FROM Chicago Tribune:
Unlike every preceding episode, which opened with a kind of mortality cocktail, the last installment of "Six Feet Under" began Sunday with a birth.
Not to worry. Death was waiting patiently in the wings, poised for a resonating last word. The 5-year-old serial drama, set in a Los Angeles funeral parlor, bit the dust in more ways than one.
Like the 62 or so victims that launched the other chapters, all of the major characters would be dearly departed by the entry's conclusion. True to form, this lead character massacre came about in a stylistic tour de force. Though not altogether original (novelist Michael Cunningham did something similar back in a 1990s novel), the stratagem involved a time trip well into the future and the later years of the 21st Century.
As Claire, the youngest adult in the Fisher family, drove to a new life in New York, the story flashed forward through time, revealing everyone's fate:
Ruth dies in old age in a hospital bed, Keith is shot during a robbery, acquisitive Rico keels over on a cruise and David passes out at a picnic, lured lovingly by a ghostly Keith. Brenda slumps, as if bored to death, by self-absorbed, prattling brother Billy.
Claire, the baby, misfit and artistic refugee, endures the longest. Her end in bed, after about a century of life, is enviable.
The tempting analogy to the cathartic pile-up of Greek tragedy is misleading. The death of the Fishers is more the stuff of a medieval morality play, an "Everyman" more than a "Hamlet." The Fishers died not from their tragic flaws (and God knows they had plenty of them). They died because everybody must: A benediction for the human condition as much as an end to a TV show.
Talk about closure. Meanwhile, the last episode hinted at plot resolutions and reconciliations in the perplexing, open-ended, bittersweet manner that distinguished the series. All summer, water-cooler debate puzzled over Nate Fisher's callousness toward pregnant wife Brenda. Several weeks ago, he died, unexpectedly at 40, after sleeping with another woman, telling Brenda he wanted a divorce and hinting much of the season their coming baby might be abnormal.
That left Brenda less than a weeping widow. She even for a time turned Nate's daughter by his first wife, Maya, over to her mother-in-law, Ruth, a kind of bloodless echo of "Medea." But the baby's birth and precarious, premature existence change everything. Thanks to a dream, in which Nate and his long-dead father, whom Brenda had never met, cradle the infant with unconditional love, Brenda finally forgives Nate, free to embrace her surviving Fisher in-laws as the only loving family she has known. Let the dead bury the dead; life is about the living.
David's panic attacks, born of last season's violent kidnapping, also give way to a purgative dream, wherein the monster of his imagination, in a beautiful bit of cinematic poetry, segues into a smiling Nate, enabling David to thwart his mental illness and commit to saving the Fisher family trade.
Family business and family bonds both survive, even if the nuclear Fisher clan is replaced by an extended interracial gay one, the kids' and Brenda's inclusion in it two very different types of adoption.
Even Rico and wife Vanessa, scions of their own family dynasty, will happily attend Keith and David's wedding.
Though at times weepily over the top, "Six Feet Under" concluded with class, voluminous surprise and a tempered hope. Most of the Fishers die in the company of loved ones. Only Claire, the sweet, vulnerable, hot-tempered outsider, dies alone, surrounded by photographs -- her art, her life mission and, as she draws that final breath, her everlasting memories.
FROM MIAMI HERALD:
Six Feet Under: 2001-2005.
Millions are mourning on this Monday morning, as Oscar-winning director Alan Ball's HBO series about the funereal Fisher family has finally drawn its last breath.
But the collective sadness is tempered by a sense of profound satisfaction -- the SFU finale proves to be the perfect ending to what some fans consider TV's most perfect show.
After dealing with the deaths of strangers for the better part of five years, the Fishers are now unraveling after Nate's untimely demise three episodes ago. Matriarch Ruth -- always a bundle of denial, frustration and regret -- is a zombie, a hollow husk.
As her ex-husband George tries to comfort her, Ruth says blankly: ``Each day I feel worse. More empty. More dead.''
''I promise you -- you will get through this,'' he counters.
``I don't want to get through this!''
Nate's wife Brenda is tortured by guilty visions of him, starting at the pediatric ICU, where their premature daughter Willa struggles to thrive.
''Too bad you don't believe in anything,'' he says, ``or you could pray.''
Later, as a doctor reassures Brenda that Willa shows no signs of permanent damage, Nate spits, ``Great. So she'll seem normal for awhile before whatever's f----- up about her shows up.''
Nate's brother David -- tortured by his loss, as well as recurring hallucinations of a psychotic hitchhiker who last year doused him with gasoline and threatened to burn him to death -- is too traumatized to be an effective parent to the preteen sons he is adopting with his partner Keith. So he goes back home to stay with his mother.
Immediately, Ruth -- whose depression worsens after her granddaughter Maya returns to live with Brenda -- seizes upon a chance to care for a child: ``Put your things upstairs, then I'll make you some cereal. You like it in your yellow bowl?''
And David, now the emotional equivalent of a little boy, acquiesces.
Claire, the youngest Fisher sibling, is planning to move across the country to work in a stock photography house. When she learns her job has fallen through, Nate appears to tell her to move to New York anyway.
''You're gonna land somewhere -- you'll be fine,'' he assures. ``You're talented. You're smart. You're ready.''
``What if I'm not?''
Then Nate puts it all in perspective. ``I spent my whole life being scared. Scared of not being ready, not being right, not being who I should be. And where did it get me? You can't stay here.''
Most series end in ambiguity, leaving viewers alone to imagine what may have happened to their favorite characters. Not so here. Claire's tearful drive away begins a masterful montage that chronologically wraps everything up. Clearly inspired by the scene in Paul Thomas Anderson's epic film Magnolia that uses Aimee Mann's haunting Wise Up as the soundtrack, the gripping sequence -- anchored by the melancholy Breathe Me by Sia -- shows us the future we're desperate to see. Since Six Feet Under centered around death, it was essential to tell us the end of the story -- a wholly unexpected, yet in retrospect, absolutely necessary choice.
We learn that baby Willa makes it to her first birthday, and beyond. We're thankful that Keith and David marry and continue to provide stability for their boys -- we later see Durrell married with children and Anthony seemingly happy with a gay partner. Though Ruth had refused to live with George, we find comfort in seeing him at her deathbed in 2025 -- and are shocked that the old man outlived her. Keith, the most powerful, stable character -- David's rock -- is the only one to meet a violent end, getting shot to death in 2029 while running his own security business. Fifteen years later, David has moved on with another partner, but it's Keith's face he sees as he dies. In 2051, Brenda's nutty brother Billy -- with whom she endured a creepy, incestuous bond -- finally talks her to death. Then we're left with only Claire, and though her eyes are cloudy with cataracts, she lives to 102, and in 2085 the Fisher clan is history.
In a two-hour, retrospective farewell special that aired a week ago, the cast stressed how much they'll miss their ''second family,'' and how the show ''raised the bar'' for television.
They poured everything they had into these unprecedentedly rich roles. And Sunday night's finale of Six Feet Under raised the bar even for itself, giving us more than we could have hoped for without ever coming off as cheesy or maudlin.
Yet, somehow it's still not enough.
