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Six Feet Under 101: Season 1, Episode 1, June 3^rd 2001: The Pilot

The first episode of Six Feet Under starts with a man named Nathaniel Fisher talking on the phone with his wife smoking a cigarette, his wife was suspicious of him smoking and told him to stop. He than after getting off the phone with her, decided to light another one, causing him to cross an intersection and get hit by a bus. Most movies when ever someone does something that can impair their driving you already get the message that something bad is going to happen, because the camera angle focuses on the window of the car to let viewers see the problem coming. When the husband was hit by the bus, his wife accidentally cut her finger; I think the director did that to symbolize something wrong. Some can argue that when the husband lied about not smoking and than promising he wasn't anymore, he had sinned which caused him to get hit, or it was a freak accident that could of been avoided if he wasn't on the phone or smoking. The other symbolic thing was when the wife cut her finger, and felt a feeling of worry, after that. Can be seen as metaphysical symbol, many believe that when our love ones die, we'll sense something because of a spiritual bond of some sort.

After that scene, you get to see the whole family and what they all do for a living. Surprisingly the fisher family works in the funeral industry. When starting this unit I assumed that funeral directors or anyone who deal with dead people, can handle death better, and live their lives a bit differently by not fearing death. But like anyone, it's hard for anyone to recover from a lost of relatives. For example one of the visitors, who came in the other say, took a 3-day break from work (funeral directing), after his mother passed away. Like most things in life, it's hard to understand how people feel, until it happens to us.

Six Feet Under 101: Season 1, Episode 2, June 10^th 2001: The Will

The episode starts out with a family at a get together around a pool, people are talking and socializing etc. Chandler Swanson (the person who’s going to die in this episode) dives into the pool, and drowned, leaving behind a wife and baby daughter. The episode switches back over the Fisher family where Nathaniel Fisher's had a will left for his family read by his widowed wife to get money, stocks and insurance money. And the funeral business is passed on two his two sons Nate & David. His wild and experimental daughter received college tuition, but chooses to trade it in for cash. Nate (the eldest son) wanted to help out the widowed wife of Chandler Swanson, because of the debt her husband had left her with, and started learning a few things about the funeral business.

After watching two episodes of Six Feet Under I got pretty hooked on it, for many reasons. One of them is that it’s really well written; it deals on many different types of deaths, and family issues that are so common to many and not so much to others. It also show’s how there’s no such thing as a “normal” family, because every family has their own problems, the fishers have a lot of secrets from Mrs. Fisher cheating when her husband was alive, their second son David being gay, their eldest Nate who recently decided to come back because he sees that his family is broken up, and their youngest child and only daughter Claire who’s a confused girl and doesn’t know what she wants in life (typical young adult) who experiments with drugs. One of my worries is Claire dying; she seems really easily pressured and doesn’t handle things to well. The show also does well at showing the different reactions people get when they hear of a death of a loved one, some of the reactions were calm, but than they freaked out, some freaked out and than calm down, some kept calm, but stayed calm but in a docile manner.