I continue to struggle with Big Love and its perpetual substitution of “more” for “more interesting.” But last night’s episode is a good example of how the show can sometimes approach coherency, as well as a reminder of why the entire Juniper Creek plotline was even a part of this show to begin with. This whole season is built on a problem – Bill Henrickson running for State Senate is such a wacky, unlikely idea that it’s difficult to move past it and consider anything else going on in the show – but in episodes like “Sins of the Father” you can glimpse the plan underneath the craziness.

As has been noted again and again about this show, everything that happens in the Henrickson family is so complex, twisty, and fascinating that it’s baffling why any episode would waste time with the unsubtle, overwrought Juniper Creek gang. Big Love has made it too easy to forget why we should care about Juniper Creek at all, and “Sins of the Father” did a far better job of sewing together those plot threads than any other episode in recent memory. Juniper Creek haunts the Henrickson family, but their worlds are so distant that it becomes difficult to see the meaningful connections: I could care less about Bill’s mother’s absurd Mexican bird smuggling scheme. But when the Mormon lost boy story makes the news and Bill is forced to go on record about his past, suddenly the emotional impact of Juniper Creek becomes a live wire. Bill’s teenage mug shot is plastered all over his campaign office, and it’s as if this enormous and meaningful aspect of the Juniper Creek plotline is staring out of those posters, literally overlaying this ridiculous State Senate story with the glaring history of Bill’s misdeeds. Bill’s father exiled him at fourteen, and Bill has now thrown his own son out of the house for the same kinds of fear and jealousy that caused his own exile. Roman Grant is finally dead, and much as he’d like to deny it, Bill feels the same desire to seek power that comprises the foundation of his marriage and his family history. At least in the world of Big Love, the nature of polygamy brings about conflict between fathers and sons, and Bill has fallen into the same trap he desperately wanted to escape.

Instead of the typical scattershot, haphazard flickering between the casino, the Henrickson compound, what I now discover to be the ironically-named Henrickson’s Home Plus, any of the three households we follow in Juniper Creek, Sarah’s new life, and the entire State Senate story, “Sins of the Father” provides some order to the chaos. These stories are actually one story, telling the life history of this enigmatic man whose childhood abandonment has spurred him to constantly build himself newer, bigger homes. (“Build with Bill” – a lackluster campaign slogan proves more effective as a thesis.) And yet he falls prey to the same jealousies as his father, and throws his own son out of the house. The parallels are almost too neat. At this point, though, unless they’re hit-you-over-the-head obvious, they fail to withstand the sheer onslaught of other stories.

Am I supposed to be reading some metaphor here with all the caged birds? Because it's just too weird and uneven.

So – a good episode. A sad episode, full of a tragic Phillip Glass-like musical score and an uncharacteristically revealing portrait of Bill, who usually acts as the background for his more interesting wives. As effective as it was, it still doesn’t solve the deep problems with the show’s construction. Individual episodes rarely reach this kind of internal harmony, and the fact that Bill’s son Ben refuses to come home and is reaching out to his bird smuggling grandmother doesn’t bode well. Still, episodes like this are why I keep watching.