By Curt Schleier

If you are not already a fan of SAVING GRACE this episode will convert you.  It is elegantly written and constructed, wonderfully acted and is the single best episode of any series I’ve seen this year – and maybe longer.  Simply: it is what this wonderful show has been building to all year.

First there is the crime.  A man is found shot dead in his car.  In the back seat there are photos of him with Paige (Jessica Turk), Grace Hanadarko’s (Holly Hunter) very proper, stick-up-her-rear-end sister.  Is someone stalking Paige?  Is she having an affair? Grace doesn’t want to get involved, but has no choice. “Now I have to ask Paige about her life.”  The investigation turns up more than Grace needs to know about sis and her husband.  But the homicide is solved in a very logical manner; people who watch SAVING GRACE because they like police dramas will be pleased.


But that’s only a small part of what this show is about.  The Grace who needs saving is a cynical and tortured woman who uses booze and promiscuity to forget her demons.  In this final episode, the pressures she’s felt all season build to a boiling point.  In the last episode, Ham Dewey (Kenneth Johnson) the married partner she’s having an affair with, declared his love.  Now he tells her, “I’m going to wait for you to tell me you love me.”

The entire Hanadarko clan is getting together for the holiday, the first time since they’ve all gathered since the funerals.  Grace lost her father, a fire fighter, and her sister, to the Oklahoma City bombings and holds herself responsible for the latter’s death.  But she has more going on.  The real reason Grace is Grace is that as a child she was abused by a priest. But the events she’s tried to bury are being raised from the dead.  Almost literally.

Earl (Leon Rippy), the last chance angel God assigned to redeem her soul, has lately left a series of clues.  Grace’s best friend, Rhetta (Laura San Giacomo), has become obsessed with trying to figure them out.  Then Earl offers one more: “Sometimes you have to go backwards before you go forward.”

Going back means discovering that Father Patrick Murray (Rene Auberjonois), the priest who abused her and she assumed was dead, is not only alive but living in relative comfort in a retirement home.  Rhetta takes Grace out to the desert to tell her, and Grace’s reaction is predictable.  She gets angry and vows to kill him.  The only thing that keeps the priest alive is that Rhetta has hidden the car keys.

After she exhausts herself throwing everything from Rhetta’s car around in search of the key, Grace sits down, lights a cigarette, and for the first time since it happened, let’s someone into the darkest part of her past.  She was just nine year sold when the priest got her undressed.  He told her she was perfect and then he raped her.  He continued to do so until she got her period.

Grace was afraid that he would do the same thing to her sister, so one day she went into the rectory and seduced the priest.  When he “stuck his tongue down my throat,” she bit it and threatened to expose him.  That’s when he had himself reassigned and, subsequently (or so the story went) died of tongue cancer.


This had to be a difficult scene to film; Hunter is brilliant in presenting a full range of emotions at once.  She is angry, sad, fearful, resigned, even a little relieved at finally sharing this burden.  After arguing with Earl -- “I’m gonna kill him, Earl, cause I don’t give a shit about you” – she jumps into her Porsche and heads out for the retirement community where she breaks in and puts her pistol in his mouth.

Ultimately, she doesn’t pull the trigger, for a reason that is both surprising and pitch perfect in the context of the show.   I won’t spoil the surprise, but this is one episode aficionados of great TV must see.