"Big Love" Recap & Review - "Good Guys and Bad Guys"

Big Love
"Good Guys and Bad Guys"
Original Air Date: 7/23/07

[Submitted by: Stacey]

This week’s episode of Big Love started with a bang as we learned that Margy’s mom Ginger was about to come and visit the family with no knowledge of the polygamist relationship between Bill, Barb, Nicki and Margy. While Margy wants to keep their lifestyle a secret from her mother, viewers no doubt guessed that Nicki would spill the beans. In what seemed like a pathetic attempt to take Margy’s mother as her own, Nicki bonds with Ginger and offers her couch to her when Margy kicks her out for rejecting their lifestyle.

While Margy fights with synthesizing her two lives (her mother and her lifestyle), Barb goes to the Compound to help Joey and Wanda. Whenever she visits the Compound, Barb is reminded of her choice to convert to polygamy. She seems to struggle with accepting her lifestyle when she sees the way the polygamists live on the Compound. In her own words, Barb says it makes her feel like what she is doing is vile. Margy is struggling to merge her mom and her current life and Barb is struggling to merge her life with Bill, Nicki and Margy with the lives of other polygamists. It’s almost as if she feels like her circumstance is an exception. Barb’s time at the Compound forces her to confront her life choices in a raw unfiltered way. As Frank (Bill’s father) tells her, in this religion “God gave men the power.” This misogynistic tone and its subsequent practices on the Compound seem to be the crux of what Barb struggles with when thinking about her life choice. All this culminates in a Barb meltdown when Frank (Bill’s father) comes to attack Wanda (who tried to poison him last season) and shuts off the power. Joey shows up right in time and no one inside notices Frank hanging around outside and they attribute the power outage to a normal glitch in Compound living.

In what can only be described as a pointless storyline, writers for Big Love continue on this Weeber Gaming competition between Roman, Bill and the Greens. We find out that the Greens are back from hiding in Mexico, claiming their standing as the true profits. Roman starts a complete shut out – no conversation, no business with the Greens and Bill, caught in the middle, will need to negotiate his dealings with both Weeber Gaming and the Greens so as not to turn them all against him. Can we say boring? This show is about relationships. That’s why we watch it. We want to understand and experience (as much as you can through a TV show) the life of polygamists and the business dealings/struggles divert the viewer’s attention from the draw of the show.

To sum it up – Nicki wants a mom and tries to steal Margy’s. Margy wants her mom to stop trying to compete with her and, in essence, steal her life. All she’s looking for is a mom who accepts her and sees her for who she is. Barb struggles with her life choice and how it fits into the bigger picture of polygamy. We all felt her pain as Roman expressed to Barb that she is part of his family and he will always try and protect his family. Bill struggles to make a risky business deal using deception and questionable ethics (BORING). Oh, and Sarah, who has been struggling with her parent’s life choice for a few episodes now is forced to voice her rebellion to her father when he learns that Alby has been stalking her. There seems to be a breakdown in the teenager/parent relationship that is not only “normal,” even under these circumstances, but will continue throughout the season.

B-