Big Love recap: Chews, red wine and regrets, Some thoughts

By April MacIntyre Jan 17, 2011, 18:22 GMT

Try juggling three wives.  If it weren\'t tricky enough, Season Two of Emmy®- and Golden Globe®-nominated \'Big Love\' finds modern polygamist Bill Henrickson (Bill Paxton) tackling problems outside his three-house suburban home. As a failed expansion and a suspicious employee entangle his work at Henrickson Home Plus, Bill races to find the person responsible for outing his wife Barb (Jeanne Tripplehorn) as a polygamist at Utah\'s Mother of the Year ceremony. ...more

Darn you Lisa de Moraes for giving me the unerasable images of Mormon sister wives running around with tiny little hatchets behind their billowing tarp dresses and long braids.

More modern polygamists Barb (Jeanne Tripplehorn), Nicki (Chloe Sevigny) and Margene (Ginnifer Goodwin) are about ready to go at each other as familiarity has bred utter contempt between each gal, as husband Bill (Bill Paxton) stoically holds his illegal harem hoarder head up high, ready to take the poly lifestyle out of the closet, damn the modernized Brigham Young torpedoes.

Well, as much as I hated "Sister Wives" on TLC (a real show about polygamy) I love this ridiculous HBO telenovela of wadded-up pious Principle proselytizing, now in its final death throes for HBO.

Last season, Big Love gave poor Alby (Matt Ross) a taste of the Mormon anti-homosexual towel snap as his own wife Lura (Anne Dudek) hipped Bill to Alby's secret Gay life, and now buttoned down Lura has to look at her mopey love sick hubbie who pines for his long lost man, and plots Bill's demise simultaneously.

The episode kicked off in a bizarre camping trip scene where sing alongs and weeping were the order of the night, and Margene wasted a perfectly good marshmallow as she stormed off to her tent to wail over her bad press. Barb is dressed as a Charlie Chaplin as the little Tramp, and Nicki consoles Margene as only she can, in her patented 'snap out of it, you're being ridiculous' pithy advice.

For the record, Barb got Bill in her tent for the score keepers, despite her mustache.

Meanwhile, the news of Bill's expansive homelife has all his Home Plus employees essentially giving him the side eye, as his co-polygamist capo Don has grown a pair and asserts himself this season.

Bill takes the little hatchet-less women to an office visit for his new digs, armed with pedestrian Russell Stover Chocolates, offering a "chew" and a promise to stir things up, when the disgraced Senate majority leader runs into them and shares his DUI drama and bids him good luck.

The fallout from the Principle news being exposed sees the resident Boy Scouts' Scut Farkas bullying Bill and Nicki's kid, calling him "Plyg."

Nicki goes on a tear and terrorizes the kid, scaring him so badly he knocks his own tooth out on a metal fence running away from her.

Then, after an unsuccessful attempt to reinstate her disgraced brand, Margene's "Heart on Your Sleeve" line is yanked by VSN because of The Principle news.

A Tony Robbins-type spies her wailing in the VSN offices, and gives her a self-help DVD, that looks to cause all kinds of problems for Margene and Bill down the road, if we get there this season.

Our stoic Barb gives in to the sweet nectar demons and buys a bottle of red wine. Using the classic "it's my mother's Coq au Vin recipe" ingredient excuse, she deflects the naturally suspicious Nicki, who ramps up the banter to "Barb's an alcoholic" and reminds her she is breaking the LDS doctrine that prohibits all the good stuff in life.

Back at Margene's vida loca, she and hunky Goren sign divorce papers. Goren and Ana now have 60 days to leave the country.  Oh, and Ana is having a boy, the final dagger delivered in Bill's wife-hogging heart.

Money issues loom as Bill tells a depressed Barb that the Black Foot tribe canceled the casino contract and they refuses to pay out the Henrickson's share. Margene's cash cow job is over too. Time to clip coupons.

Love match spotted as Don's brick-throwing son gets cosy with Nicki's Cara Lynn at Home Plus. Budding romance despite Nicki's high alert status.

The Ginger Scut Farkas bully is discovered to be from a polygamist family who wishes to stay in the closet. "We're not on the same side," the dad explains to Bill. "We don't want to be a part of you."

My favorite nut, Adaleen is finally freed by insane Lura, released from a desert root cellar.  Lura of course banishes Adaleen, as she spins off some Bible verses conveniently forgetting her own glass house of lies.

Dear Mormon Angel Moroni of the trumpet playing ilk, please let Mary Kay Place have many scenes in these end-of-times days for Big Love.

The last scene is Bill's open house, which sees no one until a brave group of polygamists come and eat Bill, Barb, Nicki and Margene's jam cake or pie and chit-chat about the clever ways one conceals an illegal life in modern Utah.

See you next week.