Big Love: Hands On A Cold Body
LatestAs last night’s season premiere illustrated, polygamist Bill Henrickson’s got 99 problems and a bitch ain’t one—more like three or four of them. Also filling his plate were crab legs, a casino, Kenny Rogers, and his father-in-law’s corpse.
Let’s do a quick recap of where everyone stood at the end of last season. Bill married a fourth wife but then she left him; his brother Joey married a second wife, but then she died in an accident caused by her hair and Roman Grant; Joey murdered Roman; Bill and his second wife Nicki broke up, but he took her back; Nicki reconnected with the teenage daughter no one knew she had; Bill’s daughter Sarah got engaged; Bill’s son Ben developed feelings for Margene, Bill’s third wife; Margene started a home shopping empire; Bill’s first wife Barb was officially excommunicated from the LDS; and Bill decided to start a formal church to give his family the rituals and traditions that people seem to like about organized religion.
This new season also introduced a new opening sequence. Instead of Bill and his three wives ice-skating and eating dinner in the celestial kingdom, they are now floating and falling through blackness, grasping for one another. The significance of this has to do with the Mormon belief of outer darkness, which is essentially their version of hell. Only those who have committed blasphemy—an unpardonable sin—will be cast into the outer darkness, and they’ll have to remain there for eternity because they won’t be receiving an invitation into the kingdom of glory after Judgment Day. Barb was super afraid and upset that the LDS basically sentenced her to outer darkness after they excommunicated her, which is one of the reasons why Bill decided to start his own church. The new opening sequence suggests that the Henricksons are in outer darkness, but they’re there together, and being together in the afterlife was their idea of heaven anyway. It’s either that or I’m reading too much into it and Big Love producers just couldn’t afford to use that Beach Boys song anymore.
So Bill has founded a new church and his congregation seems to be comprised only of his family and the family of Don, his Home Plus business partner. Don, Bill and Bill’s son Benny are the holders of priesthood, and together act as the church’s quorum. (If you remember, Benny has told his parents that he’s totally into the idea of polygamy and wants to practice it in adulthood.)
Ben also started a Christian rock band.
He’s so Johnny Bravo.
Alby, of course, is still homosexual, and has abandoned his truck stop bathroom trysts for Gaywatch. This is going to come back and bite him in the ass—figuratively, and if he’s lucky, literally—because the guy he picked up while cruising the park turns out to be a lawyer who is working on dissolving the UEB trust. It’s not likely that Alby will ever come out of the closet, not so much because it’s against the religion he’s practicing, but because he’s only really practicing the religion as a means to gain power and control. Those cravings—stemming from his inferiority complex—have a much stronger hold over him than any sexual desires.