In which I bake a tart and cry about The Closer.

Only one more episode.

Tonight the historian and I watched the next to last episode ever of The Closer, a show I have loved from pretty much day one. Sometime ago, Kyra Sedgwick, the eponymous and legendary interrogator, decided that she would bow out of the show in this, its seventh season. So, like every other fan of the show, I have relished and fretted over every one of these last episodes. I have, of late, dug up interviews with Sedgwick and the producer of the show, reviews of it, profiles of the actors, discussions of its plot twists. My daughter in Louisiana has also been a fan for a long time; we have been comparing notes over the last year at least over each episode and the overall arc of the show for the past two seasons. I will really miss it.

One thing I realized during this period of last-ness is how much I cherish a drama that's reliable, but how much more I cherish a reliable show that counts on you paying attention. This isn't, writing-wise, at the level of Mad Men or The Wire. But over the past season, or season and a half, the writers of the show have asked the viewer to reconsider her feelings about the characters and even, I would say, the satisfactions of a police procedural that depends upon our identifying with a police interrogator whose will to close the case, and deep intelligence, lead to unorthodox methods. The reconsideration asks us to view the character's unorthodoxy as possibly unethical, and gives her ample opportunity to consider and reconsider her own actions.

I love a show that picks up a thread that seems to have been dropped, and weaves it back into the fabric of the plot, and by so doing, turns the entire premise and its pleasures on its head. I will really miss The Closer. I might feel a little foolish for saying so. But I will, I will.

In its Platonic dream of itself, my tart looks like this.

Which is how I came to shed a tear or two into the tart dough I made. We had some apricots that needed to become a tart, or be eaten, or they would turn inexorably into sad, sad wasted fruit. I bought those apricots at the farmer's market at least two weeks ago, and tonight was the time to pick them up from their cold oblivion, and let them fulfill their destiny as pie.

And while the dough was chilling, relaxing, in the dark of the refrigerator, I watched the episode again. In case I missed something the first time around.