Private Practice finale pulls a switcheroo

I was annoyed. After sitting through this Private Practice finale — which reminded me of the season premiere when everyone sat in the waiting room awaiting news about whether Violet would survive the violent removal of her baby from her womb at the hands of an unhinged patient — I didn’t like where this episode went in the end, but I suppose that was the point, wasn’t it?

Killing off Dell? Really? Rendering his poor daughter Betsey — who lost her meth-cooking mother this season — an orphan? What a crappy ending for this character who’d matured from being a surfer boy at the reception desk lusting after Naomi, to a responsible dad who’d become a midwife and had just been accepted to medical school. Did he really need to die in order to make this season finale more exciting? I think not.

There was plenty of drama with the Maya situation and all the romantic partner swapping. The car accident — Maya was in labor and Dell was driving her to the hospital when a drunk driver hit them — broke Maya’s back and Dell was thought, initially, to have sustained only minor injuries. In order to spare Maya from paralysis, the baby’s life had to be jeopardized and, for a while there, it looked as though the baby wouldn’t make it.

This finale was built around everyone trying to hold it together in the face of all this, particularly for Violet who had perhaps the most salient lines: “A year ago I was dying. And we got through that, we got another year under our belts and once again, here we are, in the same place, with somebody else … I just want to scream to whoever keeps doing this to just stop, stop bringing us here with another one of our own dying.”

The twist of having Sam operate on the drunk driver who hit Dell and Maya’s car was an interesting one, as was having Pete lie to Sam, saying that this was just some other inebriated dude who needed saving, not the same one who hit his daughter’s car.

But the scene with Dell saying goodbye to his daughter — telling her that she’d live a happy life because if something bad happened to him she would have gotten all of the bad things over with early– was heart breaking and cruel. Nobody seemed to really care about Dell as he sat, with broken bones in a cast, in the waiting room and Naomi, in a conversation overheard by Dell, casually blamed him for the car accident, saying that if Maya had called her instead of Dell she wouldn’t have been in this situation. Nice.

The small bit of light in this episode came in the form of Cooper proposing to Charlotte — “I have to be with you. We have to be together.” — and then withdrawing the proposal after Dell died so he could ask her to marry him on a happier day.

The Cooper-Charlotte reunion was one of several romantically healing moments, which I can only imagine were intended to serve as salve to blunt the sadness of the Dell and Maya situation. Addison gave Pete permission to return to Violet, which he did. William told Gabriel he could pursue Naomi because he was leaving town to go stay (and die of ALS) with his daughter. Addison, in the last scene, went to Sam and asked if she made him happy. When he said she did, she replied, “You make me happy too.” She shed her clothing and joined him on the sofa. Sure, the main couples were back together, but Dell was dead and I was in a snit.

What did you think of the season finale? Anyone else feel badly for Sheldon?

Clacked by Meredith O'Brien
on May 14, 2010 @ 13:00 EST5EDT