Season 5 & epilogue=train wreck
So they finished off the 5th season in the wake of the dangling mom story and the tangent filler story of vets on meds. The only thing I cared about by then was Patty, her son, and Ellen. Everything else was forced by the time this skidded into its own semblance of resolution. So they ramped it up a bit and finally started pushing things forward. The finale was better than the previous 5 episodes for sure. By the time one gets to the end, one is overloaded with the same flashforwards and it is time for payoff. Payoff that has been masterful in the early seasons. This time it was simply mediocre relief with some wretched green-screen framing an attempt to recapture the dynamic the leading ladies once had in the salad days of this show. OK. Coulda been worse. Coulda been like that botched season 4. Overall average though very disappointing.
THEN...
Then they dropped that epilogue on us. They say "a few years later" and we see that Ellen's child has grown from fetus to five year old in the span of a few years. But only physically. Mentally the child is 2 and riffing some kind of Shirly Temple baby talk that only lacked a giant lollypop and singing routine. Patty hallucinates being thanked by Ellen and meeting her freakish daughter. When Patty looks down at her, they switch to a worm's-eye camera view of the kid. Yet another ham handed effort to disguise the fact that the kid was obviously older than they were trying to present her as. Then Ellen has a conversation with the kid that is meant to show us that Ellen quit being a lawyer. This comes by way of the kid just outright saying it. "But yew downt dew that anymowuh mahmee."
Sure, the kid is cute. I'm not attacking her. The guilt lies with the director on this.
The last moment of this once great show were about as bad as they could get. They ended on a sour note. I put that first season among the greatest in television history. Sad.