The Last Six Feet Under Redux

I have a few more things that I would like to say about the Six Feet Under finale. For starters I would like to say a few (or not so few) words about Ted. When Ted first appeared I didn’t like Ted. He seemed kind of like a smarmy lawyer who was just trying to nail all the women in the office. When I found out Ted was a Republican spewing the party line on the war in Iraq, I hated Ted. You see, I pretty much agree with Claire’s take on that whole mess. I wanted Claire to dump that guy now, dammit. But then a very interesting thing happened.

It really came to the forefront when Nate died that Ted is a good guy. He stayed with Claire at the hospital all night. I started thinking, "Hey, this Ted guy’s politics may suck, but maybe he’s not so bad." In the episode with Nate’s funeral, the scenes where Claire and Ted were driving around showed this even more. It seemed that Ted really cared about Claire and was a really good listener. And in the episode where Claire has her huge drunken freakout and totally goes off on Ted, I felt bad for the guy. By the end of the series I realized that I really liked Ted.

I think this was a very clever thing that the writers did here. In this day and age where there is so much division and animosity between people on opposite sides of the political spectrum, it’s easy to fall into the trap of judging someone by their political views. And I have to admit that I have been guilty of this myself. But the way that I grew to like Ted is making me really think about the fact that life isn’t so black and white, and that initial impressions can be wrong. I also see a nice tie-in with the movie ‘American Beauty’ which was also written by Alan Ball (creator of SFU). The tagline for that movie was ‘Look Closer’, and I realized that I had to look closer at Ted to see that he was a good person. I know it’s kind of weird to write so much about a secondary character, but this was something that really stood out to me.

Some other things that stood out:

• The conversation between Ruth and Claire where Claire says that she will stay after all and Ruth talks her out of it. How Ruth doesn’t want Claire to make the same mistakes she did. And wasn’t it freaky how much Claire looked like Ruth in the ending sequences as she gets older?
• The dichotomy between the Nate that Brenda saw and the one that Claire saw was very interesting.
• How David saw Keith in the guy playing football right before he keels over. And by the way, I thought it was interesting that either Anthony or Durrell (not sure which) apparently turns out to be gay.
• What in the heck was going on with Brenda and Billy when Brenda died?
• I thought it was cool that Claire replaced the Deathmobile with a Prius, but she probably won't have much use for it in NYC.
• Claire lives to be 102!