Brothers & Sisters

Five questions about last Sunday’s episode — “Glass Houses” — still rattling around in my brain:

1. Has Rebecca been dipping into the trust fund? I thought she still had some time to go before that dough would be hers, but how else to explain her newfound independence? Last season, she was living with Nora and bumming rides; now she’s got an apartment and what looked, in the dark, to be a pretty spiffy set of wheels. What she doesn’t have, as far as we know, is gainful employment. Justin better make sure she doesn’t have some rich old guy on the side.

2. Would either of those letters have worked for Kitty? I’m trying to remember the letters we needed for our homestudy, fourteen years ago now. I know there were guidelines; I’m pretty sure they had to do with describing the prospective parents’ particular experience with children and ability to provide a stable loving home — not praising them as superlative specimens of humanity. Sarah or her ghostwriter would preferably have written specifics about how Kitty and Robert interact with her nieces and nephew and his children. The fact that Kitty was the first to spot Paige’s diabetes might have been a nice detail. A mention of the fact that the Walker family is welcoming and inclusive of children would be acceptable. But neither Nora’s over-the-top approach nor Sarah’s get-out-of-jail attempt seemed to me to be on target at all. Now, we were adopting internationally and not appealing to specific birthmothers, so maybe the rules are different. Not that different, though, I’ll bet.

3. Was Kitty too hard on Sarah? Maybe I’m oversensitive then, too, having been there and done that. Getting paperwork together to adopt is an overwhelming and emotional process. Family members belittling that is painful. The thought that you might not get this thing you want so bad is terrifying. Seeing other people in your family with children reinforces what you fear you might miss. I’m not saying this is all logical, but it’s emotionally true. You need letters from family, and you ask your sister to provide one. Your sister does not have the option to accept and then blow it off; she doesn’t really even have the option not to accept. Yeah, Sarah is stressed and has the world’s worst job and a busted marriage and children driving her crazy. Boo hoo. Doesn’t matter. You do it. And if you don’t … like Kitty, I have a hard time interpreting that as anything but a passive-aggressively hostile act. I like Sarah; I want to like Sarah. But she has to take positive steps to fix her life, or she’s going to become insufferable. (That said, I do dispute the notion that this has been an ongoing problem between the sisters. I think it’s more believably a function of Sarah’s Big Bag of Resentment recently springing leaks and dripping all over everybody.)

4. Was Tommy really being all business when he fired Kevin? Probably, although not good business; seems smarter to explain the economic bind to Kevin and looking for ways to cut costs that would leave a lawyer with huge knowledge of and personal interest in the business on the job. Would be kind of fun, though, if the guy just finally went over to the dark side, and made a pact with Holly to drive his family out. I think he had legitimate reasons to feel underappreciated in the past, and Holly would be pretty good at fostering his resentment over being the most boring and colorless and ineffectual Walker. Maybe Kevin is only the beginning, bwa ha ha. Make them pay for all those episodes you were hardly in!

5. What is crystal that expensive even doing in a beach house? I’m sure I have a different perspective than super-rich law-firm show-offs, but geez. Shouldn’t a place at the beach be more kid-proof and drunk-proof than that? Plus, what kind of crazy security system would you need to protect pricey objects in a house with glass walls?

_{Photo: ABC.com}

Brothers and Sisters, ABC, Glass Houses, commentary