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‘Housewives’ pulls it together

Sunday's pentultimate episode was compelling and quick-moving, and reminded viewers of how entertaining this goofy show can be when it's at its best.
/ Source: TODAY.com

This season of "Desperate Housewives" has been a bit all over the map. It's hard to believe this is the same season where Katherine went nuts when Mike married Susan and where a plane crashed into Wisteria Lane. And doesn't it seem as if Lynette has been pregnant for at least two years?

The season's had good moments and bad, but recently, the show seemed to flounder a bit. Yet as "Housewives" inevitably does, it's pulling together just in time for next week's finale. Sunday's pentultimate episode was compelling and quick-moving, and reminded viewers of how entertaining this goofy show can be when it's at its best.

Every season of "Housewives" has a mystery, and when Angie, Nick and Danny Bolen moved in, with fake names and a hidden past, it seemed clear that Angie's flight from her days as a violent eco-terrorist (!) was going to be this year's big plot. Yet on the way to the reveal, a second plot developed, one almost as compelling. Susan's daughter Julie was strangled and numerous other women were murdered by a serial strangler, who's been revealed to be Scavo family friend and troubled teen Eddie.

The episode explaining Eddie's troubled childhood and drunken, unloving mother was pretty groan-worthy, but with that out of the way, Two of his victims were found this week -- his mom, and Preston's former fiance, Irina. Cops started drawing a circle of suspects, with Preston Scavo at the center.

Pregnant Lynette, just trying to do a good deed by taking Eddie in, happened to be there when he discovered the police had found his mother's body. Now she's in trouble, and, of course, everything comes together just at the same time her baby decides he wants to make his appearance.

The Angie Bolen plot has coasted for weeks on the power of Drea de Matteo's acting — fake identity or no, she'd be a great permanent addition to the Wisteria Lane poker club. But now her former partner in crime, Danny's father Patrick, has taken her and his son hostage and is forcing Angie to build him another bomb. (Supposedly to stop some logging in Oregon, a plot it seems like the writers pulled from a 1994 issue of Outside Magazine that they found in a dentist's office.) This plot isn't quite as interesting as Lynette and Eddie, but it was pretty funny that Angie frantically stuffed a note in a lasagna that Gaby's girls later pulled out of the trash.

The other Housewives are reaching some plot heights too, but their stories are not nearly as interesting as those of Lynette and Angie.

Sam, Rex's apparent son, is trying to get Bree to sign over all her financial ventures to him by threatening to turn Andrew in for the ages-old car accident that killed Carlos' mother.

Susan and Mike are renting out their Wisteria Lane mansion due to Mike's money troubles, and Katherine and Karen — well, who knows what happened to them? There may have been an episode somewhere where they were sent to visit relatives, but I sure don't remember it.

It doesn't matter. The families and their plots are coming together as they always do on this show, and just in time for the finale. The best season of "Housewives" remains the first one (Paul Young, where have you gone?), but this season is redeeming itself by the minute.