Nip/Tuck/Thoughts: Tell Me What You Don't Like About the Series Finale

After 100 episodes, hundreds of surgeries and roughly 2,000 sex scenes “Nip/Tuck” has reached its end.

As someone who stuck with the show through thick and thin (all you had to do was adjust your expectations in seasons 4-7), I’m sad to report that the series finale was a bit of a letdown.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not disappointed about the fact that the show’s swan song was a relatively subdued affair (instead of an hour-long basic cable orgy). There were also several individual moments that made this a worthwhile episode. However, after last week’s excellent lead up, this series finale ended up being kind of a dull bummer.

Let’s get some of the bad stuff out of the way first – Matt is the worst TV character I have ever seen. (And I watch a LOT of TV.) I mean, he’s a lethal combination of pathetic, humorless and wimpy. I wondered if creator Ryan Murphy (who wrote the series finale) would try to redeem him in the end. Instead, Murphy appeared to go the other way and made him as unlikable as possible (which is actually an interesting direction).

To summarize, Matt ditched his fiancée at the altar to run off with Ava and wanted Sean and Christian to take care of his daughter while he and Ava traveled to Brazil to operate on her baby. Christian eventually made a deal with Ava (I DID like that they were evenly matched in deviousness) that would involve her dumping Matt in exchange for operating on her baby. (Shades of Christian forcing Kimber to dump Matt to perform surgeries on her.) In the end, Matt and his daughter Jenna tracked down Ava at the airport. Ava got her “perfect” child, while Matt got Ava (he doesn’t seem to mind that she doesn’t love him).

Ugh, Ava is too awesome (evil but awesome) to end up with Matt.

Also, remember how I said that last week Julia was as cool as she’s ever been? Well, this week she reverted back to her annoying Debbie Downer self. I mean, it was obvious that Sean was pretending to be content with his life (he WAS more fun that way), but having Julia be the one to naggingly point it out was disingenuous given that she was fleeing the country and taking his kids. She also had some harsh words for Christian (which I’ll get into a little later). This episode pretty much obliterated all the goodwill Julia built up (with me) last week.

Finally, I wasn’t a huge fan of our Patient of the Week, “Hiro Yoshimura.” Obviously, I had high hopes for the senior citizen Japanese porn star who was actually happy the way he was (but wanted a heart surgery scar removed), but the storyline offered nothing new or interesting (except for Sean and Christian doing drugs and kinda hooking up with Hiro’s two female companions). Also, you’re not going to believe this, but an operation Sean and Christian performed backfired and Hiro ended up dying. (The surgeries usually turn out so well on this show.)

But you didn’t come here to listen to me complain, and I don’t want to spend my last “Nip/Tuck” recap talking about the stuff I didn’t like. Let’s focus on the positive.

I think it was cruel of the show to never give Liz a functional relationship, but having Sean and Christian make her a partner (and letting her utter the show’s signature line) is a terrific consolation. The Sean/Liz baby poppa drama didn’t do much for me, but Roma Maffia was often excellent on this show, so it was nice to see her character end strongly.

I also really liked Christian’s arc (and lack thereof) in this episode. All season (and series) long has been about Christian refusing to let Sean go. In this episode, Julia had told him that he “steals people’s souls”, which was harsh, but also kinda true. (That also led to a terrific final appearance from Kelly Carlson’s Kimber, who told Christian in a dream that she’d killed herself to get away from him. Ouch.)

Christian eventually realized that Sean would slowly kill himself too if they stayed together and, for lack of a better term, broke up with him in a fantastic “tell me what you don’t like about yourself” counseling session. (That scene was much more effective than the music-montage dinner farewell for Julia – there should’ve been a banner that said, “Good Riddance” for that one.) Anyway, even with Christian’s breakthrough he’s still the same guy. I LOVE that the show ended with a verbatim recreation of the pilot scene where Christian first hit on Kimber at a bar.

While I enjoyed Christian in this episode, I HATED what they did with Sean. Yes, I understand that his freewheeling attitude early in the episode was a sham, but at least he wasn’t a pill. Still, the absolute worst sin the writers committed is that they apparently absolved Sean of all responsibility in his relationship with Christian.

It was Christian who decided to initiate the breakup (Sean would’ve been happy to go along and be miserable.) When Christian and Sean said their goodbyes at the airport, Sean actually said, “Thank you” as if Sean had been some sort of prisoner this entire time. Last time I checked, Sean was a grown-ass man and I absolutely detested that they made him out to be an absolute weakling that needed to be let go.

Oh well. Nothing’s perfect. And despite everything I just wrote, there’s no denying this show left a mark and that it will be missed.

So what’d you think of this episode? Can you honestly name a worse TV character than Matt McNamara? Were you happy/surprised to see the young children in this show actually resurface for a few minutes? Finally, what’s your favorite “Nip/Tuck” episode of all time? (I’ve gotta go with season 2 finale “Joan Rivers. It had everything – Ava Moore, Alec Baldwin, and a genuinely chilling shocker of a cliffhanger.)

Thanks for checking out my “Nip/Tuck” recaps (and a special thanks to the people who bothered to comment – even if it was to tell me I’m an idiot).