fuck yeah rectify

it’s the beauty, not the ugly, that hurts the most.

Rectify, “Physics”, S04E06

The characters on Rectify sometimes speak as if they’re discovering their emotions all at once. They knew those emotions were there, but they took great pains not to examine them too closely. In a sense, that’s what the show is about. It can be easy to ignore many of your less pleasant feelings when nothing really challenges your status quo, as was the case for Daniel’s family when he was in prison.

Yes, their lives had been shattered by his conviction, sentence, and imprisonment. But then they spent 19 years living with his incarceration, getting used to it and coming to understand it. Daniel’s release served as a kind of jolt to the system, a sudden shock that sent the characters spinning off course and made them realize how much unhappiness they’d been living with.

Thus, Rectify isn’t really about Daniel’s release — it’s about how his release affects both him and his family, emotionally. And over the course of its run, the show neatly mirrors itself. Season one was mostly about Daniel’s immediate reaction to reentering the outside world in the form of his hometown of Paulie, Georgia, and season four is essentially all epilogue about his family. Daniel has moved from Paulie to Nashville (though we still check in on him), but his family is left behind trying to make sense of what they’ve been through.

Before the finale, Young, who fostered such brilliant chemistry with every single one of his castmates, had only shared screen time with two of them in season four, and the finale only offered screen time with one other (though he shared a series of phone calls with a few more). The season focused on the other characters taking stock of how their lives had changed in Daniel’s handful of months spent in Paulie after getting out of prison. Marriages ended. Businesses closed. New loves blossomed.

None of this was the sort of high-stakes, pulse-pounding TV that tends to dominate headlines. It was quiet and small, driven by the innermost self. But the more you watch of Rectify’s fourth season, the more you realize that the show’s central idea is to probe everything its writers know about the characters’ emotions and help them find a way to speak about their feelings.

Watching season four is like watching a dam burst, as each character experiences some sort of major revelation about what they want in life, then finds the words to express it. There are few shows as wise about the inner workings of our minds as this one, and Rectify season four has been next level in that regard.

– Todd VanDerWerff