Six Feet Under - The Finale

I finally got around to watching the last three episodes of Six Feet Under. If you haven't yet seen the finale, and are planning to, please avert your eyes, as spoilers will follow.

Alan Ball provided a fitting end to a TV series that could be considered the great memento mori of the motion picture/television canon. Many viewers, critics included, have lamented this season, and it has been difficult to watch characters that I've grown to love make some really questionable choices, reveal darker sides of their personalities, and, well, die. But it's also been brilliant. Nate's death framed perfectly the concerns of the series. Many episodes owed their drama to disagreements over proper burial rights for the corpse-of-the-week. Would the family that saw other families torn apart by these arguments be able to avoid falling into the same traps? The answer, of course, was no. The Fishers were no more immune from anger and misery and spite than Nate was, as the main character, protected from death.

The finale itself hit all the emotional notes expected from a show of this depth and complexity; that is, it hit ALL of the emotional notes. It was all over the place. Series finales often have these moments of great ontological confusion, when all of the layers of a character's identity come to the surface at the same time. In this case, Claire's farewell to her family reached a level of maudlin excess that had me wondering, "is this Clair saying goodbye to her family, Lauren Ambrose saying goodbye to her character, or Alan Ball saying goodbye to his cast?" Probably all three at the same time, especially at the moment she thanked her mother for giving her life. A bit much, yes, but immediately redeemed by what followed, a musical montage closing the book on the Fisher family, showing that, though the series may end here, it's characters will not live in eternal glory forever. Remember: you, too, will die.

A note on the specifics of this montage. Like the "ghosts" of departed characters that appeared to the Fishers throughout the series, I interpreted the parade of events as completely internal to the character: possibile futures as imagined by Claire as she sped towards her future. It seemed likelier that Claire, at the moment of leaving her old life behind, would imagine meeting up with Ted 20 years later and marrying him, than that this would ever come to pass. But I guess Alan Ball intended a more literal interpretation. He prepared obituaries for the show's homepage, and in this interview, references some very specific biographical information about the characters post-show. But I like my explanation better.