'Housewives' wraps season with juicy finale
Posted: Sunday, May 20, 2007 7:35 PM by Gael Fashingbauer Cooper
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TV
Spoilers for "Desperate Housewives" finale lurking ahead. Consider yourself warned.
"Desperate Housewives" wrapped its third season up with an old-fashioned, juicy, pull out all the stops finale Sunday night, and fans who weren't so sure about recent episodes finally received their reward. This show was up there with a good old "Dallas" episode -- two weddings, a fake baby, a suicide, and a wrenching toxic mom/cancer subplot. The results were electrifying, leaving fans with plenty to chew over as they wait all summer for the show to return. This episode finally was a return to the soapy drama of season one, and it was about time.
Start with the biggest plot twist, the one the writers appropriately saved for the end. If you saw that one coming, you're more of a psychic than most. Edie was hiding the fact that she was taking birth control pills, despite knowing that Carlos desperately wanted a child. He found out just before the emotional experience of attending Gaby's wedding reception, and perhaps that pushed him to tell Edie it was over between them. Instead of the usual "Housewives" back and forth of forgiving and forgetting and breaking up and getting back together, Edie went home, wrote a note to Carlos, and apparently hung herself.
Not only was the apparent death stunning (is there any chance Carlos could find her in time?), it reached back to the series pilot, in which another housewife, Mary Alice Young, killed herself. And while we didn't know Mary Alice when she killed herself, viewers have come to know Edie. She's often been the comic relief, the entertaining blonde who never received enough lines of her own. She's come into her own lately, and to see this often wise-cracking woman brought to the ultimate despair was all the more horrifying because viewers knew her so well.
Edie's trouble was just one of the plot lines that will keep viewers chatting. Bree returned, as Marcia Cross made an appearance after taking time off to give birth to twins. Yet she shocked her friends by showing up with an apparent pregnancy of her own. Smart viewers knew right away that it was a pregnancy pad, and Bree was faking her pregnancy so that when unwed daughter Danielle has her baby, Bree can pass the child off as her own, but watching the deception was enthralling.
And what would a soap opera finale be without a wedding? "Housewives" offered up two: An elaborate, well-attended ceremony for Gaby and Victor, and an intimate, moonlight wedding for Susan and Mike. Both weddings advanced their respective plots as well. Gaby discovered that Victor was probably using her to court the Latino vote in a planned race for governor, while Susan, for once, saw one of her crazy schemes turn out even better than she planned. She surprised Mike with a secret wedding, and it was every bit as beautiful and meaningful as her elaborate bridezilla ceremony would have been wrong.
As for the other housewife, Lynette's plot may not be as headline-grabbing, but it was doubly wrenching. The mom of four (plus Kayla) does indeed have Hodgkin's lymphoma, and who should show up but her bossy mother, Stella? Stella's had her own cancer bout in the past, as well as her own experience with infidelity, and she was quick to throw both in Lynette's face once Kayla spilled the beans about Chef Rick. Lynette ordered her mother out, but her mother cowed her with a depressingly realistic speech about how the cancer would wipe her out, and she would could either fight her mother, or the disease.
"Desperate Housewives" lost a lot of viewers with the second season's Applewhite murder plot, but if those viewers returned to give season three a shot, they were rewarded handsomely with the drama of Sunday's finale. How long till the show returns in September?
