Big Love: Oh Jesus

As good as last night's Big Love turned out to be, my personal highlight might have been getting to hear Norman Greenbaum's "Spirit In the Sky" played over the final credits.

Somehow a song that fuses gospel and psychedelia by a Jewish one-hit wonder proved to be a perfect coda for a show focused on a fundamentalist Mormon polygamist running for political office. >Rolling Stone ranked "Spirit" exactly 333 on its list of the 500 greatest songs of all time. That's a bit low if you ask me, but you don't have to be a numerologist or a vinyl devotee to appreciate the purity of that number. Plus, "Spirit" is lodged right between Bob Dylan's "Subterranean Homesick Blues" and the Rolling Stones' "Do Ya Think I'm Sexy" shakin' its bony white butt at 301.

But it wasn't Rod that was played when Hunter S. Thompson's ashes were shot out of a cannon, it was "Spirit In The Sky." And the song's sonic appearance on Big Love, with it's wry undertones, proved an ideal ending to a genuinely funny episode—one that provided a break from the denser, almost gothic episodes of this season.

As Nicki said, "Experience has taught me not to ask big picture questions," and the episode, "Sins of the Father," dealt with Big Love's many big questions through comedy. The episode was written by Seth Greenland, a screenwriter and playwright who also happens to be a novelist. His books, The Bones and Shining City, are sharp satires that retain a certain loving heart—as did last night's Big Love.

A man's troubled relationship with his wife can be tragedy. A man's troubled relationships with three wives perhaps can only be treated as farce. What worked last night was that as Bill's multiple lives crashed together like a bunch of asteroids that had broken free of their orbits, we could only laugh as he struggled to keep it all together and reestablish order.

Looking at the unlikely arrival of Bill, Margene, Nicki (undercover as Bill's assistant Daphne), Marilyn, and Congressman Paley, Barb said, "Do I even want to know why the circus just rolled into town?" Bill is the ringmaster, but he has lost control of the clowns, trapeze artists, and lions—although he was able to wrangle the elephants in enough time to miraculously pull out his nomination for the state senate. (Nice line by Teenie when she said, "Why would anybody want to be a Democrat when we have all the fun?")

The often absurd comedy helped accentuate the impact of the emotional and personal questions that played out. The sequence when Bill stealthily revealed to Barb what had happened between Ben and Margene in front of the counselor heightened the shock that Barb must have felt as she came to realize that her sister wife had hit on her teenage son. The revelation of Bill's criminal past surviving on Fritos and donuts during his "lost boy" phase also gained power that would have otherwise been lost amid the tangled threads of some of this season's earlier episodes.

At times this season, I thought that Bill's plan to run for office was unrealistic and delusional, given the utter mess of his exponentially complicated life. But I read Game Change's sections about John Edwards running for president while carrying on his relationship with his videographer and self-proclaimed witch Rielle Hunter, impregnating her while his wife Elizabeth was dealing with her cancer, and then trying to have an aide take responsibility for the child. It's clear that the portrayal of Bill may be more prescient than fantastic.

Sure, it's a lot for one man. But as Bill put it, echoing the timeless wisdom of Norman Greenbaum, "There'll be rest in the hereafter." After all, he's got a friend in Jesus.