Quotes of the Day

TIME's TV critic, the incomparable James Poniewozik, has been on vacation and didn't review the last two episodes of Big Love, so I've been entrusted with analyzing what's been happening lately on the HBO series about the fundamentalist Mormon with his very extended family. You should have seen the Feb. 7 and 14 hours before reading this. Jim will return to blog on tonight's episode.

A TV show is said to have jumped the shark when, having reached its peak, it tries something desperate or hackneyed to prolong its popularity. Examples of such gimmicks include weddings, births, replacing an actor in a role and adding a "new kid in town." Even the best series can fall into one or more of these traps. And one of them, Big Love, leaps right in.

I love Big Love. I love how it extended the standard HBO series premise — "They're a family... of mobsters, of Roman emperors, of vampires... who fight and stick together like any other family" — into the social and political saga of Bill Henrickson (Bill Paxton), an ordinary guy in suburban Salt Lake City who happens to have three wives and a bunch of nutter relatives out in the woods. The show works simultaneously as family-values-affirming drama and deadpan surrealist farce: Father Knows Best meets Twin Peaks. And its creators, Mark V. Olsen and Will Sheffer, seem to keep those shark-jumping events as a checklist of things-to-do.

Last year they concocted a wedding (of Bill to Ana the Slavic waitress; it lasted two days). This season they replaced a cast member (Bella Thorne took over from Jolean Wejbe, who had played Tina, Bill and first wife Barb's youngest child Tancy) and brought a new kid into town (Cara Lynn, the long-lost daughter of Bill's second wife Nicki). Some of these plot tweaks can be waved away because Big Love has a narrative more hurtling and congested than any series I know; it makes Mad Men's plotting seem staid by comparison ... But Olsen and Sheffer must also think that testing the credulity of the storyline, is a smart way to keep their viewers debating, guessing and glued.

Then, in a single episode a few weeks ago, Big Love managed to jump more sharks than Evel Knievel in a sequel to Jaws. The whole Henrickson family went nuts, even by their own elastic gauges of plausibility. Eldest daughter Sarah more or less abducted and adopted a junkie Indian mother whom Barb had knocked over with her car on the reservation. On a trip with Bill to Washington, D.C., Nicki was found packing a pistol in a government building. Wife No. 3, Margene, gave her sort-of-stepson Ben a big smooch, recorded live on the home-shopping TV show she fronts. Out on Juniper Creek, the polygamous compound where Bill and Nicki were raised, Nicki's brother Alby, the sect's new leader, entered into a dangerous liaison with Dale, the man charged with examining the books of the UEB, the Juniper Creek business arm. And Bill pursued his latest messianic or suicidal mission: risking exposure as a polygamist, and the ruination of his family, by campaigning for a State Senate seat.

Most of these events struck me as game-changing, potentially deal-breaking lapses. They gave me a queasy feeling that all was not well with Big Love — the same foreboding I got when, at the beginning of this season, the show junked its much-loved "God Only Knows" ice pond opening-credits sequence for one that blended slo-mo falling, a la Mad Men, with what looked like a commercial for Preference by L'Oreal. (Do you fast-forward through that opening when TiVo-ing the show? I do.) But in the past two episodes, I've come to think that Olsen and Sheffer knew what they were doing and have made the vagaries pay off.

The Feb. 7 episode, "Fight or Flight," concentrates on Bill's immediate family before and after the convention that will determine if his State Senate bid is successful. Everyone — Bill's mother Lois, his brother Joey and all three sister-wives — got in a tizz over two events involving Bill's eldest son Ben. Word of the not-quite-inadvertent kiss has spread, a news story soon topped by the bulletin that Bill "exiled" his son. Moments before Bill's big debate at the convention, Barb tells him to reconcile with Ben — "right away, this minute, or I swear I'll check myself into the boobyhatch" — then confronts Margene, whose fury makes her blurt out, "Eff you!", at which Barb angrily kicks a leg out from under Margene's display table.

Bill has another revolt to worry about. His opponent in the Republican primary has seized on the death of a "lost boy" — a teen refugee from Juniper Creek — to plaster the hall with mug shots of the teenage Bill, himself a lost boy when his father threw him out of the compound. During the debate, Bill summons the resolve to give a big Frank Capra speech, confessing that to stay alive he committed burglaries and worse: "I did things for cash that haunt me to this day." He insists that society must save the lost boys. "Until we embrace them — our shadow, our stain — we will never be free of our history." He walks out of the debate and, of course, wins the primary. The exultant Tancy wonders, "Why would anybody want to be a Democrat when we have all the fun?" (But doesn't winning the party nomination assure Bill election in an overwhelmingly Republican state? Not exactly: eight of the 12 Salt Lake City seats in the real Utah State Senate, including the eighth district Bill is running in, are held by Democrats.)

Throughout the series, Bill has displayed the charm, belief and obsessive drive of a born politician — or a dictator, whose ego is rarely clouded by the saving grace of self-doubt. For any man on a God-ordained mission, whether he's a Muslim or a breakaway Mormon, the end justifies the means, however shabby. Earlier this season, he pressured Don, his friend and business partner in the Home Plus stores, to "take the bullet" by outing himself as a polygamist, allowing an unsullied Bill to proceed with his campaign. Friends' lives ruined, his son ostracized: it must all be part of the divine plan. That kind of faith means never having to say you're sorry. Tiger Woods surely apologized more times during his 13-minute statement Friday than Bill has in 38 hour-long episodes. The closest he gets to an act of contrition is admitting, "I'm an imperfect person, I know that.... I've been tested, and failed." But apologize to Ben? "Apologize for what?"

The Feb. 14 episode shifted focus and setting, from the State Senate campaign to Juniper Creek and Mexico. While Margene tries to reconcile with Bill ("We haven't had sex in a week; I don't think I can take it much longer"), Barb, who's been attending to the casino the Henricksons run with a local tribe, cozies up to the sulky, dishy Blackfoot Tommy Flute in a sweat lodge and finds an ally in Marilyn Densham (Sissy Spacek), a Washington lobbyist who, against Bill's wishes, wants to represent the casino. Ana reappears, visibly pregnant, and Barb agitates to bring the waitress back into the family because "she's carrying our child" — until she learns that the child was conceived before the marriage. Bill reveals that his political ambitions fold into his domestic dream of make his polygamy public and moving his families into one big house. Bill's parents Lois and Frank drive Ben from Juniper Creek to Mexico, where they buy parrots for resale in the U.S. Lois thinks they've "cut out the middle man": Hollis Greene, the leader of a rival polygamous cult, who lives down there. But Hollis is not so easily ignored. He and his ultra-butch wife Selma seize the interlopers at gunpoint.

That should be enough for one terrific episode, but not on this show. When Big Love wants to get really creepy, it turns to Alby, who after the death of the patriarch Roman Grant, his and Nicki's father, has assumed control over UEB, because God told him to. He's declared that Adaleen, Nicki's mother and Roman's widow, should be "sealed" (wed) to J.J., Nicki's reptilian first husband; and Adaleen, with odd docility, agrees. At the sealing ceremonies, Nicki bursts in to find that Alby is planning to seal Cara Lynn, Nicki's and J.J.'s daughter, to an old man whose seventh bride she would be. Furiously, she whisks the child away.

Bill has rightly pegged Alby as "a total sociopath." He tells this to Dale, who can't shake his love for Alby despite counseling from Mormon elders. Just say no to your gay impulses, they tell him, and Dale, shriveling in mortal misery, says, "That's what I've been hearing for 30 years." Every attempt at reprogramming his sexuality, from college days on, has only increased this very decent man's abysmal shame. Alby's wife Laura has discovered the affair, and informs Bill, who tells Dale he'll have to be taken off the UEB case. For all his sins, including against Dale, Alby is devoted to him; he's even rented a love nest for their trysts. When he arrives there, he finds that Dale has hanged himself.

It's a great episode with moments of surpassing poignancy and weirdness. Nicki curls into Bill's arms and whispers, "I think I'm damaged." When she appears at the weddings, she's wearing a miniskirt, garish makeup and a rakishly askew ponytail. "Get a sheet to cover her up," says the disgusted Adaleen; and Nicki spits back, proudly if cryptically: "It's who I've always been inside." Frantically seeking Cara Lynn, Nicki finds Joey's wife, the demurely deranged Wanda, who says of Cara Lynn, "She's in the nursery with the ponies." (We're deep into Twin Peaks territory now.) And when Alby discovers the hanging, he crumples to the floor in shock and grief, and gently kisses Dale's foot.

Narrative art at its best both confounds and satisfies. This episode of Big Love rises to nearly unique, unbearable, thrilling levels of malice and true love, of insanity and empathy. I can't wait to see what happens next. So tonight, I'll be skipping the Winter Olympics. Everyone else can see how the ski-jumpers perform. I have to watch the shark-jumpers.

• Richard Corliss