Six Feet Under

[sistermagpie]

One person dying can make me sad watching it.

Death, meaning death for everyone, like the simple fact that everyone gets old--or not even old, but things change--rips my heart out. Tolkien wrote about it in LotR and it killed me there. Now this. Oy. Like I don't worry about this every time I see my family, which I did this weekend. I don't even think I'm worried about getting old myself (I occasionally worry about not being able to take of myself and having no one there to take care of me, but I sort of picture myself as a healthy old person a lot). It's more...I don't even know. This is why I'd want to live in the Shire. There's a place for everybody, no matter what age they are.

Alan Ball knows what he's doing. The whole point of the show was about how nowadays we basically ignore death and pretend it doesn't happen, like it's not the natural end to every story, but I still never would have guessed they'd end it like that. Even if individual deaths couldn't help but be cliché sometimes, it worked. Rico as a short little squat old man, David with no hair. Also, kudos for assuming gay marriage will be legal in the future. And for having Brenda and Billy together in the end--Nathaniel and Isabelle forever.

The last death especially was...I hesitate to say wonderful, but Claire in her New York apartment (at least it looked New York) with her nurse, surrounded by her photos, blind from cataracts. Oh.

Must go weep again.

Comments

[slytherincesss.livejournal.com]

*is also weeping*

I love that Claire lived to be 98.

[sistermagpie.livejournal.com]

I love that you're right there with the math! I think I was incapable of even reading the numbers!

[sistermagpie.livejournal.com]

I take that back about the math--according to the website, she was 102!

[ishtar79.livejournal.com]

Um, I'm totally gonna regret asking this, but what happened? Did the series get the Macbeth ending?

[sistermagpie.livejournal.com]

SPOILERS, obviously.

Nate does die within the timeline of the series, but he's the only one. In the last episode it's not that everyone dies like in MacBeth, but it just flashes forward to show how all the main characters do die--like the way all the episodes start with the moment of a random person's death and the years of their life.

[strangemuses.livejournal.com]

Wasn't that a lovely ending? Sad, but so true to the story. It would have been such a cop out to have them all live happily (and eternally ageless) ever after.

T'was downright Zen, actually.

[sistermagpie.livejournal.com]

Yes--I never thought about how eternally ageless characters on shows are until they did this.

[nymphgalatea.livejournal.com]

*Is busy downloading because she lives in the stupid fracking UK*

But I'm so glad they had the balls to kill them all off. I remember watching this in season three or so and realising that I hoped the show would end with everybody dead, because it's the only way it could end.

[sistermagpie.livejournal.com]

I had said to a friend I thought they should end it that way--she said, "I applaud your sense of story!" when it was over. It really was the best way to do it. Stupidly, I notice that some people seem to be under the impression that the deaths are a fantasy or a premonition when it's just supposed to be real.