Big Love Season 5 Episode 1 Winter : Where to begin, where to begin? I’m not sure how many of you have been watching HBO’s polygamist free-for-all, ‘Big Love,’ but for those of you not in the know, or who maybe caught an episode here and there because your aunt forced you into it after a family Sunday dinner because she insisted you had to see “the show with the guy from ‘Twister’,” it has become the most insane quality show on television … and by insane, I mean literally insane, as in, even a lunatic wouldn’t be able to make sense of everything that goes down.

If even a fraction of what happens on
‘Big Love’ is an accurate depiction of life as a secret polygamist in suburban Utah, it’s enough to scare you into never leaving your house again. Last season, dude had to go to Mexico to save his son and parents from a rogue polygamist death squad, all the while running for state Senate and trying to keep his concubine and illegitimate child in the country. It sounds like I just made that up, I know, but it’s FOR REAL! Oh, I almost forgot, he’s got three wives, all in different developmental stages of crazy, that he has to keep happy. If his unit doesn’t fall off, you might think he’s going to slip into a drama-induced coma.

I know what you’re thinking: “Hey, this all just sounds like a really horrible run of ‘The Young and the Restless’,” or some other trashy afternoon soap. It’s not. The show has a heart that is rarely seen on TV. The best television is that which has the ability to make the audience appeal to, or align themselves with, otherwise marginalized people or groups. ‘Big Love’ has achieved this, and more, and has only scratched the surface of what pockets of American life are out there, undocumented, waiting to be given a voice.

Turns out, it’s hard work getting people to be down with polygamy. It’s difficult enough trying to get people to switch their beliefs about toothpaste, let alone how many wives a man can have. This final season premiere had everything to do with establishing attitudes. The parallels between the fictional Henrickson’s public battles over polygamy eerily reflect our current cultural climate concerning the legitimacy of homosexuality, and the show becomes a metaphor for any pre-judged group, from homosexuals to people who want to marry their pets.

The episode reset everything from the previous season and had very little to do with the children and everything to do with the marital dynamics between Bill (Bill Paxton), Barb (Jeanne Tripplehorn), Nicki (Chloë Sevigny) and Margene (Ginnifer Goodwin) in the midst of the fallout from their exposure to the public through Bill’s Senate campaign and victory.

After a family camping trip into the desert to escape the public scrutiny, the family returned home walking on more eggshells than ever before. It was almost comical to watch, if it weren’t so cripplingly tense. Bill tried, for self-preservation’s sake, to put on a brave face and turn frowns upside down (and any other saying you can remember your third grade teacher writing on the board) because he has so many people relying on him to do so. The wives were in the fortunate position of being able to air their skepticism and doubt to one another, however passive-aggressively they saw fit, but no one could deny the dissention in the ranks.

Barb (First wife): Expressed her desire to seek life outside the family and the faith by trying to sabotage Bill’s campaign last season. Here, she battled both Bill and herself over the feelings she had but knew she shouldn’t. She started drinking and — gasp! — brought a bottle of wine into the house. You would have thought she was drinking baby’s blood with all the trepidation and Nicki’s reaction.

Nicki (Second wife): Still dealing with all of her previous season transgressions, but in a far less humble manner. No, Nicki chose the self-righteous approach, holding both Barb and Margene to painstakingly high standards of Mormon decorum, perhaps to rid herself of the burden of guilt. She has always had it in for her sister wives, and now seems like a perfect opportunity, with the family deteriorating right in front of her, to systematically eliminate them.

Margene (Third wife): Prior to the campaign, Margene was the only wife with a public persona. Therefore, she had the most to lose when her lies were exposed to all of Utah, and she did not take to any of the ways the media depicted her. She was making money on a home shopping channel and now all of that, and as a result, her identity, was gone. She’s the emblem of what almost every other main character on the show feels — torn between their happiness and the decisions they’ve made that violently impede it. As third wife, Margene has the most vivid recollection of what it’s like to not be in a crazy religious cult, so when Grant Show (of ‘Beverly Hills, 90210‘ fame) showed up as if a spirit of sexiness, with a self-help DVD and a smile of reassurance, you could start to see her leaning. Last in, first out … of polygamy.

Back home in the ‘burbs, and Bill just wanted to act like nothing had changed, quoting scriptures and spinning everything like a Svengali, but no one was buying it. Literally everything was collapsing around him: Don and the employees at work were all either quitting or talking trash about the principle and by association, Bill. His wives at home were all trying suddenly find themselves in a world that they had for so long muted all sense of. His children were getting beat up and ridiculed for things they had no control over. His colleagues in the Senate were essentially blackballing him to avoid any controversy or political tumult, going as far as to say “You are an embarrassment to the state, to the church.”

Bill started to see how everything was trickling down out of control and impacting everyone he loved. After being spit on at a Town Hall meeting, he decided to have an open house for all his constituents, all cards on the table, and the wives seized the opportunity to mentally and emotionally pick each other apart.

Nicki went to exact some vigilante justice on the kid who hate-crimed her son, only he ran into a pole by accident, and you can add child abuse to the litany of horrors soon to be uncovered about the Henricksons, as they rallied at a school board meeting to show solidarity, tolerance and support for their own. It ended with Margene f-bombing the press, Nicki being positively identified as the woman who smashed the kid’s face in, and Barb being outed as an alcoholic, all before Bill could get a word in edgewise about shared morals and community understanding.

In an interesting turn, Bill and the newly exposed bully, Nicki, went to apologize to the boy she harmed and his parents, only to find out that they too are polygamists resentful of Bill and not happy with the heightened awareness. Talk about the polygamist calling the other polygamist a polygamist.

No one showed up for the open house until late, when the door bell rang and a handful of supporters came in, wanting to wait until everyone else left and thank Bill for putting himself and his family on the line. It wasn’t much, but it was a start.

Oh, and I haven’t even started talking about the fundamentalist side of all of this. Here’s a glimpse: Nicki’s mother was pregnant with Nicki’s ex-husband’s baby and has been banished to a hole in the ground by her own son — the new “prophet” — who is a closeted gay man. You’ll be back!

‘Big Love’ airs Sundays, 9PM ET on HBO.

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