Episode Title: The Long and Winding Road
Season 06, Episode 30
Episode 130 of 344
Written by Joel J. Feigenbaum
Directed by Alexander Singer
Original Airdate: Thursday, May
23rd, 1985
The Plot (Courtesy of TV.Com): Greg keeps
trying to call Laura, who hangs up on him. He follows her and explains that it
was a stunt Ruth set up, so he kicked her out. Greg asks Laura to marry him,
but she says she's already
married. The police question Karen about Ackerman, while Mack goes to his
office and finds Val's file. He sets the alarm off and is arrested. After Mack
is out, they find a list in the file that has the names of couples who
illegally adopted babies, but there are no addresses on the list. One name on
the list, Harry Fisher, rings a bell. The next day at work Karen tells Gary the
babies are alive. Mack remembers that he and Ben were at the Fisher's house,
and they had twins. Mack calls Karen and tells her to meet him there. Gary goes
with her. Harry Fisher rushes home and tells his wife Sheila to pack and that
they have to leave on a vacation now. Sheila says she won't leave because she
hasn't picked up the prescription for the twin's ear infections. Frustrated,
Harry takes one of the twins and goes to pick it up while she packs. Abby
receives the notebook pages via messenger. She picks up Val and tells her that
she received a mysterious phone call meant for Val. She said they told her that
the babies were alive and where to find them. Mack, Karen, Ben, and Gary arrive at
the Fishers. Karen and Mack tell Sheila that the babies were adopted illegally
and taken from their mother. Sheila says that's not true. Abby drives up with
Val, who is surprised to see everybody there. Val hears the baby cry and starts
to walk up to the door. Sheila is very distraught. Harry drives up and sees all
the people outside of his house. Sheila yells at him, "Harry, they want to
take the babies!" Harry speeds off.
Welcome to The Long and Winding Road. I confess that I’ve kinda been putting off
writing this essay, and while a good reason for that is probably my own
laziness and the fact that I’d rather just hang around the house or go to one
of my naked places or do whatever it is that makes Brett happy, I think another
part of it is that I’m almost sad to write about this ep because it will mean
I’m done writing about season six of KL (pretty
much; you’ll still be seeing my “Reflection on Season Six” essay a few days
after this one goes up), and it’s been such a divine pleasure to re-explore
this season and really get down to the nitty gritty by focusing on each and
every ep. Remember that this is episode thirty of a thirty episode season, and
it continues to astound me at how amazingly the whole creative crew has managed
to keep this season feeling unbelievably brilliant and exciting even when
stretched out over the course of so many eps.
In any case, let’s dive right in and discuss the season six finale.
Well, after our usual thirty
second preview and brilliantly brilliant scrolling opening credits, we actually
get a pretty long recap of the end of last ep.
When I say “pretty long,” I mean, oh, maybe two minutes, but it feels
kinda long when you just jump from the previous ep right into this one, as My
Beloved Grammy and I did. In fact, she
actually said, “Oh, why do we need to see all this again?” and I reminded her
that, in 1985, it had been a whole solid week since last ep and people probably
needed a little reminder of what went down.
Also, you could argue that starting an ep with a man blowing his brains
out is just a good way to hook those viewers in if they happened to miss last
week for some reason, so it works in that regard, as well. In any case, the ep starts up with Karen and
Mack staring down Dr. Ackerman as he tries to focus on his bridge game, then
also shows us him getting up to escape, the little car crash, and of course the
slow motion of him grabbing his gun and buying the farm.
From
there, we jump into the episode credits proper, playing over footage of
someone, face unseen, frantically busting through Dr. Ackerman’s house and
throwing files and papers everywhere and generally causing a big old mess. They keep cross cutting from this person to
shots of police cars rushing to the scene, since whoever it is that broke into
Dr. Ackerman’s place also caused the alarm to go off. Once the police arrive and do the usual
“Freeze” routine, we reveal that it is, in fact, Mack who has caused this
disturbance. Why would Mack be raiding
Dr. Ackerman’s place in such an obvious way?
Well, I find this easy to justify from a storytelling perspective, which
is that he’s simply desperate now that Dr. Ackerman is dead and can’t confess
to anything, so he’s just real fast trying to find any evidence in any way that he can, but I also learned of a behind
the scenes story that explains this.
Apparently The Dobsonator injured his back filming the prior ep and they
had to find a way to sorta shuffle Mack out of the story for a portion of this
ep, and this is how they do it.
Honestly, it works for me and didn’t feel in any way inorganic when I
was watching this; I only learned of the real reason after reading the trivia
on TV.com.
Most
of this episode will heavily focus on Val and her babies, but I wanna take a
moment to mention Laura and Greg before I move on to all that stuff. After the little scheme hatched by Ava and
Abs in Vulnerable, Laura no longer
wants to have anything to do with Greg and is refusing to answer his calls or
talk to him in any way. However, when he
finally does manage to corner her and get her to speak with him (by driving up
to her while she’s on the sidewalk and then just abandoning his car for a
minute to get out and chase after her, which I found amusing), he does
something that I really appreciated from a writing point of view; he tells her
that the whole thing was a stupid setup by Abs and his mother. I appreciated this so much because you just
know that if this was some other series, the writers would really draw this out
forever and make it take an eternity for Greg to figure out what really went
down. They would simply make his
character dumber for awhile so they wouldn’t have to deal with him realizing he
was tricked, but the KL writers do it
in a way more organic way. I remind you
that all Greg saw last ep as he came walking outside was Abs and Ava sitting
together while an angry Laura sped away; it wouldn’t take a brain surgeon to
figure out what was really going on. The
writers respect the intelligence of Greg as well as the audience enough to not
dumb him down and keep this going on; they just have him go right up to Laura
and say, “It was a trick; I know it was a trick.” Yeah, Laura doesn’t believe him and doesn’t
take him back, but that’s not my point; my point is that the writers let it be
revealed good and quick that Ava and Abs were in cahoots to screw both Greg and
Laura. Oh yeah, and one last thing,
which is that Greg tells Laura he shipped Ava off to Africa and that’s the last
we’ll be seeing of her. I’ll take one
quick moment to reiterate how much I enjoyed Ava during her seven eps and I
loved the energy she brought to proceedings; if she hadn’t sadly suffered that
stroke and then passed away in 1990, I would have loved to see her return to
stir up more trouble later down the line.
So
let’s back to Val’s babies, the story that has provided the nucleus for this
entire incredible season. When we first
catch up with Val and Ben, it’s a scene that I found positively delightful,
because they are at Ben’s Plant House and Val is in bed and Ben is, for some
reason, parading around the place in a kilt, playing bagpipes loudly. What the hell is going on here? The sheer strangeness of this image is what
made me like it so much, and both My Beloved Grammy and myself actually laughed
aloud, and quite uproariously, when we first saw it. I again have to ask: What the hell was I
thinking a few years back when I first watched the show and I so callously
dismissed the character of Ben as “boring”?
We’ve now seen two of his four seasons on the series and he’s
incredible. Not only is he fabulously
decent and just an inherently good person, but he has this fantastic dry wit
about him and often gets these really killer sarcastic lines during the eps,
plus he’ll randomly start playing bagpipes for no reason in the bedroom, and
it’s astounding. I feel like I oughta
send a wine and cheese basket to Douglas Sheehan along with a letter of apology
for ever calling his character boring; I was absolutely 100% wrong in that
regard and his character has just skyrocketed in my view, because he is so
incredible. I also like this bit because
it’s just silly and rings true to the way couples will behave in their private
lives. One of the keys to a good
relationship is to be able to be silly together, so my thighs would definitely
melt for a guy that puts on a kilt and does a bagpipe solo performance for me.
In
any case, Ben only gets to play the bagpipes briefly before the phone rings and
he’s interrupted with news of Mack’s incarceration. He leaves Val with some excuse or other and
rushes to the police station to deal with this and we get another scene that I
found rather fabulous. Basically, Ben
sits down and spends several minutes talking to this officer about what he
thinks Mack could have been doing at Dr. Ackerman’s place, and then after a
certain amount of time has passed, the officer reveals that he’s not holding
Mack and that Mack is probably waiting for Ben outside at this precise moment. Ben has this little moment where he says how
clever it was for the cop to distract him and try to get information out of him
this whole time, and I don’t know why, but I found the whole thing unbelievably
cute. I also like how the officer says
he’s letting Mack go because he believes, if Mack was breaking into someone’s
house, there has to be a good reason. I
like this sorta inherent trust the officer shows towards Mack, and it also
reminds us that Mack is well respected in the community and can maybe, every
now and then, get away with bending or even outright breaking the law if he
needs to.
Meanwhile,
Karen is still stuck at the bridge tournament place waiting to find out where
Mack has gone. She’s all alone and we
are told that Nurse Wilson has fled the scene, probably frightened by the sight
of Dr. Ackerman or perhaps by what happened to him. I honestly can’t remember if we ever see
Nurse Wilson again and I am far too lazy to pull up her IMDb page and look to
see if she’s got more eps to her credit (and we’ve also established that IMDb
could very likely be wrong about such things, so it would be a futile waste of
time in any case). However, Nurse Wilson
is not where my priorities lie at this point; I’m more interested in Mack and
Karen and the whole gang, so I’m glad we’re mostly focusing on them now. After awhile, Karen is reunited with Mack and
he explains what happened and where he went and then everyone runs off together
to go continue their research.
The
way that Mack connects the dots to the Fishers I found rather good and very
believable. I already covered that it’s
a slight contrivance that Ben and Mack just happened to find the Fishers’
address a few eps back and just happened to stop by the house and just happened
to not see that they had a set of twins and all that stuff, but that’s a teeny
tiny nitpick that I’m gonna go ahead and overlook now. Basically, the characters are hanging out at,
I think, Pacific Cable Whatever, and Mack happens to see a piece of newspaper
with the announcement of Greg leaving the senate or whatever, and then he says
to Ben how he remembers the moment they found out that Greg was stepping down
from the senate and he remembers exactly what they were doing, hanging out with
Sheila Fisher. I should probably mention
that, at this point, they have this list of people who could be involved in
illegal adoptions, but they have no addresses or nothing, just names. But the name “Harry Fisher” has been sticking
out to Mack, and he doesn’t know why, but now he puts it together; they were
standing in the Fishers’ house when Greg resigned, and now they know they just
need to go back to the Fisher house.
Meanwhile,
Abs is figuring out the exact same information thanks to the little deal she
worked out with Ava. See, in case I
forgot to mention it before, Ava didn’t just have Abs pretend to be sleeping
with Greg and upset Laura because she hates Laura, but because they had worked
out a deal. If Abs agreed to her little
plan, Ava would give her the pages that she’s been seeking for the majority o
the season, and now she proves her word is good by giving Abs the
information. This works out well for
Abs, who can now tell Val what she has “discovered” and come out looking like
the big hero, which is of course what she does.
She finds Val sitting at the beach (of course) and she tells her how she
got a phonecall asking for “Mrs. Ewing” and at first she thought they meant
her, not Val, but after a bit of talking, she realized they were looking for
Val. Then she lets it out of the bag and
says, “Val, your babies are alive,” and tells her where they are and that she
can take her to them. From there, the
two ladies hop into Abby’s car and drive off together.
What
an interesting sight this is. When was
the last time that Abs and Val were alone together for an extended period of
time? Maybe somewhere in season
three? You’ll recall that during seasons
two and three, Val and Abs were kinda chummy, but that has all changed since
Gary ran off on Val to be with Abs, so it’s a unique sight to see these two
ladies one-on-one in a scene, pretty much managing to get along. Also interesting to note in this scene is how
calm Val is. When she hears that her
babies are alive, it’s not like a big dramatic thing; you get the feeling that
she’s been waiting for this moment.
After all, she never stopped believing they were alive, now did
she? Abs even notes Val’s serene
demeanor and asks her what’s up and Val tells her she knew this would happen,
that she never lost faith.
At
the same time that Abs and Val are driving to the Fisher house, Karen, Mack,
Ben, and Gary are all doing the same thing, but one thing I really appreciated
is that they get lost. Not only is this
a fabulous reminder of a pre-GPS world in which you just sorta had to know addresses
and how to properly read a map (a skill I never learned), but it’s just so
wonderfully down to the earth and real.
We’re right on the precipice of finally solving this big baby mystery,
of finally finding the babies and returning them to their rightful mother, but
then there’s a delay in the action because the characters can’t remember how to
get to the house. This feels totally
realistic and like something that would happen in real life to any of us, so it
successfully keeps this whole situation from feeling to melodramatic or soapy
or over-the-top.
While
all this is going on, what’s happening over at the Fisher house? I’m glad you asked, because we have some
really interesting moments between this couple right near the start of the ep. I think I already established that I just
inherently like this character of Sheila Fisher. I think she seems sweet and nice and like a
loving mother and I feel bad for what’s about to happen to her. However, I’m not sure I like her husband and
I’m not sure I’m supposed to. Real fast,
I wanna note that Harry is played by an actor named Joe Regalbuto, and I didn’t
recognize him from anything, but I did some research and found out that he was
a series regular for all ten years on Murphy Brown, a show I’ve seen maybe five eps of in my entire life (but I will say
I enjoyed all five of those eps), so there you go. Anyway, when we first see the couple, Sheila
is in the middle of the usual breakfast chores and Harry is sorta ignoring
her. There’s some good suspense building
because the newspaper is on the table with a picture of Dr. Ackerman on the
front page and a headline saying something like “Baby stealing doctor blows
head off in concluding moments of KL
episode,” but Harry is more interested in the stocks pages and fails to see
this big old cover story. We all know
that if he saw it, he’d probably freak out, but he checks his stocks, gets real
grumpy that one of them is down or whatever, and then he heads off to
work. Tellingly, Sheila is talking to
the twins and says something like, “I know it may not seem like it, but your
daddy really does love you.” Wow, what a
fascinating line; what are we supposed to make of this? Is this put in here to establish Harry as a
bad man? Or is he, like all of our KL characters both large and small,
simply complex? We are still unclear on
exactly how he got involved with Dr. Ackerman, so we don’t know how aware he is
of what duplicitous means were necessary to obtain these babies in
question. In any case, I’ll say that I
like Sheila but I don’t like Harry, and perhaps we are not supposed to like
Harry because it would simply be too hard and too sad to watch a nice, loving
couple have the babies they adopted yanked away from them. By making the husband something of an
asshole, it makes it sting less.
A
little later in the day, Harry hears the news about what happened to Dr.
Ackerman and he immediately rushes home to find Sheila and the twins, only the
house is empty. He finds Sheila taking a
walk around the neighborhood with the twins and says how they need to get out
of here right away, pack a big suitcase and hit the road. Sheila is confused, and justifiably so, as
Harry is acting like a bit of a psycho, not pausing to explain anything to her,
just throwing out frantic comments about how she’s been bugging him for a
vacation and now they are taking one.
Sheila says how they can’t just run off, how she has to go to the
pharmacy to pick up some sort of ear medicine for the twins. Harry says he’ll go do that and when Sheila
reminds him that she can’t very well pack while also attending to two babies,
Harry takes one of the babies with him.
To
provide a little context from someone who doesn’t know what’s going to happen
next the way I do, My Beloved Grammy did the super cute thing she does where
she kinda narrates what she thinks might happen next, and she seemed fairly
convinced that the big cliffhanger was just gonna be the Fishers taking off,
leaving the country, something like that, and she said how she hoped that
wouldn’t happen. Fortunately for her,
that’s not what happens. Instead, Harry takes one baby and runs off to
the pharmacy and Karen, Mack, Gary, and Ben all arrive at the Fishers’ doorstep
at that moment to confront her. When
Karen tells Sheila how the babies were obtained illegally, how they were taken
away from their natural mother, Sheila denies all this, and I believe her. Again, I like how the writers have managed to
keep the Fishers pretty vague. We don’t
know the exact circumstances and situations that have lead to them raising
Val’s babies and we don’t know how aware they are of it. Harry’s behavior right now definitely
indicates that he has at least some knowledge of the truth, but I don’t think
Sheila knows a thing and she’s the character I feel bad for. Again, she just seems like a nice, sweet
lady, and she seems like she’s doing a pretty good job of being a mother to the
twins, so imagine how it would feel to have strangers arrive at your doorstep
and tell you that your babies were stolen and that they are not rightfully
yours. Oh my, such a sordid state of
affairs.
From
here, things really start to hit a crescendo of high drama, because it’s at
right about this moment that Abs and Val arrive on the scene. Val gets out of the car and starts to walk
towards the house, all slow, kinda in a daze, and that’s when Harry’s car comes
driving on up the street, as well, and that’s when we go into the super slow
motion. This is similar to the super slow
motion used when Dr. Ackerman decided to put a bullet in his brain, in that
it’s that sorta choppy looking kind, if that makes sense. I like the slow motion and I like the scene,
though I confess that it might go on a few beats too long and it has one little
detail that’s perhaps a smidge too much.
That one little detail is also something that probably any KL fan should remember vividly, and
that’s Sheila Fisher screaming, in super slow motion and with the sound all
elongated and drawn out, “Harry, they’re gonna take the babies!” I considered writing that sentence out in the
same way that she says it but decided not to, mostly because it would look
dumb. I find this line to be a slight
bridge too far, that it’s maybe trying a little too hard to be really super
dramatic and it just ends up coming off as slightly campy (indeed, My Beloved
Grammy laughed at this particular part), but this is a micro complaint that’s
barely even worth mentioning. After the
big line, we conclude the season with Val spinning around to look at Harry’s
car and the little baby passenger inside of it, and then the camera freezes on
her and goes into a closeup of her face and, well, that’s it; that’s the end of
the season.
As
far as the cliffhangers go, this one is definitely near the top. If we are just focusing strictly on THE
CLIFFHANGER in question and not the entire season leading up to the
cliffhanger, then I honestly might prefer the cliffhanger of season five, which
was really more like a whole rapid fire series of cliffhangers, a ton of shit happening all at
once. That season five finale was
packed, and then the very conclusion of it was Karen getting shot by Laura Palmer's mother and Mack
holding her body. Okay, so maybe I like
that one better in that regard, if viewed simply as a cliffhanger, but this is
clearly better if we are taking into account all the factors that have lead to
it and the season as a whole. It feels
like it’s been a long time coming to get to this moment, that we’re about to
reach a moment of real catharsis, and that’s the exact moment that the season
concludes, which is pretty great. I also
appreciate that it’s fairly mellow; another show would be tempted to, say, have
Harry crash the car and a great big explosion going off and someone screaming
“Oh my God!” and the music swelling and then concluding the season that way,
something like that. Instead, this plays
as more down to earth, and I appreciate that the final image of the season is
Val’s face, because she’s been the heart of the show for this whole sixth
season and it’s been all about her journey.
So
that was The Long and Winding Road. Honestly, I have a ton to say about this but
I feel like a lot of my comments would be better suited to my upcoming
reflections essay, when I’ll talk about the season as a whole. For now, I’ll just say that this season
finale does not disappoint, does an excellent job of bringing all the different
elements together and starting to tie up the loose ends, and then leaves us
eagerly waiting to see what will happen next season. This has been a frankly stunning year of
television, so before we get started with season seven, I will be posting my
“Reflection on Season Six” and then, after that, we will dive right into season
seven with the premiere episode entitled The Longest Day.
The final two episodes of season 6 tie with season 9's "Noises Everywhere (Parts 1 and 2)" as my favorite two hour blocks. I loved the finale, and the final shot of Val slow-spinning is just perfect. This was the season that hooked me during the original run, and it is still the best IMO.
ReplyDeleteClose to my favorite two episodes, which are season 8's "do not fold, spindle or mutilate" and "cement the relationship".
ReplyDeleteI believe this episode was the most watched show in the country that week, and the only time a KL episode held that spot.
ReplyDeleteWow! My heart was pounding. What a great cliffhanger. And tastefully done too.
ReplyDeleteWe just finished S6 of Knots Landing (for 2nd time with my partner - 3rd time for me counting original airing!)
ReplyDeleteAt 30 episodes, it's a bit bloated - I wouldn't have minded some of the Empire Valley shenanigans boiled down to shave off a few episodes, but dannnng, these last two eps. are examples of masterful TV. Great job all around.