Big Love: Fertility Miracles?

On last night’s episode, many of the Henricksons found themselves in danger—at the hands of a Mexican cartel, gender-bending polygamists, and anti-gaming Evangelicals—but it was Nicki’s infertility and her mother’s seemingly impossible pregnancy that were most compelling storylines.

Seriously, I’m so over Bill and Barb’s bullshit and the problems they bring upon themselves through their own greed, bad choices, and delusions of “testimony.” Their issues seem avoidable, and are, at this point, annoying. I’ve always been way more interested in compound life, particularly in the context of its women. After Nicki—who is probably in her early-to-mid 30s and finds out that she’s experiencing “secondary infertility”—hears the news that her mother is pregnant with JJ’s child, she became incredulous.

Nicki forces her mother to take a home pregnancy test, which gave a positive result. Adaleen—who correctly guessed that Nicki is having fertility issues—told her daughter to see JJ’s son Roquet, who is a fertility doctor that just relocated to Utah. Something seems incredibly suspicious about Adaleen’s “miracle.”

As JJ’s son said—and as we’ve seen with his sick wife, on whom he personally performed a biopsy—JJ likes to think of himself as a doctor. I have a feeling that Roquet is just a front for JJ’s own experimental fertility treatments. Did you notice how Adaleen said that she has the “uterus of a woman half [her] age”? It’s likely that JJ may have performed a uterus transplant on Adaleen. (Could it be Wanda’s uterus!?) Or, he might just be injecting her with hCG, which could lead to a false positive in a pregnancy test. It also could be why Adaleen is feeling so much “energy and vitality,” as hCG has also been used as a weight-loss drug, suppressing appetites, and causing stored fat to provide energy for the body.

Additionally, hCG has been linked to cancer, and JJ’s early testing of the hormone may be what has made his other wife sick.

Wanda is clearly horrified at the news of Adaleen’s pregnancy. Perhaps JJ forced Wanda to have a hysterectomy as one of the terms of his blackmail regarding Roman’s murder. Whatever happened, it definitely involves something reprehensible…like incest? A lack of fingernails—like JJ has—has been linked to incest within polygamist communities. Could JJ be having a baby with Wanda’s eggs and his sperm inside of Adaleen? I’m trying to think of what his motives for something like this would be, and all I could come up with his that he wants to prove that he can “work miracles” in an attempt to seize the prophecy from Albie.

Desperate in her attempt to get pregnant, Nicki visited Roquet at his clinic. Do you think that JJ will perform some sort of fucked-up IVF treatment on Nicki, impregnating her with his child to gain some kind of leverage with Bill over the UEB trust? It’s all so complicated!

And though Bill’s troubles in Mexico were supposed to be suspenseful, they were mostly boring, except for this part, when his mother chopped off Hollis Green’s arm.