More like "Six Feet Blunder." Pow!

Finally caught the series finale of "Six Feet Under" last weekend. First off, let me say a hearty fuck you very much to the New York Times, the New Yorker, and everybody else who printed warning-less spoilers. Can we all agree, from this point on, to assume a significant proportion of any cult show's viewership is going to be watching it on DVD well after its initial airing?

That said: Spoiler alert.

The last scene is a long montage which invites us to envision the deaths of the show's main characters, possibly through Claire's imagination. There's nothing I could say about the sequence's emotional resonance that hasn't been said already, so instead I'll quibble. Several of the characters just keel over -- Brenda in a nursing home, David watching a touch football game, Rico on a cruise ship. Now, I happen to be married to a doctor, who tells me a lot more about her work than I'd sometimes care to know, and one thing I know is that when people just keel over, it's almost always one of three things: a myocardial infarction (loosely speaking, a heart attack), a pulmonary embolism, or a stroke. And while these things can, indeed, strike at any time, by far the most common time is while one is on the toilet. It has to do with the act of bearing town, which raises the pressure in the thoracic cavity. So my reaction was: great ending, but where are the bathroom deaths? And C., who was watching it with me, told me afterwards that she'd been thinking the same thing.