“We’re all stressed, but that doesn’t mean we can turn on each other.” – Kody
So here we are at the Season Two finale! The Browns have made the decision to move, but the houses they were trying to buy fell through so they have three days to pack up everything they know and get to Vegas, with no place to move into on the other end. The start of the hour-long special has Kody telling the little kids that they’re moving Monday morning, and they don’t take it well. No one wants to go and the kids feel a bit left out that this decision was made without them. And Mariah doesn’t want to go — she had a really bad experience in public school and can’t even consider going back to that, even in a different place. And everyone is involved with school, the church and a community of people who understand them and support them.
Kody, however, informs them all that it’s his job to keep the family together and for that they have to go. So they go. They have three days to pack up all the essentials from the big house, because they own that one and can come back later, and everything from Robyn’s house, because that’s a rental and they need to be totally out. And they can’t tell anyone. The cops have been coming by more often, and they want to make a clean break.
I still think it’s not a good idea to leave town during an investigation.
They manage to get everything they need packed, but they need a bigger trailer, which freaks out Janelle — she thinks it’s too obvious and she’s the most afraid. They wind up getting it anyway, and the stress rises. And when they finally get on the road, everything goes wrong. Their real estate lady got them a month-long rental in a house big enough for everyone, but it won’t be available until a day after they’d planned to leave, but TMZ has found out they’re leaving and plans to break the story, so they can’t wait that long. Once they’re on the road, they have something like five flat tires and wind up taking a day and a half to travel what should have taken six hours. But they do get there, and their life is now on a different path.
It was definitely something that couldn’t have been done in in the usual half-hour episode length. Everything was so intensely emotional that the shorter format wouldn’t have given them a chance to get a word in edgewise. It wouldn’t have done the drama justice. On the other hand, slowing down and letting it be shown how upset everyone was sort of made this show close in on the usual sort of reality show drama where everyone is yelling and crying all the time. The difference, as always, comes when they decide to pull together instead of letting this do exactly what they meant to avoid by moving to begin with. It’s hard to watch everyone being so upset, but it’s great to see them working together.
It’s amazing too how much stuff this family has. Their bare essentials filled up a moving truck, a trailer, and all their cars, and they still left behind most of what they packed — piles and piles of boxes. They don’t seem to have any more than any other American family, but when you put it all in one place, it’s a little shocking. Would any family with that many people have that much stuff? Would other families with that many people have more?
And now they get to the end of the episode and we have no idea what they’re going to do about it. They have a month to find somewhere to live, to get the kids in school, and to find jobs. Sounds like a good start to the next season, doesn’t it?
We know from last summer’s news that they’re eventually not broken up or sent to jail, but this inside view of how it happened makes everything much more immediate than the news does. These are real people, you know? I think it’s a little easy when someone has a show to forget that they aren’t fictional, but when it connects to real things that we know, it makes them real again.
More thoughts on “Gambling on the Future”:
* We got to sort of meet Meri’s mom! I always wonder, while watching this show, where’s the rest of the community? They talk about friends, about other polygamous families, about their own families, but we never get to meet any of them. I wonder if that’ll change in the new season? Will we get to meet people in the new communities they find themselves in? Will they have visits from family members? I mean, they’re in Las Vegas. If that’s not enough to introduce them to wild new characters in lots of different situations, I don’t know what is.
* It’s great how, even in the middle of all this, they stopped to celebrate one of the kid’s birthday. Since the whole thing was about saving the family, it really just proves the point that they put family above all other considerations except God.
* It looks like the premier will have the announcement of a new baby–or at least, that’s what the ad wants us to think! I wonder what the maximum number of children a man with 4 wives has ever had?
This review originally appeared on TV Geek Army.