Brothers & Sisters

Five questions about last Sunday’s episode — “You Get What You Need” — still rattling around in my brain:

1. Did Holly know Rebecca had seen the file when she confessed to having acquired it? I’m going to believe she did unless proven otherwise. Something about the “Hmm, wonder what she’s up to” look she had when Rebecca was all eager to go to the winery, and the way she volunteered the information spontaneously when Rebecca hinted clumsily around it, makes more sense if she saw the file was missing and put two and two together — or, more likely, put the file out as Rebecca-bait in the first place. It helps that this season’s Holly seems to have lost any nuance and is now entirely evil, so we don’t have to bother with finding possible positive motivation.

2. Was Jayne Brook a bad casting choice for Bertha? Perhaps it’s some sort of extremely subtle product placement for IMDb, because you know large numbers of viewers are checking out her and Luke MacFarlane’s birth dates after every episode she’s in, sure that she’s too young to play his mother. The fact that she does actually have twenty years on him doesn’t change the fact that she looks too young, and that Bertha’s youthfulness is disconcerting. They threw a bone at it this episode by mentioning she was young when she had Scotty, but it’s still mighty distracting, and I think makes the character less effective.

3. This butcher Sarah was talking about — is that the same one who sold Nora ducks for Easter dinner? Apparently, assertiveness only gets you so far. Maybe Nora should hire Mrs. Jones to do her negotiating for her.

4. Did Emily Craft help Nora get ready for her charity interviews? That blouse was awfully low-cut and open-falling; maybe Emily chopped off the first three or four buttons, and gave Nora a lecture on the importance of cleavage in business negotiations. Hey, she got the money.

5. Was that bottle Kevin gave Scotty’s father the same one Kitty gave him when she was looking for his help against the blackmailer? If so — wow, nice re-gifting. Would that we could get that much continuity with plot points that actually matter.

_{Photo: ABC.com}

Brothers and Sisters, ABC, You Get What You Need, commentary