I miss them already

SPOILERS AHEAD!

There's a cartoon from the late and lamented Animaniacs in which Yakko, Wakko, and Dot are plagued by a short, fat, balding guy named Franklin Pumpfeather. Inevitably voiced by Ben Stein, Pumpfeather blathers on and on about nothing, boring the Animaniacs to death, as they try ever-escalating methods of getting rid of him -- to no avail. Finally, he leaves of his own free will, and they look at each other and cry out in unison, "I miss him!"

That's kind of how we Six Feet Under fans are feeling this morning, as we bade goodbye (and a final goodbye it was) to the Fishers and their extended kin last night.

For five years, the Fishers have been like those friends who drive you crazy because they keep making the same mistakes over and over again and keep wanting to cry on your shoulder for support. They've been psychic vampires, and yet we kept coming back for more. I'm not sure why, especially in this darkest of seasons, which saw Nate and Brenda, the couple we viewed as soulmates, finally marry only to find that what drew them together was angst and chaos, and without that they had nothing. We also saw Ruth, the matriarchal narcissist with the martyr complex dump her kind but mentally ill husband George in an apartment and leave him there, as if she were Mr. Rochester and he was the crazy wife. Claire's adolescent crisis continued forever, and only David and Keith seemed normal, as they managed to overcome the difficulties in bringing two troubled boys into their lives and turn them into mensches.

Every Sunday night this season, I've lain awake till the wee hours, mulling over the latest episode, haunted by the sight of Nate keeping over with a brain hemorrhage, muttering "N'arm!"; and by the dream he shared with David in which a David in an alternate reality is a surfer dude, who along with the ever-present Late Nate Sr., escort Nate into the beyond vie a joyful swim in a Pacific ocean that's "so fucking warm!".

Yes, writer/director Alan Ball wrapped things up just a little too nicely last night, capped by David's horribly-written uncharacteristically sledgehammer dream in which the threatening, hooded figure he sees everywhere turns out not to be the guy who held him hostage in last season's most excruciating episode, but himself. Yet even in tying up the loose ends, he leaves some ambiguity. Ruth and George reconcile, but only as friends. Claire heads off to New York anyway, after learning that the job offer she'd received has been rescinded. But we've come to love these characters so much, and find it so hard to say goodbye, that even David and Keith's ridiculously quick makeover of the Fisher homestead into the kind of sleek, modern-yet-homey digs we see Thom Filicia create on Queer Eye every week seems somehow right.

It's rare that fictional characters capture our imaginations the way the Fishers and the Chenowiths did. The Sopranos may be the most popular show in HBO history, but its characters, even the more nuanced Tony, are still familiar archetypes from mob movies. The Sex and the City girls all sound like Carson Kressley in Jimmy Choos. But the Fishers and the Chenowiths could be us or our friends and extended family. And so they became a part of our family. And when the amazing acting skills of Frances Conroy, Michael C. Hall, Rachel Griffiths, Peter Krause, Lauren Ambrose, and the others, breathed life into these people and made them real, we rejoiced in their happinesses and grieved for their tragedies.

Alan Ball made the parting easier with his peek into the future, in which we see the demises of all of the Fishers, as well as the joyous moments. I loved Ted and Claire's wedding, with David flanked by his two sons, one gay, one straight, both in interracial relationships. I loved the image of Claire, over 100 years old, dying in her own bed surrounded by her photographs. A similar scene from the film Titanic spawned a thousand fan fictions, and it wouldn't surprise me if the coda to the Six Feet Under finale had a similar result. Because we love these people, and we want to know more than just the tantalizing snippets we saw last night. We want to know what Claire did in New York, and who the guy Brenda married is (I'm pretty sure it isn't Joe; I didn't see Justin Theroux anywhere), and about Durrell taking over the family business, and the impact when one of the Charles-Fisher boys announced he was gay, and whether Ruth and Bettina ended up as more than friends (something implied for two seasons now), and whether Maya or Willa ended up producing Nate III, and whether he took over the funeral home, and on and on and on....

Because as much as the Fishers made us nuts most of the time, we love them in spite, of perhaps because of their flaws -- and we're going to miss them terribly.