Big Sky wraps up its first big case with the year’s weirdest In Memoriam montage

It’s taken an embarrassingly long time to ask this question, but something occurred to me while watching “Let It Be Him,” the eventful winter finale of the show ABC cannot stop reminding us is the year’s hottest new drama. The question in question: Is it possible that Big Sky is a pretty routine crime series that would be better off without all the fascinating weirdness?

All that weirdness can’t be accidental. Some of the choices made in these first nine episodes are so strange that such a thing seems impossible. Remember “a waste of good cereal”? There’s no way somebody writes that line and then thinks, “Yeah, that’s some pretty safe, colorless dialogue;” nor did it feel as if it didn’t belong in the scene and in that story. Yet in both “The End Is Near” and “Let It Be Him,” several of the most surreal moments seem to come from nowhere. In the bucket of weird-but-let’s-go-with-it, the “waste of good cereal” bucket, we’ve got: “If you’re happy and you know it, say hi to your mom;” staples to the face; jumping straight up in the air to drown a man of the cloth in your kitchen sink not long after telling him you remember him low-key drowning you during your baptism as a tiny baby; the big cardboard Legarski cutout; the frozen corpse of Helen Pergman wrapped up in a child’s blue hoodie like she’s about to shout “she doesn’t even go here.” There are others, but that’s a solid few. Oh, and the serious plot significance of the immortal ballad, “I Know An Old Lady Who Swallowed A Fly.” Put that in the cereal bucket.

But then there’s the “uh, what?” bucket, and while I am personally a little bit obsessed with the things in this bucket, they don’t seem to belong to Big Sky, the David E. Kelley series about the women of the Dewell & Hoyt Detective Agency. Among them: a bizarre car chase set piece that hinges on the safety features of the Tesla; what seem to be several takes directly to the camera courtesy of Brian Geraghty/Ronald Pergman; a cute lil’ paperboy telling Pergman he’s going to get shivved in the lunch line; several seasoned law enforcement officials standing in a room that smells like gas with a bunch of menacing metal boxes making strange clicking sounds without immediately shouting that everyone needs to evacuate, like, right that second; and, the pièce de résistance, a soft-focus, gently-soundtracked In Memoriam-style montage of three characters who died, among them a guy who died way back in the pilot and has been seen only fleetingly since then but who happen to have been played by a famous person, the mom who told her adult son to go masturbate himself but who was also “very nice,” and a murderer/kidnapper/terrible husband who happens to be played by a beloved character actor. The poor bow-and-arrow-struck fisherman, however, is nowhere to be seen.

It’s possible that some of those elements aren’t meant to be quite so weird. The In Memoriam bit is reminiscent of curtain call-style credits, a final send-off to members of the company who won’t be returning next year, and if you assume Merrilee’s perp walk is meant to be a part of that sequence and that Brooke Smith’s tenure on the show is at an end (a reasonable assumption), then it’s about what the actors, not the characters, have in common. Those takes to the camera might be the result of odd camera angles, rather than a deliberate choice to have Ronald Pergman stare at you through the television. Then there’s the Tesla sequence, which plays like an action movie version of the TGS With Tracy Jordan writing staff talking about Snapple.