Dark Brown Waffles

Instead of my usual The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly, I though tonight we’d do this character by character. Tonight’s episode, after all, was the season finale, a chance for all of us to get a final fix before taking an unwanted yearlong vacation until Season Three. It was an episode very much like the show itself, both beautiful and vexing, wonderful and frustrating. 

I’ll list the characters in the order that they appear on HBO’s anemic Cast and Crew page, mainly because it gives me one last chance to whinge about how underdone that particular well of information is. 

Antoine Batiste

I can say without hesitation that this was the finale that I wanted for Antoine, a fitting goodbye after a season’s worth of maturing. He awakens one morning to discover that half his band is bailing on him and the other is complaining about it, including a message from Wanda excoriating him for his bad behavior, a message he clicks off in disgust. His attitude isn’t improved when he arrives at a show that the majority of his Soul Apostles skips out on. He breaks up the group on the spot, declaring professional music worse than, “Raking leaves on a windy day!” For good measure, he adds that some of the leaves tell you fuck you while you’re trying to rake them. At Jazz Fest (the event that the show centers on, just as it focused on Mardi Gras three episodes ago), Wanda blows him a kiss from the stage. She picks him out despite a crowd far larger than anything he ever managed to assemble. 

But he has his moments, arranging trumpet lessons for his talented students, then getting a group of students including the trumpeter together to perform on the street. He (apparently) buys and moves into a house with Desiree, and although it isn’t a ring for her finger, she spends the episode generally tolerant of Antoine. His band of teenagers? He tells them to “Play for that money!”, same as he uttered at the beginning of the show’s premier episode. 

Davis

Davis made money from his arrangement with Aunt Mimi, who gave him a check for $4,000 after selling L’il Calliope’s contract to Cash Money Records. Davis realizes his time with the Brassy Knoll is at an end, and leaves after a triumphant performance of James Brown’s “Sex Machine” all the while paying homage to his own whiteness in the preppiest outfit imaginable. And then, he goes back to the radio station and takes over for Jeffy Jeff, playing the show’s montage music and getting weepy thinking about it. He laments that New Orleans is home, and wonders where else people like him would go without it, and then, wonders who else would take him. It was the best of Davis in all facets even if he was downtrodden. 

Albert 

Delmond suckers his father into accepting $20,000 in “royalties” for the album they made, which mades Albert mutter that its time to cut another record. Tonight featured Albert only minimally, and even if he was being tricked by Delmond and his agent - whose claim of sales in “Sweden, and Switzerland…and Brazil! And Japan.” was transparently unbelievable given Albert’s suspicion that the album hadn’t yet been released - we know that he accepted the money and set to work properly rebuilding his own home. 

Miss LaD…LaDonna

She’ll always be Miss LaD to me, and Khandi Alexander flat out stole the show tonight. Stole it. Stole in three distinct moments:

-The fear in her eyes when she sees her rapist in the restaurant, the way her shoulder slumped, the way she backed out of the bar, the way she locked her doors after she got back in the car. 

-The anger in her voice when she kicked her rapist and then viciously criticized the ineffective District Attorney. When she said she was “All the way to lost my fucking mind!” I swelled with happiness, not at her condition, but at the outpouring of everything that viewers felt. It wasn’t just me either. Her husband Larry was smirking the entire time LaDonna just murdered that District Attorney, and when he said they were all coming back to New Orleans? Sure it was slightly difficult to believe in retrospect, but at the time we were all thinking, “Goddamned right you’re going back to New Orleans.” 

-The happiness on her face when she gave Larry his red beans and rice at the bar. Whether it was the new haircut or the fact that there was life and color and swagger back, it was Khandi Alexander throwing down a hell of a gauntlet for the other actors on the show. Nobody holds a candle to her and that’s even though there are some other awfully good actors on the show. 

Toni

Including the Oscar winning Melissa Leo, whose Toni turned a case over to the FBI (just as Terry had already done) and who managed to reconcile with her daughter, finally having the conversation she might have had earlier. That mother and daughter, who have so much to disagree about just as part of the natural process of growing up, can still agree that Creighton will forever be loved by not forgiven just yet was a necessary end to a turbulent season.

Janette

Yay for the return of Jacque, yay for the return of Janette to New Orleans, boo to the entirely wasted season for the character. We can argue, I suppose, that Janette never finds a new restaurant without being in New York City, that there was no other plotting possible that would have gotten her a new kitchen in the place she calls home, but I don’t buy it. I’m not somebody who’ll dare to suggest what should have happened instead, but rather to say that Kim Dickens felt totally forgotten about for almost the entirety of this season, right until the point she woke up next to Jacque, paying off a love that’s been simmering (SEE WHAT I DID THERE?!?) since the very beginning of the very first season. And while I don’t like advocating for plot, perhaps Jacque could stay in Spicer’s kitchen? 

Delmond

Say what you want, but Delmond pulled off the clumsiest imaginable breakup with his girlfriend. The look of shock on his face when he realized she thought he wanted to move in, followed by his silence when she said that he had to be a one woman man? Way to think it through Delmond. Getting him back in New Orleans though will make for a more interesting third season. Having all of the characters back in New Orleans will make for a more interesting third season.

Annie

Ugh. 

Sonny

I used to work in an Indian restaurant where my nickname was a word that sounded like “Bey-Bey.” I have no idea how it was really spelled. It meant, according to the family I worked for, “Wise Old Woman Of The House” and they derived no end in pleasure at saying it to me. Sonny got the same treatment when he was repeatedly called useless by the Vietnamese fishermen, then retorted, “That’s Mr. Useless to you.” His brief discussion with the captain about the oil slick in the gulf hinted heavily at what’s obviously coming in the future seasons. The father’s already sad lament - “They take what they want and then they move on…” - while oil floated in the water, while there were wells all over the horizon, suggested we might finally get a real telling of what happened during that spill, as opposed to much of the coverage we got from our broken national media. 

Also, he gets the girl, at the least the opportunity to date her. Asking me to forget that he punched a woman in the face only recently is a bit much, but Sonny’s character has become mightily more interesting since getting sober and getting his ass on the boat. Here’s to more of that and less of the heroin. The final shot of him eating food with the other oystermen was beautiful, and would make for a hell of a poster. (Is there such a thing as a Treme poster?)

Nelson

Nelson ended up caught up in the Oliver Thomas controversy, losing his right to contract with Robinette as a result. Nelson was always a bit much for me, too cartoonish, too stereotypical, too evil, and the finale was no different. His argument with his cousin about what he actually does and stumbling piss drunk from an otherwise classy bar were icing on his cake. He seems the kind of character who will be back, no doubt with a vengeance, but for the time being, neutered without access, he’s forced to stay on the other side of the fence, the same fence he so aggressively sought to put other’s behind. 

Terry

Pursuing the Robideaux’s investigation by himself after severing ties with Toni, Terry figures out that the cops are bad after the lose his evidence in transit, evidence he only partially released. He was testing his fellow officers. He goes to the FBI with what he knows, laying out a clear case for them, and ends up back in uniform, back on the street, back doing what he did before being shifted to Homicide. For the time being, he loses to Priolo, the investigator he was sent to to Homicide to snoop around on. Presumably though, the story isn’t over. His information is too good. And besides, this sort of thing remains ongoing. Things with Toni certainly haven’t calmed down. (It should be noted though that Terry’s meltdown at Toni was warranted [SEE WHAT I DID AGAIN?] given how Toni’s capable of acting when not getting everything she wants right when she wants it.)

Sofia

A more mature, more mellow Sofia has slowly emerged over the course of the season, highlighted (GOOD GOD, I CANNOT BE STOPPED!) by her refusal to get high last week, then her acknowledgement of her relationship, artificially with Oliver Thomas and more personally with her father. Both men, to entirely different degrees, disappointed her, and that she can accept that about both while still owning her anger is telling of a girl different than the one we started the season with. This was progress, albeit slow and choppy, par for the teenager’s course.

Creighton 

Still listed on the HBO Cast and Crew page, despite getting less than a minute of total screen time this season. Characters still not listed? Jacque. Larry. Davis’s friend who looks like Tiny Tim. Any of Albert’s Indians. Desiree. The list goes on. 

See you next season.