{it’s all in there: mummies, zombies, Beetlejuice, flames, death, Jamie Lee Curtis, Vada, Macaulay Culkin, bee attacks, reading glasses, volcanoes, lava, peaches, skipping needles}

By Sean Moeller

There’s an impulse, when considering the implications and intent of the final season of “Six Feet Under,” HBO’s insightfully dark drama about the joys and jeers of embalming and the business of directing funerals in Los Angeles, to think about mummies—zombies really. Then you stop thinking about the zombies – with their comatose states, rotten flesh and bones and their dragging feet slowly shuffling to destinations – when you regain your senses and realize that these are real people here, not Beetlejuice (I believe the plural form of Beetlejuice is Beetlejuice, unless you care to convince me otherwise). You see these characters – most of which are members of the deeply conflicted and unbearably depressed Fisher family – beating their heads against the sidewalk, bursting into emotional flames and fighting with a life that serves them death and sorrow each and every day.

This is not the same funeral home where a pregnant Jamie Lee Curtis explained to Vada that there wasn’t milk in her breasts yet, but it is more like the one where Vada is losing it, wanting to put Macaulay Culkin’s glasses back on, though he’s resting in a coffin after a fatal bee attack. The Fishers go through their lives as volcanoes (not zombies as I may have suggested earlier, a weaker state of mind), rumbling and rock-hard, dormant for only so many minutes, before setting a plume of ash and smoke sky-high and sending tears of lava down their arms, before regaining themselves for an interim period, until the next blowup.

For this final season, we see random people meeting their maker after defiantly eating a can of peaches (a no-no for a diabetic) and after unwontedly being forced to watch a shitty theater production (a good way to catch a heart attack). We see the Fishers fighting with themselves, trying not to be unhappy, but ultimately making it worse. What we’re taught is that a working understanding of the grieving process and how to help others bypass or cope with the harshest of those emotions almost never makes it back to help the helper in their times of need.

The Fishers are a fascinating/frustrating study in the greatness of despair. You wonder why they can’t just be happy and why their relationships seem to be unquestionably moribund – just waiting to fall down dead – and then the conclusion strikes that most people are the same way. Dealing with death and mortality issues is an impossible thing for those not ready for it no matter how seasoned they happen to be. People, in general, are cruel and irrational whenever they’re faced with a cold body and that doesn’t only have to apply to death. We see these cold and lifeless bodies – fragments and whispers of former selves or selves that never were – everywhere in “Six Feet Under.”

Ruth, the matriarch, seethes about her situation and sacrifices the love she used to have to live any way that’s possible, so long as it’s not the way she’s always lived. We feel for George and wonder why no one wants to love a lovable man with only minor mental deficiencies. Why no one stood up for George is still a concern in my home. Every other character – Claire, Nate, David, Keith, Billy, Brenda – deals with their own lives in the same way that their funeral home patrons deal with the sudden departure of a loved one, by asking the question, like a skipping needle: where did they go?