A Few Thoughts on The United States of Tara Series Finale

pastemagazine

I've been casually been blogging this show for its final season, and while last night's show was conceived as a season rather than a series finale, it worked perfectly as one.

If I have one criticism, it's that the finale episode felt disconnected from the season, or even the series as a whole, but even that fits in with the theme of a show with an interesting narrative that never quite found its groove. There was definitely a sense of finality and closure.

I really like what Todd VanDerWerff for the AV Club wrote in his recap yesterday:

The best thing the finale does, I think, is restore Tara Gregson to the center of the show’s sympathies. I know that Tara’s always the center of the show, but in this season, it was easy to forget that Tara was at one time the show’s hero, so far down the rabbit hole did she drag her family. In the finale, which is almost completely free of alters (Bryce turns up at the very beginning, and we get the sense Alice, Buck, and T survived the carnage to make the trip to Boston), we once again see that she’s just a Kansas mom, trying to hang on to her mental capacities long enough to not disappoint her kids and be a good wife to her husband. Toni Collette has spent the last half-dozen episodes or so mostly showing us the terrible things about Tara’s condition, so it was nice to have an episode that reminded us why these people are always so quick to forgive her, even when her alters do awful, awful things.

I think that last part is so important, and illustrates the difficulty in developing a television show whose central character has a mental illness. RMJ writing for Bitch magazine last year, posited that Tara's Dissociative Identity Disorder (formerly known as multiple personality disorder) is exploited as a plot point, and for the first two seasons, I'd agree. Tara's DID was treated more as personality quirk. It was only in this season that we really got to see how Tara's disease affected her family, as well as her own life. (Interestingly enough, a lot of this was saved for the finale, where Tara stays Tara throughout most of the episode.) As I've said before, I think this show suffered by being promoted as a dark comedy rather than an hour-long drama, and the levity of two previous seasons was replaced by a lot of real, scary things about her disease, and what triggered it. It was uncomfortable watching.

I'll miss Tara. Without giving too much away, I'm glad it went out on a relative high note while not attempting to wrap all its loose ends prettily and neatly, like so many shows do. The show's creative crew might not have intended it this way, but for Tara, it seems right.