Saving Grace: The Final Season (DVD)

Not much seems to have changed as Saving Grace begins its third and final season. Star (and executive producer) Holly Hunter's Grace Hanadarko is still the tough-talking, hard-drinking, truth-abusing, rule-defying Oklahoma City police detective we've come to know; in fact, in the very first episode, she and her boyfriend, fellow cop Ham Dewey (Kenny Johnson), are caught on film committing a drunken and very public prank. But this time there's more to it. Ever since the pilot episode, Grace has received regular if unpredictable visitations from a folksy, avuncular "last chance angel" named Earl (Leon Rippy), who has offered her a chance at redemption, telling her that "God is using you for great things." And now, at last, Grace somehow realizes that her time is coming. Not that she's exactly serene about it; on the contrary, she remains defiant and skeptical. But she also has a growing sense of the inevitable, and these 19 episodes (about half again as many as the previous seasons) gradually lead her, and us, to a resolution that's neither pat nor pretty.

Along the way, Grace and her colleagues, who by now have developed an appealingly casual but caring camaraderie, deal with various quotidian police matters, with stand-alone stories involving the specter of domestic terrorism (an especially touchy subject in OKC, still reeling from the 1995 bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building, in which Grace's own sister was killed), an AA-like program for alcoholics, Hasidic Jews and kosher beef, Muslim attitudes toward homosexuality, ranchers battling over water, and so on. But it's Grace's personal journey that predominates. Over the course of the season, she tries to help a troubled young woman who also has a relationship with Earl, thinking this might be what God has in store for her; she also confronts a sinister stranger named Hut Flanders (Gordon MacDonald, Hunter's real-life boyfriend), who, like Earl, is not of this world. Of course, Grace isn't someone who channels her emotions very positively. And by the final few episodes, she's deep into a downward spiral, self-inflicted and otherwise, that makes her earlier self look tame: she's involved in a fatal car accident; her house is burned down; she smokes crack, turns tricks, and rejects friends and loved ones alike. It's hard to believe that all this turmoil is part of "great things," but if there's one thing series creator Nancy Miller has emphasized throughout Saving Grace's run, it's that God works in mysterious ways. --Sam Graham