Brothers & Sisters

Well, I stand corrected. When I was looking at this episode before it aired, I was sort of dreading the spa silliness, but as it turned out, it was really the least painful plotline. It seemed less slapstick-y to me than it looked in the previews, maybe because different scenes were pushed together, and maybe because some of the preview scenes didn’t turn up (did I just miss Kitty tackling someone for flowers?).

I’m still not crazy about the crashing a wedding business — do people really do that? people with family members running for president? — but it wasn’t as excruciating as I expected. On the other hand, Sarah’s kick-ass attitude has always been the most fun part of Walker road trips, and she was kind of a sad sack this time around. Hope she gets her groove back soon.

Man, they didn’t waste much time messing Justin up, did they? And making Rebecca totally useless. Girl was all “You’re going to have to watch him, he’s not going to be Justin for a while” last week, but now she can’t figure out he has a stash? So much for her touted experience with addicts. They seem to be working hard to take the edge off Rebecca — even her hair was smooth ‘n’ shiny this week — and I think that’s a mistake. She was so tough with Justin back when he was newly sober. The last thing he needs is for her to go easy on him now.

At least now we know what Scotty’s around for: Outing Saul. I guess it was a serviceable enough way to get the “Kevin figures out Saul’s gay” storyline going, but it still feels kinda arbitrary. I mean, no one ever thought this about Saul before? Kevin’s never wondered about the fact that his uncle has never had a relationship? And if he’s never wondered about it, Saul’s presence at one party suddenly makes him wonder and decide? Now Saul has flatly denied it, though Kevin doesn’t seem to be buying it. Funny if the entire family decides Saul’s gay — yes, well that explains everything! — before he admits it himself.

As for the Tommy plotline … sigh. I hate what they’re doing with this character, and I hate that they couldn’t come up with something better. I suppose it’s possible that he and Lena just really did stay up late together, I don’t know, working or talking or watching movies on cable. If they did cheat, then Tommy has gone from “you are the love of my life” to “ah, what the heck, my wife left me and you look a little like her” in one episode, and that makes him seem like a completely different character than he’s been before. And it paints the character of Lena as pretty one-dimensionally black, too, if she picked up on Tommy’s emotional distress and used it to pick him up. Even if they didn’t do anything wrong, Tommy seems to be taking the implication thereof a little lightly.

It seems, really, as though there should have been an episode between last week’s and this week’s. An episode to show Justin struggling and slipping. An episode to show Tommy tormented and resentful and angry, and a little bit of Lena’s true colors. An episode to show Saul go from fleeing from Milo any time he came by to going to a party at the man’s house. I’m not saying any of the plotlines we saw tonight were impossible or even improbable, but they were pretty darn abrupt.

At least there’s one relationship on the show that seems to be stable, one union whose state is secure: Kitty and Robert. The prenup was kind of a MacGuffin to get Kitty all blithery and spa-bound, but it worked. From the way it was introduced, it was kind of a safe guess that Robert really wasn’t going to push it and it was all going to turn into much ado about nothing, but I think it was cutely done.

Is the quota for this show only one happy relationship at a time? Are the other Walkers doomed to divorce and infidelity and despair for as long as Kitty and Robert are happy? I hope not, because I want them to be happy for a long time, and it would be kind of a bummer for the rest of the clan. Surely, there are different, dynamic ways to show happy couples. Aren’t there? Really? Please?

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Brothers and Sisters, ABC, States of the Union, commentary