Brothers & Sisters

William is dead. We know that because there’s a funeral right there at the top of the episode, with melancholy music playing over dialog-free scenes. Sarah gives the first of many speeches. Family members hug. Jonathan comforts Kitty. Justin spies Holly lurking on the outskirts, Saul going over to her, and Holly leaving — leaving Justin with the capital-T Troubled look he’ll wear for much of the episode. William is dead, but he’s not done messing up his kids. Not by a longshot.

Then, suddenly, it’s three weeks later, ’cause time flies when you’re mourning a loved one. Kitty’s moving in with Mom to take the job and a break from Jonathan. The colossal badness of this idea is not lost on Kevin, and not just because he’s the one who has to haul her boxes upstairs. But Kitty thinks Nora needs her, and Nora thinks Kitty needs her, and Nora also thinks Kevin should move in, and you know she was lying when she said she’s only joking.

Perhaps Sarah and her brood could move in, too, because Sarah’s having a hard time with that work-and-family thing. Working in the family business was supposed to make her more available to her shaggy husband and needy kids, but what with Dad dying and embezzling and all, it’s just not happening. At issue this particular morning is the purchasing of a grass skirt for Paige’s Hawaii presentation, which Sarah, evil working mom that she is, has consistently forgotten to do. She swears today will be the day, and even writes it in ink on her palm to make sure. So we know, don’t we, that no way is she bringing the item home.

Justin, the Look o’ the Troubled still on his face three weeks later, gets Holly’s address from William’s Rolodex and drives out to confront her, sort of. He saw her at the office. He saw her at the funeral. He saw her before, a long time ago. Holly cautiously replies with exactly as little information as possible, confirming but not elaborating, and Justin pops a few pills and flees. He’s Troubled, I tell you! Troubled!

Also troubled is Ojai Foods, which Saul is now free to explain to his sister’s offspring is teetering on the brink of bankruptcy due to William’s financial trickery, not his own. Seems the old man sold the pension fund some stock at an inflated price to shore up a bad investment. Sarah’s determined to go to the authorities, but Tommy thinks there must be another way out and Saul is the Great Defender of Keeping Things Secret, Like Families Do.

Families do also fight over the reading of wills, apparently, and William’s ain’t exactly a peacemaker. The document specifies that Sarah should be president of the company, leapfrogging right over a ticked-off Tommy. It also ties Justin’s future inheritance up in a conservatorship, with Kitty holding the purse strings. Justin, still Troubled and also high, makes a scene and splits. Parental disapproval and manipulation from beyond the grave! Boy, this family’s good.

As if being judged by his mother as an insensitive will reader isn’t enough to make Kevin’s day, back at the office he has to depose Scotty on his whistleblower case, and be judged as insufficiently gay. Who does that in the middle of a legal procedure, starts questioning the lawyer on his personal life? Scotty’s cute and all, but man, he’s got boundary issues. Somebody needs to blow the whistle on him.

Saul blows the whistle on any hopes Holly may have had for an inheritance, because really, a guy can’t endow his mistress without raising some serious questions, no? Saul would like to be friends with Holly, but in the interest of his poor sister and her fatherless children, he can’t do it. No secrets for him! He is the Great Defender of Not Keeping Things Secret. Or something like that. Sometimes. Depending on the scene. And the subject. And the mood of the writer.

So maybe we thought that Justin stormed away from the will reading to go work hard at his job and show his dead dad just what a stand-up guy he is? Nah. Nora finds out he stopped showing up at work and got fired, and so she ambushes Kitty at her job and drags her to Justin’s apartment, where they find a wide array of pharmaceuticals and a sleeping Fawn. Justin, meanwhile, has been arrested in Oceanside, and we get the first-ever Walker road trip as Kevin, Kitty, and Nora head off to fetch him.

A little officer-bribing ensues, followed by a little screaming on the lawn in front of the jail, with Nora berating Justin for his disappointing behavior, Justin shouting that his dad is the disappointment and love sucks, and Kevin and Kitty wishing to be pretty much anywhere else in the world but there. Later, Kitty and Justin have a little chat, in which Kitty reassures her baby bro that their dad did dig him, and everything is made better by the promise of breakfast served all night.

Meanwhile, back at the family business, Sarah and Tommy are experiencing some friction over her promotion, and Sarah’s almost-affair Noah calls at just the right time to catch her at a weak moment and ask her for coffee. They talk around their mutual attraction and the impossibility of it being anything more, until Sarah notices the smeared up ink in her hand and realizes that she has once again missed her opportunity to be a competent grass-skirt-buying mama. There follows a melt-down in a party store that is brilliant in the way it shows how enormous stress erupts over the most mundane things. But there’s a happy ending here, too: Joe got the grass skirt, and he made grilled cheese, and he opens a bottle of champagne to celebrate Sarah’s promotion, and they watch their little hula girl in a rare moment of family peace.

Maybe trying to keep that peace just a little longer, Sarah disregards Kevin’s advice that they absolutely, positively, must go to the authorities over William’s financial indiscretions, and honors Tommy’s advice to try to get to the bottom of things first. Hey, if she goes to jail, at least she won’t have to worry about doing it all anymore.

Original air date: 10/1/06

_{Photo: ABC.com}

Brothers and Sisters, ABC, An Act of Will, recap