‘Big Love’: Judgment Day

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I was raised Catholic. I attended Mass almost every Sunday, went to Sunday school, took first Communion and got confirmed. I remember thinking it was a superior religion based soley on the facts that our services were finished in just under an hour (compared to the hour-plus at the Lutheran church my mom attended) and that Catholic priests were made to seem pretty cool in ‘The Exorcist’ and ‘The Father Dowling Mysteries.’

I am no longer a practicing Catholic -- somehow the greater theological teachings escaped me -- but my overriding impression of the religion is pretty benign, aside from the Crusades and the Spanish Inquisition, of course. So it was with troubled amusement that I watched Nicki (Chloe Sevigny) rail against the ‘hocus pocus’ evils her young son Wayne was being taught at his Catholic school in Monday night’s ‘Big Love.’ She stood in the church, staring aghast at the votive candles and hearing of the Holy Trinity from a church official and demanded, ‘Why would you believe that?’ As always, she was wearing her ankle-length skirt and high-necked blouse -- the standard-issue polygamist uniform, apparently -- and we were made to feel somewhat superior to her.

Here was a woman who couldn’t help but scoff at the religious iconography of a set of rosary beads and who considered belief in the Virgin Mary so much mumbo-jumbo, and yet her own religious beliefs caused her to share her husband with two other women and gave her a father who lived on a compound and called himself ‘The Prophet.’ Oh, the irony!

It’s taken awhile for the creators of ‘Big Love’ to confront the Henricksons’ religious beliefs head-on, but with Nicki’s personal crusade against Catholicism they finally did and, unfortunately, they blinked. What has up until now been an extremely even-handed portrayal of a modern polygamist family creeped closer to becoming a didactic mockery of its central characters.

Nicki has never been the most likable character on the show, but somehow her religious fears for her son made her far more sympathetic than Barb (Jeanne Tripplehorn), Bill (Bill Paxton) or even sweet-but-dim Margene (Ginnifer Goodwin). While Nicki tried mightily to stick by whatever principles her religion had taught her, the rest of the Henrickson clan tossed around words like faith and values, but what they really meant was status and competition.

Who cares if their son was learning things to which they were morally opposed? He was in a good school that was hard to get into, and that sort of social status was worth any number of family prayers. It wasn’t that the episode exposed the hypocrisy present on a daily basis in the Henrickson’s world -- that’s been a fixture of the show since Day One.

What was troubling about Monday’s episode was that, for the first time, the hypocrisy was having a spotlight thrown on it, and we were being asked to laugh not with the Henricksons but at them. Rhonda Volmer (Daveigh Chase), Bill’s 17-year-old stepmother, was living as a runaway and lamented being the teenage bride to an 80-year-old man. Then she caught sight of another teenage girl smoking. ‘Smoking corrupts the body,’ she proclaimed in a tone of moral superiority.

Don (Joel McKinnon Miller), Bill’s business partner, expressed his moral misgivings about their new forays into gambling machines. ‘This is about belief, Don,’ Bill assured him. And somehow we were meant to chuckle knowingly at both of these incidents. Silly Mormon polygamists, the show seemed to be saying, we mainstream Americans know better.

Nicki’s battle with the Catholic school may have ended in her acquiesence, but it was troubling that the foibles of the Catholic faith -- in any faith, really -- weren’t as exposed as those of the polygamists.

Previously, they’ve used tricky analogies, including comparing the polygamists to gay couples, in order to keep our judgmental selves from getting too loud. This time the show’s creators seemed to stack the deck against our protagonists, and no matter what they did they lost.

Earlier this season, I compared the show to ‘The Sopranos,’ and once again the Henricksons appear close to paralleling that troubled family. Where the Soprano crew started its six-season run on a fairly light note and slowly descended into a nihlistic bleakness that climaxed with Tony snuffing Christopher, so too do the Henricksons run a similar risk. With Bill contemplating cheating on his wives and compromising their core values in favor of material gain, it’s possible the show is turning a corner down a much darker path. It’s not that we, the viewers, have to believe what the Henricksons believe, but if the people who bring them to us want to take us down the hard road, they have to believe in something. Otherwise, we’re all in trouble.

-- Patrick Day