FOILED AGAIN
by me refusing to accept the most obvious explanation: maybe this show just is Not Good
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But fessing up about the murder weapon puts the son at legal risk, while her plan is more of a legal free roll (if she gets to testify, she can sink her husband. If she doesnât testify, she looks like she was trying to stand by him and the attorney got in the way).
Note that I say âlegalâ free roll, because if you have actually come to believe that your husband is a sociopath who violently murdered his lover, maybe you donât want to be tanking his case while heâs still out on bailâŚ
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Glad it was only 6 episodes.
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The perfect headline doesnât exisâ
https://twitter.com/chaneyj/status/1333459644593926147?s=20
At first, it seemed like series creator and writer David E. Kelley had purposefully made her inscrutable because it was serving some larger purpose (i.e. that Grace had actually killed Elena or was hiding some other crucial piece of knowledge about what happened). But that wasnât the case. Her inability to make up her mind and be forthright was just a character flaw, and a flaw in The Undoing.
So many details in the finale defied belief. Henry (Noah Jupe), the son of Grace and Jonathan who desperately wants things to return to normal, not only kept the murder weapon in a violin case, as revealed at the end of the previous episode, but ran it through the dishwasher â twice â to remove all traces of DNA from it? Haley (Noma Dumezweni), the defense attorney, decides in the moment to put Miguel (Edan Alexander), Elenaâs cancer-survivor son, on the witness stand without giving the boy or his father any advance warning? Grace and her father, played by Donald Sutherland and his deliberately unruly pair of eyebrows, hop in a helicopter to pursue an on-the-lam Jonathan, which seems like something thing that law enforcement would, I donât know, discourage? Details can elevate a show in a familiar genre â like a murder mystery or courtroom drama â from the usual into something exceptional. But details in this finale were treated as inconveniences that had to be bypassed in order for the series to reach its conclusion.
Put another way: A trio of white women conspired to give a terrible white man his comeuppance. Thatâs not so different from the way things turned out in season one of Big Little Lies, except that in that finale, the reveal of Perryâs fate was a true reveal and it made the audience feel something. The Undoing doesnât really leave us with feelings of any kind, and thatâs because of the showâs Grace problem.
In the end, Graceâs role in The Undoing proves two things â first, that itâs possible to be so comfortable in life that you donât even recognize how messed up that life is; second, that the establishment always wins. Jonathan was a privileged white man â you surely noticed how calmly police took him into custody even though he was a murderer attempting to flee prosecution
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The finale of implausible helicopter ride and a person no one gaf about by that point threatening to jump off a bridge was terrible TV because it lacked any real dramatic tension.
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This. As soon as she decided to put Grace on the stand, I was like, âGood job, dumb fuck.â
I actually kind of liked that it was the Doc who did it. The series laid out that it had to be him the entire time and it didnât throw some stupid shit like it being the father-in-law or Graceâs second personality. The show boiled down to being an interesting trip down the âis he really going to get away with it?â road. That and Hugh Grant did an excellent job playing the role of a guy who can be so charming and convincing that you think he might actually be innocent.
I also liked that there was this tug-of-war between wanting to see him get away with it just to see how they pull it off and wanting him to get got. Sort of like in a show like The Sopranos, where Tony is a horrible person, but you still root for him (though I wasnât so much rooting for the Doc as much as I was interested to see how he could win the trial).
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I also kind of liked that Jonathan was the killer. Mainly, because given the lead in to the finale, there would have been no satisfying way to end with a different perpetrator.
I also liked it because I think it was range balancing for the genre. We need to have a few of these where itâs obvious guy, so you donât just automatically dismiss that person 100% of the time. It will make the rest of these type of shows a bit more suspenseful.
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I would have preferred an old school Law & Order âguiltyâ to the absurd bridge scene, but I did like High Grant being the killer.
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This is very well said. I am curious whether the show would play to perfection if I watch it again knowing heâs the killer so that I am perceiving the tension, as you say, from the question of whether he will get away with it.
Dreamy shots of innocent kids playing over the opening credits of a high-class HBO thriller will be very familiar to fans of Kidmanâs previous smash TV hit Big Little Lies. But while the children shimmying their way through those opening credits are played by the young members of the Big Little Lies cast, the little redhead in The Undoing credits is nowhere to be seen on the show itself.
Weâll have to assume, then, that sheâs meant to stand in for the young and innocent version of Kidmanâs character, Grace. Loss of innocence is very much a theme of both the series and the credits themselves; at one point, the childâs bubble is literally burst. Series director Susanne Bier told Vanity Fair âs Still Watching podcast that Graceâs fantasy world is exactly whatâs undone by the events of The Undoing.
BONUS
As for Kidman: Despite her Moulin Rouge! bona fides, sheâs not always exactly been comfortable as a singer. A couple of years ago, Kidman sat down with costar Ewan McGregor and recalled how intimidated she had been by his singing voice.
Same. Ewanâs voice was/is something impressive. I remember discussing Ewanâs singing with my vocal coach at the time Moulin Rouge came out.
While Ewan could effortlessly switch between a classical style thatâd keep his voice and range intact for decades, he also smoked at least a pack of Marlboro Reds a day, and as an actor, he just as often switched between the classical style thatâd keep his voice and range intact for decades to the belting style thatâd slowly kill his voice if he did it more often than an occasional movie or celebrity cover album.
NICOLEâS VOICE
But back to Nicole, her voice, and her most-recent callback to that eponymous Elton John cover that just under twenty years ago showcased how intimidating Ewanâs voice can be.
In the intervening years, Kidman has been keeping the dust off her pipes in a handful of public appearances with her country-music superstar husband, Keith Urban, who will occasionally pull a reluctant-seeming Kidman into some bit of promo for his albums or onstage appearance. The couple satisfied both Urban and Moulin Rouge! fans alike just last year when they duetted on Elton John âs âYour Songâ before the Big Little Lies season two premiere.
Finally watched the last episode last night. Had been putting it off because I knew it was going to be awful. I was not disappointed. 0 bags of popcorn.
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Began as a promising whodunnit and ended as a subpar soap.
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The acting was great - Hugh Grant, who knew! Story went off the rails.
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