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December 21, 2005
Nip/Tuck Carves Out a Grisly, Loopy Season Finale
Spoilers for Season 3 Finale ahead. In any given Nip/Tuck episode, there's a fare amount of blood and gore. It's gotten so bad that my wife, unable to stomach the realistic surgery scenes, gave up watching it a long time ago. In last night's finale (season three), Ryan Murphy outdid himself with scene after scene of mutilation. I thought the episode was scarier than the recent Texas Chainsaw Massacre remake. By the time it was over, we had: a finger cut off; a penis cut off; two bags of silicone removed from breasts without anesthesia; and about 11 people with their faces slashed.
The suspense for the two-part finale was built around the Slasher, the mime-like mutilator who went around destroying Dr. Troy and X handiwork for almost two years. I was surprised they kept the quest for the Slasher's identity running for so long. He first appeared midway through NT's second season, first attacking Sean and then Christian in the season ender. I assumed when Season 3 opened that this would quickly be resolved. NT's writers must have decided to prolong the story when they realized that the Slasher is the perfect anti-thesis to McNamara/Troy's practice. Everything that the doctors do to preserve or enhance physical beauty is undone by the Slasher. Every dramatic show needs a villain and in a show about plastic surgery, this is the one.
FX and Ryan Murphy milked this as much as possible. The Carver had his own blog on MySpace. People gossiped about who the Carver was. A lot of people thought it must be Dr. Quentin Costa, the new surgeon with plenty of problems and bad behavior. I never thought it was Costa for the following reasons: 1) He joined the cast in Season 3 and the Carver story started back in Season 2; 2) All the clues were being laid out for Costa like a trail of red herrings; 3) It just seemed way too simple if it was Costa. During the finale, I had jumped to the conclusion that the Carver was a woman: Dr. Liz Cruz, the anesthesiologist who put up with the bad boy doctors for far too long. Liz made perverted sense to me, because she had access to all the patient records and could order the drug the Carver used to incapacitate his victims.
But Murphy pulled a bait and switch. It was Costa all along. We saw his face, just before Costa went totally super-villain and bound McNamara/Troy to upright hospital gurneys (making them look a bit crucified). After a set of expository speeches, where Costa reveals his mad philosophy for destroying beauty, he sets upon torturing the doctors. Sean gets his pinkie chopped off. Before any more digits are clipped, Christian offers himself as a victim. You may think it shows us that Christian loves Sean, but I think it's because he loves money: he knows the practice can't survive without Sean's masterful hands! Carver/Costa agrees to Christian's offer, but only if he ups the ante by taking off an entire hand. The Carver tries to make Christian lop his own hand off (I remember Hannibal Lecter did the same thing) when Detective Kit (Rhona Mitra) shoots Costa in the back. I was a bit surprised there wasn't much blood from that bullet. Later, we find that Detective Tit-Kit is actually the Carver's sister. The shooting was faked. The Carver escaped from the morgue, and by the show's end he's in Spain with Kit sipping sangria and looking for his next victim.
By this point, Nip/Tuck is like a traffic accident. It's horrible but I can't stop watching. Even those scenes with Sean's stupid son, Matt, and his involvement with the racist blonde girl. Matt was forced at gunpoint to chop off the penis of a transsexual, which was terrible, but I had a feeling that Murphy came up with this to intercut with the Carver torturing the doctors. The plot holes are just so big that even a show like Buffy has more connection to reality. How can Kit shoot the Carver without having a team of forensic specialists come in and examine the body? How did the Florida police allow Kit to come in, take over the Carver investigation, and fuck all the suspects? How come McNamara/Troy uncover the Kit-Carver connection and not the Florida police? When I was watching this, it reminded me of that Denise Richards movie, Wild Things. The one where you get about five different revelations at the end and they are all so crazy.
The amazing shit is that by the final scene, everything is reset back to the beginning of episode one. Sean and Julia might be reunited thanks to the baby. Matt's tired of transsexuals and racists and wants a little normalcy at home. And Christian? He's the one I feel sorry for, he lost his masterpiece, Kimber. Even though he repaired Kimber's injuries, her mind is either better or worse because of the Carver (depending on your POV). I suppose I'll have to watch next year and see if she comes back. Nuff said.
