I'm sure you're inundated ...
The Carver, Nip/Tuck
Question: I'm sure you're inundated with comments as to the revelation of the Carver's identity on the season finale of
Nip/Tuck. Is the response generally negative? 'Cause I am totally let down, and utterly disappointed in the creative team. A story line that had been carefully constructed and nurtured over the course of 1.5 seasons devolved into bad camp — in a single episode. I hate naysaying, but this denouement felt tacked-on, forced and full of holes. All of Kit and Quentin's exposition: sloppy. This is the only show on television that continually surprises me (
Lost and
Veronica Mars included) — see the brilliant plane-crash episode. To have ended the season on this note... I feel that they've lowered the bar for themselves.
Answer: And on that note: Happy New Year, everyone! Catching up on mail from over the holiday, I'll give
Nip/Tuck credit for giving us one last big, juicy gripe to dish over from 2005 before we start tackling the avalanche of new programming coming our way almost immediately in January. Lots and lots of mail on the
Nip/Tuck finale, and it was uniformly negative. For my own disgruntled perspective, check out my longer
Dispatch, but Chris' letter pretty much echoes my thoughts. Most of the mail focused on the letdown of Quentin being revealed as the Carver, since he was the most obvious choice. As Joseph wrote: "Could it be that the show has left our jaws on the floor so often that when it fails to do so, we are let down? Or can
Nip/Tuck simply not push the envelope any further?" Well, I'd argue that the plot twist ending the finale's first hour, revealing Quentin's lack of a sex organ, was pretty envelope-pushing. I actually didn't even mind Quentin being the Carver, improbabilities and inconsistencies aside, especially when it was clear it was a tag team with his sister Kit (a somewhat unexpected twist, with lots of grisly Gothic backstory). What bothered me most about the
Nip/Tuck finale was the way it was presented, like out of some Z-grade horror-movie serial, with the heroes all tied up and tortured, including Matt in the truly useless Aryan-bigot-kidnaps-trannie subplot. As Mike noted in another e-mail: "The actual finale was like an episode of
Melrose Place." And he did not mean that as a compliment.
Mike went on to ask: "With the season over, what do you feel worked this season and what didn't? Also, do you feel Nip/Tuck sometimes suffers in comparison to the more grounded Rescue Me?" In brief, and I'm sure I'm forgetting some things, what worked for me most was the remarkable episode with pain as its theme, which included the faux victim who screamed internally when she wasn't properly anesthetized during surgery and was later murdered by the Carver, an episode capped by the sight of Sean cutting himself. What really didn't work was the way the show simply abandoned so much material week to week, including Sean's self-mutilation, also the way the Carver story line was abandoned for weeks on end, and then dropping the entire plane-crash trauma episode (with the stunt involving Julia's mother initially thought to be dead), almost as if it never happened. That should have been more of a turning point for Julia's character. I wasn't crazy about the instant-spa subplot, and felt the semen face cream was a cheap joke. The Anne Heche story line was OK, but again it ended too abruptly, with no sense afterward that it had ever occurred. I enjoyed most of the Christian-Kimber story line, and upon her disappearance from the wedding (a great moment), I was astounded by Christian's cruelty toward the unattractive woman whom he forced to wear a paper bag over her face while having sex. And Matt's relationship with the Aryan racist played by Brittany Snow just seemed silly. The show is extreme at all times, and you either accept that or you don't watch (and I don't blame anyone for choosing the latter). But this was a very uneven season, no doubt. For every haunting story (the obese woman fused to her couch), there was one that just made you roll your eyes.
And does this suffer by comparison to Rescue Me? You bet. But then, most shows do, not just other FX shows. Rescue Me was FX's best drama last season and one of the best shows produced anywhere on TV. I've put Nip/Tuck high on my year-end lists before — not so much this time. It probably got more attention than it deserved because of the great company it keeps.
