Big Love: Teeming with pregnancies, threats, blood, lies & politics

Guns. Disputes with Mexican police. Lies. A sham marriage. A bomb scare. A grandmother pregnant with a baby via her granddaughter’s father. Political skirmishes and protests over the morality of gaming. A really big knife dripping with blood.

As insane as the twists were in Big Love’s recent episode, “Blood Atonement” — and the twists were seriously twisted — I’ve got to admit that it was damned entertaining watching this whacked-out three-ringed circus, probably because I’ve abandoned looking for realism and decided to just go along for the ride. (Maybe if I applied the same mindset to Lost, I’d be a whole lot happier.)

As these far-flung stories unfolded, I kept thinking about each event from the perspective of a reporter covering politics, because Bill’s still running for office, something I think the character forgets as he goes charging off from place to place. Imagine if only one-tenth of the stuff he or his family has done in the past two episodes was made public? In the age of cell phone cameras, YouTube, political blogs and scores of fallen politicians all over the place, you’ve got to believe that these shenanigans will eventually catch up to Bill and not just in the form of an old mug shot.

What about the fact that Bill disappeared from the campaign trail just as he’d been appointed interim UEB trustee in the wake of Dale Tomasson’s tragic suicide? While Bill did do a radio interview via his cell phone from inside a Mexican police station (though he didn’t mention that to the host), what if someone found out that he’d been in that police station, threatening the police chief and saying he had pull in Washington and that the authorities needed to find his parents and son who’d been abducted and held captive by a violent polygamist sect? Or that his parents — notably Lois who introduced him at his campaign kick-off rally — had been smuggling guns and birds and brought Bill’s son along? How would any one of those items play with the electorate? Or the minor detail that Lois sliced off Hollis Green’s arm?

Simultaneously back in Utah, there is a foreign-born waitress who’s pregnant with Bill’s love child whose fiance was facing deportation and she planned on going with him. As if those facts aren’t damaging enough on their own, Bill’s third wife committed fraud by marrying the fiance in order to keep him from being deported and keep the baby mama from leaving. If Bill’s ultimate goal is to mainstream polygamy — to make it seem like a holy, spiritual calling — how can this particular situation possibly advance that argument? (Answer: It can’t.)

Speaking of pregnancy, how would it look to voters if they learned that Bill’s mother-in-law is pregnant with a baby conceived with Bill’s second wife’s ex-husband?

Throw in the fact that an evangelical conservative group, with oodles of resources and political contacts, has been aggressively picketing the Henricksons’ casino and, related or not, a bomb was discovered at the casino, and there’s so much material for reporters to delve into that I can’t wait until the Big Love writers pen an episode where the Utah media finally stumble upon at least one of these little nuggets of information. It’ll be fun to watch how Bill “I’m an Action Hero Now” Henrickson (seriously, see him with that gun?) handles the fall-out.

Are you, like me, waiting for this campaign to blow up in Bill’s face and to have the insanity that’s been the Henrickson family’s life for the past few episodes, come to light? Or do you think Bill will somehow be able to keep a lid on it all?

Clacked by Meredith O'Brien
on Feb 22, 2010 @ 14:00 EST5EDT