Brothers & Sisters – Episode 5-10 Review

Reviews, Shows

 The Walker siblings’ predictable Christmas dinner at Nora’s is turned upside-down when Nora says she’s no longer hosting the holiday. Petty sibling rivalry, The Grinch as played by Sarah Walker, and one surreal dream sequence make for one of the season’s most hilarious episodes.

Dr. Karl convinces stressed Nora to leave all of her Christmas craziness behind and fly off on a vacation with him. Knowing that her children groan at all of her traditions anyway, she decides to go for it. Of course, when they become so wrapped up in their own issues that they don’t call her once, she begins to wonder if she’s too obsessed with them, and they all would have been better off without her over the years. This leads to a bizarre nightmare in which Sarah’s a cruel businesswoman, Kevin is married to a woman but having an affair with Scotty, Justin is a drunk, and Holly lives in Nora’s house. When the dream ends with her own children plotting to kill her, not Holly as she assumed, frightened Nora runs back home to spend Christmas with her family, where she belongs.

This episode is Nora at her best. Okay, admittedly the nightmare scene is a little too creepy for my tastes. But Nora has some fantastic one-liners in this episode, like “My gingerbread-people! I incinerated them!” and “Kevin’s married? To a woman?” The scene where she tells her kids that she’s leaving is just absolutely priceless. And I love that she actually did pack a suitcase and leave her children without Christmas plans. They didn’t appreciate all she did for the holiday, so she left. It’s a great development for her character, and continues her ongoing story line of trying to find her own life.

And oh, before I forget, it should be noted that Patricia Wettig appears in the nightmare and gets to play a version of her character’s formerly lucid self. It’s making me wonder how she’ll fit into the show now that Holly’s still confused and Justin doesn’t visit her anymore.

Meanwhile, since Nora didn’t name a successor, Kevin and Kitty compete to see who should host the holiday. Their motives are revealed in a hilarious and totally wrong moment where they each respectively play “the gay card” and “the widow card” while desperately fighting for Nora’s Christmas train and village. While Seth is still in the episode, and we learn that his mother is Kitty’s boss, it’s great that Kitty’s story line doesn’t just focus on her boyfriend at the moment.

And bitter Sarah is the radio station’s own personal Grinch, as she’s spending this Christmas without her kids or Luc. Sarah wins no friends when she demands the carols to be turned down and complains about the holiday spice in her coffee. However, she crosses a line when she plans to fire the station’s vaudeville staple, an elderly woman and her ventriloquist dummy. Fortunately Kevin inadvertently talks some sense into her. Not only does Sarah un-fire the host, she invites the lonely woman and her dummy over for Christmas dinner.

In the background, both Saul and Justin deal with past mistakes. For Saul, it was bumping into the man who infected him with HIV. When Saul demands to know why he wasn’t told that Jonathan was HIV positive, Jonathan admits that he doesn’t remember their affair. And as for Justin, he tries to set things right with Annie, who he had a coffee date with before sleeping with every girl in Scotty’s restaurant. Annie is reluctant, but she agrees to spend Christmas with him.

I group these two together because neither of them has enough scenes in the episode to really qualify as an actual story. Which actually isn’t a bad thing. In that sense, the jump to each Walker makes Brothers & Sisters feel like its old self again, incorporating every character and giving them serious drama to work with. Well, more serious than most of the drama has been this season.

Hopefully “Cold Turkey” marks season five’s turn for the better. Brothers & Sisters returns January 2nd with the episode “Scandalized.”