‘Big Love’: Cancan Dancers for Christ

“This could be our last family portrait. Jesus could be here by Labor Day.�

Ahhh! Our favorite character is back! It’s scary, scary child bride, Rhonda, played by Daveigh Chase, a.k.a. Samara in The Ring. She’s a pure expression of this show’s appeal: creepy and wholesome in equal measures.

In this excellent, totally confusing episode, Big Love flashed its seamy petticoats all over the place, like a cancan dancer for Christ. We got half-naked teen-boy bonding at a tattoo parlor; tender outdoor conjugal white-sheet sex (featuring Chloë Sevigny freed of her braid); sister-mom-on-teen-son pool wrestling; a random flash of middle-aged sister-mom rack; and teen-boy-on-slatternly-secular-girlfriend rutting, the most graphic and least erotic scene of the bunch. Plus, as a bonus, Bill Paxton making oddly adorable “bleep bleep� sounds while testing out a video gambling machine.

Plot-wise, there was so much going on here that no one who’s drifted over from The Sopranos is going to understand who the heck these people are — a situation rather hilariously alluded to by Adelene’s lunatic monologue concluding, “And that’s how I become my own grandmother.�

But let’s face it, the true engine of this series is no great puzzle: It’s an endless, entertaining riff on the virgin fetish, broken up by philosophical interludes, inter-family skulduggery, and occasional bouts of poisoning. So when Samara showed up at Barb’s door all dressed in white, we couldn’t have been happier: The endlessly unsullied bride of the prophet has escaped, and now her innocent evil can provide one more monkey wrench of naïveté thrown into the Henrickson happiness machine. —Emily Nussbaum