OH SCHITT

2 April 2020

If you are a fan of Schitt's Creek and/or Outlander and have not seen this week's episodes yet, please just go somewhere else until you have seen them because this entry is going to be one big spoiler.

*

*

*.

*

I have stated in the past that I am a "crier."  I cry at sad things, I cry at happy things, I cry at emotional things.  Hallmark card commercials can do me in.  But then so do those SPCA commercials about animal cruelty.

This week has been an emotional catharsis up the yin yang.

First there was the second-to-last episode of Schitt's Creek.  I am SO glad Jeri convinced me to watch this show and am pleased that Ned and Marta got into it too and were caught up so that we could watch this episode together.  It was a many tissue episode!

But it was happy tears and emotional tears mostly, as the Rose family prepares to move on from the motel where they have been living for the past many years into their new/old life.  Eugene Levy, in an interview I heard recently, described the show as four people becoming a family.  Johnny and Moira were the rich people who palmed their kids off to nannies all of their lives, the kids were spoiled rotten, and losing all their fortune and becoming penniless in a run down motel was, to put it mildly, a rude awakening. 

Watching them adjust to being normal folks, and to discovering a loving relationship with their children has been the most beautiful part of the six seasons of this show.  Watching how they became friends with people they wouldn't even have looked at in their former days was wonderful. 

I loved everything about the relationship between David (Dan Levy, producer) and Patrick (Noah Reid).  I loved how nobody batted an eye at the love between these two guys and I loved how their relationship deepened as they became more in love.

Mostly I loved how loving Patrick changed David, who was all gung ho to move back to New York but changed his mind because Patrick made an offer on a house David loved and David realized that he was "not done with this place" and when his family moved, he wanted to stay behind.

Surely in future pieces written about best love stories on television, the story of David and Patrick will be a part of it.

The finale is next week.  It's only 30 minutes (and will certainly center around David and Patrick's wedding) but it will be followed by an hour-long farewell after the episode ends....good grief, I'm crying just proofreading this!

But if the Schitt's Creek tears were happy, emotional, the Outlander tears were definitely sad emotional.  In last week's episode, Murtagh, Jamie's godfather who is a "regulator" fighting against the crown, returned to Cross Creek on the eve of Jamie's aunt Jocasta's wedding.  He returned to confess his love and to beg her to wait for him.

In Diana Gabaldon's books, Murtagh actually dies at the battle of Culloden 20+ years before, but the Tv audiences loved the character and the actor so much that writers kept him in, though we don't know that for a couple of seasons.  Jamie and he reunite in Season 4, but Jamie is reluctantly working for the crown to defeat the regulators and Murtagh heads the regulators.  Jamie has to pretend to fight them in order to get the land he will eventually move other settlers onto.

After Jocasta turns Murtagh down, I knew the only thing for Murtagh plot-wise was to be killed.  To keep him in the story longer meant developing a whole new plot line, which were not in Gabaldon's books, which are long enough as it is without creating a new plot.  The writers gave him a glorious death.

Shot by a young kid, so proud of having killed the most wanted regulator of them all, while Murtagh and Jamie have just reunited after he saved Jamie's life.  (are ya following this...?)  The whole scene and following was so powerful that it didn't need words.  Sam Heughan (Jamie) is such a fabulous actor that he can play whole scenes with the expression on his face and the pain was so palpable as he begs Claire to save his godfather.  He is, of course, already dead at that point.  And the pain in Claire's face was also palpable as she has to admit she cannot.  It was one of the most moving scenes in this show in a very long time.

Of course for me, it was difficult to fully experience the emotion.   The show is broadcast several times on Sunday night and so I watched the first broadcast, which would end just as I was to get dinner in the oven (of course I had no idea that I would be sticking chicken in a pan as Murtagh was dying!)  So it is the height of emotion and I'm in the kitchen putting chicken in a pan and trying to watch what was going on on TV on the other side of the room where it is all facial expression and no dialog, when Walt came in to show me a video he had just received on his cell phone.  It would have made a wonderful sit com scene.

But I didn't get upset because I knew that Walt had no idea what was going on and also that the episode would be shown again later.  After dinner and after everyone had gone upstairs and I had the house to myself and could really get into the episode I was all into it, and at the EXACT SAME SPOT as before, with Murtagh collapsing into Jamie's arms, Walt came downstairs laughing, asking me to put my show on pause and switch over to what he had just found -- the corn hole championships.

I did rewind this time and see it all the way through but then the next night after we watched Schitt's Creek, Walt and I were going to watch Jeopardy and he asked me to wait while he went to the bathroom first.  After the recording of Schitt's Creek ended, the TV went back to return programming .... the scene of Murtagh's death, when Walt came in to let me know he was ready to watch Jeopardy. 

I will always remember that episode and laugh about how difficult it was for me to actually WATCH it!!!