Ellen Gray: A tearful conclusion to HBO's 'Big Love'

SISTERHOOD, IT turns out, really is powerful.

And if you're still waiting to see how HBO's "Big Love" ended, that's all I'm going to say about Sunday's series finale, "Where Men and Mountains Meet," until you've turned the page or clicked through to another story.

Consider yourself warned.

Sap that I am, I teared up during the final minutes of what for five seasons was easily one of television's most original dramas, a show that sounded like a bad joke when I first heard that Bill Paxton would play a suburban polygamist in a show for HBO (and that actor Tom Hanks, of all people, would be one of its producers).

How could a series about a businessman with three wives be anything but a freak show?

Five years ago, speaking with reporters before the show's premiere, Mark V. Olsen, who co-created "Big Love" with his longtime partner (and now husband), Will Scheffer, said even they hadn't known "how Tom [Hanks] ultimately would respond to this material . . . But he got it.

"He got what we were going for, which was a series that really wanted to examine family and marriage."

Family and marriage: It's a message Olsen and Scheffer never strayed from through "Big Love's" many twists and turns and it's the message they brought all the way home Sunday night in a way I probably should have seen coming, but didn't.

Because though I've been telling people for years that "Big Love" is about the wives, not the husband - Paxton gave it his best, but his Bill Henrickson remained a hard sell until the end - I didn't completely grasp that idea myself until the show's final minutes, when the phrase "sister wives" finally sank in.

I've watched the episode twice now and the tears come at the same point each time, and it's not when Bill's lying on the street, dying of a gunshot wound.

No, it's the scene 11 months later, when Margene (Ginnifer Goodwin) is heading off for what's apparently a repeat stint as a medical-ship volunteer and Nicki (Chloe Sevigny) and Barb (Jeanne Tripplehorn) are demanding, each in her own way, that she call home more often to let them know she's safe.

She starts to leave and then runs back to give them one more hug.

Hey, I said I was a sap. But this is the way sisters behave. That theirs is a relationship created by what still seems to me like an unworkable idea makes them no less family.

Others, including my editors, had suggested this season that it was unlikely Bill would make it out of "Big Love" alive, but I'd thought that with so many things falling apart, the center of the Henricksons couldn't possibly hold. It didn't seem out of the question that Bill would ultimately find himself alone, a middle-aged "lost boy" facing big bills for child support.

Or that the writers would simply choose a convenient stopping place, some small triumph, perhaps, and let the characters and the audience move on separately.

I underestimated Olsen and Scheffer, who created a family that survived its founder, as families must if the concept isn't to devolve into a series of temporary arrangements that come and go at the whim of individual players.

That's a pretty powerful message, at least as powerful as the one Bill had on Easter, when he spotted the Mormon prophet Joseph Smith's wife, Emma (Rebecca Wisocky), at the back of his church. Last seen in a dream sequence inexplicably dressed (and coiffed) like Mamie Eisenhower, she let her smile do her talking this time and that was apparently enough to make Bill finally see the light about the place of women in his new denomination.

Talk about not being quick on the uptake.

For five seasons, the guy's gone toe to toe with strong characters played by even stronger actresses, starting with Tripplehorn, Sevigny and Goodwin and including to name just a few, Ellen Burstyn, Grace Zabriskie, Mary Kay Place, Sissy Spacek and Anne Dudek, and it took a woman who's been dead since 1879 to finally get his attention?

As happy as I was to see Allentown's Amanda Seyfried return for one more scene as Sarah, I was happier to see Tina Majorino's Heather back in the Henricksons' orbit one more time.

The fact that neither of the show's Teenies ever made it out of the bathroom?

I can live with that. I hope you can, too. *

Send e-mail to graye@phillynews.com.