Brothers & Sisters

One thing you can say for Brothers & Sisters season finales: They’re not all about the cliffhangers. Sure, there is the possibility of a brother from another mother hanging over the Walkers’ heads, but at least the basics of that mystery have been laid out, and everyone’s been forthright about it. Mystery sib storyline? Been there, done that.

Otherwise, though, this episode was all about tying up storylines, some of which have been waiting for resolution for a very long time.

Like, for example, Saul’s. The possibility of Nora’s brother being gay was introduced all the way back at last season’s finale. Developments since then have been slow, but Saul did tell his sister he was once in love with a man, and finally came out to Kevin last week. After all that leisurely build-up, the big reveal to the family came surprisingly quickly. At the wedding, Saul told Nora that he thought what Kevin and Scotty were doing was the bravest thing he’d ever seen. He also told her about his conversation with Kevin, and how he had thought that all he would have to do was tell one person, and he would be free.

Later, he walked into a room where his nieces and nephews were conferring — about the possibility of an additional illegitimate nephew out there, as it happened — and Saul naturally assumed, because Kevin can’t keep a secret, that they were talking about him. So he told them all, yeah, that’s right, I’m gay, eliciting exclamations of surprise, but not exactly shock. Saul should have known it would take more than that to really rattle this family. For a show that’s so about secrets, maybe there’s some wisdom here: that sometimes the secrets you tie yourself in knots to hide turn out, when actually revealed, to be no big deal at all. So much time lost for nothing.

Also turning out to be not such a big deal is the revelation that Rebecca is not William’s daughter after all. Having been filled in on the paternity test by Justin at the end of the last episode, Nora calls the clan over to give them the news. Kevin, arriving late, assumes — just like Saul later in the episode — that they’re talking about him, and that Scotty has spilled the beans of their impending nuptials. But eventually, after the congratulations are in and the Walker home has been secured for the ceremony, the siblings deal once more with the removal of Rebecca from the bloodline, and their reaction turns out to be about the same as the one they’ll give Saul later — surprise, but nothing world-ending.

Nora lets Rebecca know that she’s still considered part of the family, and nothing has changed. The time she spent helping Nora through Justin’s time away at war has endeared her to the Walker matriarch sufficiently to cement her place in the family. Sarah tells her the Walkers are like the Mafia — once you’re in, you can’t get out. And Kevin and Tommy apparently think she’d be just as good as a sister-in-law as a half-sister, because with the incest restrictions lifted they’re both fine with the idea of Justin going for a romantic relationship with her. Tommy points out that the two of them have always had a special connection, and maybe it’s worth forgiving her for lying to see where the connection leads.

So when Rebecca approaches Justin at Kevin’s wedding, he’s ready to talk. She apologizes for lying, he apologizes for overreacting, and then he suggests starting back at Square One, as if they’d just met, without the season-and-a-half’s worth of sibling baggage. By the end of the episode, though, she’s had second thoughts about that. She calls him to meet her on a scenic mountaintop (a cliff, though not a cliffhanger) and confesses that she can’t do what he wants — by which she means go back to the start, not pursue a romantic relationship, as some fans may have hoped. She tells him that perhaps all this Walker drama, the paternity fake-out and becoming part of the family, was just a way to bring the two of them together. They kiss, and then join hands and jump off the cliff … No, no, no, that’s not what happens. They sort of laugh at the awkwardness of it, and she rests her head on his shoulder, and he puts his hand on her head, and it’s really sort of sweet. C’mon, it is.

As wrong as a Justin-Rebecca union may seem, that’s how wrong a Kevin-Scotty wedding looks to Scotty’s parents. Scotty mentions to Kevin that his mom and dad won’t be attending the ceremony, but goodness, when has Kevin ever been one to leave well enough alone? After Nora suggests contacting the Wandells, Kevin finds the phone number in Scotty’s address book and plans to call them. Then his brothers come over, spoiling for a bachelor party, and when it turns out that the gay bar they’d picked out has Lesbian Night on Fridays, the obvious alternative is a road trip to Arizona to confront Scotty’s parents directly instead of by phone.

They roll into the Wandells’ suburban enclave the next morning, and Scotty’s dad lets Kevin into the house, but Scotty’s mom quickly makes it clear that although they love and accept Scotty himself as an individual, they will not condone any imitation wedding, and in fact consider the very idea insulting. And by “they,” I mean “Scotty’s mother, who must not have been a lot of fun to grow up with.” Kevin doesn’t argue, just sadly leaves; but before he gets back to the car, Scotty’s father calls to him and gives him a box to pass to Scotty. It contains the cufflinks Mr. Wandell wore to his wedding, which he had promised his son could wear at Scotty’s own wedding. It’s a nice gesture, and when Kevin gives the box to Scotty later, he remembers and is genuinely moved — enough to forgive Kevin for sneaking off and confronting his parents, anyway.

And Kevin’s visit with the in-laws is enough for him to forgive his mother for going against orders and filling the room where the ceremony will take place with flowers. He gets it now: If your mother wants you to have a romantic wedding just like everybody else, you don’t argue, you just hug. The whole family gathers for the event — hey, look there, it’s Julia! Hi, Julia! Lizzie, darlin’, good to see you! And Cooper, hanging cutely from Uncle Justin’s neck! Paige, not even sulking because there’s not a flower girl at this wedding! And … all you extras who we have never seen before! So glad you could make it!

Kitty does the officiating, and tells a cute story of Kevin’s first wedding, which was to her, with a teddy bear officiating (remember Nora mentioning this same story to Isaac when it was Kitty’s wedding on the planning table?). Kitty apparently won the coin toss to wear the frilly white nightgown at that long-ago union, and afterwards they pretended to be Mommy and Daddy with five kids because that’s the family they knew. They’ve learned a lot more about family since then, but apparently not a lot more about wedding planning, because when it comes time to exchange the rings, the two grooms are unprepared. Tommy and Robert donate theirs to the cause, and soon enough the two are pronounced … married.

Kitty’s speech about different ways to be a family isn’t just about her brother and his husband, but about the trouble she’s been having getting pregnant. The fevered reproductive activity from the previous episode did not result in a pregnancy after all, and Kitty is looking forward with dread to another round of IVF. When Robert suggests options like adoption and surrogacy, Kitty rebuffs his effort to “fix things” — she wants to be pregnant, and that’s that. But after a conversation with Sarah, who tells her it’s not about the process, but about the result, a child to love, Kitty begins to rethink things. So later, after the wedding, when she and Robert talk again, they think about the kids out there who need a home, and decide to adopt. (And that sound you heard was me saying “Yay!”)

So in one short episode, we’ve had at least some resolution to Saul’s coming out, Rebecca’s de-Walkering, Justin and Rebecca’s change of relationship, Kevin’s love life, and Kitty’s baby fever. There is, of course, one big piece of baggage left to be dealt with. At first, Sarah thinks it’s a big load of Holly’s crap — that she obviously lied to William about Rebecca’s parentage (thus the “R” in his password) and that’s why he left her millions. Tommy asks Holly whether she knew that Rebecca had taken a paternity test before she made the merger offer, and after Sarah bursts in all ready for confrontation, she admits that she did. Sarah accuses Holly of fraud and swears she won’t rest until Holly is disinherited. Tommy pulls his co-president rank and tells Sarah to drop it, but she’s so not going to.

Going over and over her father’s old files, looking for proof of Holly’s deception, Sarah again comes upon the photo that started it all. At the wedding, she gives it to Rebecca … who denies that it’s her. Well! Whoever could it be? The answer, unexpectedly, comes from some flashbacks Kevin’s having in the wake of his impending wedding and the Wandells’ resistance to it. He remembers a business trip with his dad, in which he came upon William discussing some personal business with a colleague. William explains to Kevin that a lobbyist he knows died, leaving behind a husband and three children. And that’s got him thinking about things left unsaid, and he wants to mend fences with Kevin over his reaction to Kevin’s coming out years before. Kevin doesn’t think it’s that easy, and sort of shuts his dad down.

In a second flashback, though, to the plane flight home, Kevin goes through some papers and finds a photo. He asks William who it is, and William says his colleague must have left it behind, and that he’ll have to return it. The child in the photo is the youngest son of that lobbyist who died. Ryan. Yes, Ryan, with an R. And the photo? The very one Sarah assumed was of Rebecca. When Kevin realizes this, on his wedding night, with Scotty in the other room phoning his own father, he writes a quick note to his new spouse and heads over to Sarah’s, to explain the whole thing in breathless detail. The next morning, he and Sarah go to break the news to their mother that there may be another wandering Walker out there. We don’t hear what she says, but if I were her, it would be, “Oh, for goodness sake, children, don’t we have enough trouble with the Walkers we’ve got without going out looking for more of them?”

That probably wasn’t Nora’s reaction. But we’ll have to wait for the fall to find out.

Photo: ABC.com

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