The final season of Six Feet Under begins with a slight time jump and Nate’s (Peter Krause) wedding. “Don’t give up when things get hard,” Ruth (Frances Conroy) cautions on the video footage from Nate’s big day. Though we knew from Season 4 that Nate and Brenda (Rachel Griffiths) planned to tie the knot, it becomes increasingly clear this recording is from Nate and Lisa’s (Lili Taylor) wedding. Indeed, Nate and Brenda’s hasn’t happened yet, though she’s pregnant, can’t stand even the smell of coffee, and is unnerved by watching her soon-to-be husband’s previous nuptials. 

But that’s just the beginning of the end. Let’s recap the show’s last season, including that much discussed series finale.

What else is happening in Six Feet Under Season 5?

Elsewhere in the Fisher orbit, there is little to celebrate. George (James Cromwell) is undergoing ECT for depressive psychosis, Rico (Freddy Rodríguez) is on Match.com, and Claire (Lauren Ambrose) is taking a semester off from school to shack up with Billy (Jeremy Sisto). At least Keith (Mathew St. Patrick) and David (Michael C. Hall) have decided they want children, though the question of surrogacy or adoption causes some conflict. (Look out for the somewhat jarring moment when former Bachelor host Chris Harrison shows up in a fantasy sequence introducing David to possible gestational carriers.) But nothing is worse than when Brenda miscarries the day before her wedding to Nate. They tie the knot, but the pain and loss associated with their union takes a toxic hold.

It doesn’t help that Nate and Maggie (Tina Holmes), George’s daughter, have immediate chemistry. She’s hanging around Casa Fisher more and more as Ruth gets increasingly frustrated with George. She and Nate quickly bond over their own journeys with sadness and loss (her son died of leukemia when he was just 2 years old), and Maggie introduces him to the world of the Quakers. Meanwhile, Brenda gets pregnant again, but there are concerns about the baby’s health. At Nate’s 40th birthday party, Nathaniel (Richard Jenkins) appears to his son and says, “Time flies when you’re pretending to have fun. Time flies when you’re pretending to love Brenda and that baby she loves so much.” That party ends in violence, as Nate brutally kills a bird that flew into the house. 

At that same party, Claire hooks up with Nate’s high school friend, sealing her breakup with Billy, who’s off his meds by Episode 3. He’s increasingly erratic and volatile, even getting his mother, Margaret (Joanna Cassidy), to lure Claire to a restaurant so he can make a plea for them to get back together. Claire is done, though, and working at a temp agency, where she’s avoiding all co-workers except for the buttoned-up (and confidently, endearingly uncool) lawyer Ted Fairwell (Chris Messina). 

Ruth and George move out of the family home, then she moves out from living with George and gets back together with Season 1’s Hiram the hairdresser (Ed Begley Jr.). Meanwhile, Rico goes on some dates (look out for The Office’s Jenna Fisher, who’s a particularly cruel ghoster), but finds his way back to living with Vanessa (Justina Machado) and the kids. Speaking of families, David and Keith settle on a surrogate to carry their child, but when she miscarries, they attend an adoption event. David immediately bonds with a young boy named Anthony (C.J. Sanders), but the agency informs them that he comes with his boundary-pushing older brother, Durrell (Kendre Berry). They become a family of four, which is not without its challenges, so much so that at one point, David moves out. 

What happens to Nate?

Here’s where the heavy stuff starts, so brace yourself. In an effort to work on her relationship with Nate, Brenda agrees to meet him at a Quaker service. He’s late, though, because he’s with Maggie. As in, with Maggie. In a postcoital glow, he stands up and slurs, “My arm is numb. Numb arm,” and gets increasingly incoherent. He’s rushed to the hospital and undergoes surgery for a brain hemorrhage caused by AVM, the condition he was diagnosed with in Season 1, and when he wakes up from his coma, it initially seems like he’s going to pull through. David visits him in the hospital and the two brothers watch TV. Maggie visits and it seems this new love might have a future. When Brenda visits and says, “We’ll get through this,” he replies, “I don’t think so.” 

While in Nate’s hospital room, he and David experience a shared dream in which they’re on a surfing trip with their father. Nate runs into the water, but David hesitates — and when David wakes up, he finds that Nate has died. For the first time in the series, there’s a death card at the end of an episode: “Nathaniel Samuel Fisher Jr., 1965-2005.” 

How does everybody else move forward after Nate’s death?

The remaining three episodes are for everyone else to try, and often fail, to pick up the pieces. Maggie brings a quiche/peace offering to Brenda, which ends in Nate’s wife telling Nate’s lover, “All he ever wanted was someone to make him feel like he was a better man than he actually was.” Ruth, who was unreachable when Nate died because she had been camping with Hiram, is inconsolable. George stays by her side through it all, including when Brenda drops off Maya (Brenna Tosh and Bronwyn Tosh) at their home. At the funeral, David continues to be haunted by visions of Jake (Michael Weston), who hijacked and tortured him last season, and can’t even finish his speech. The episode ends with Nirvana’s “All Apologies” and Kurt Cobain’s voice singing “All in all is all we are.” 

But there is also life. After a challenging stage with their boys, Keith and David stick with the difficulties and rewards of fatherhood. Rico, reunited with Vanessa, wants to branch out on his own. David considers leaving the business altogether but finds a renewed passion by the end of the season. Brenda’s water breaks while she’s arguing with Ruth about who will raise Maya, after Ruth asks that Maya remain with her and George. With Ruth at her side, Brenda gives birth to a premature baby girl, Willa. (“Motherhood is the loneliest thing in the world,” Ruth will later tell her daughter-in-law, one widow to another.) Billy helps out and, mercifully, a near-incest scene turns out to be a Brenda waking dream. And after fighting with her mother for most of the season, Claire decides to leave temp life behind and move to New York City, with a road trip–ready music mix made by Ted, by then her dream boyfriend. In a heartbreaking scene, Claire tells her distraught mother that she will stay in Los Angeles if she’s needed. “Absolutely not,” Ruth tells her. “Go. Live.”  

And indeed, she does.  

How does the Six Feet Under series finale end?

Much has been written and rhapsodized about regarding the final several minutes of Six Feet Under. Claire drives away in a Prius, to the tune of Sia’s “Breathe Me,” to start her new life. And then we see time jump again and again, to David and Keith’s wedding, to Bettina (Kathy Bates) and Ruth throwing treats at the doggie day care Ruth’s running, to a re-partnered Brenda throwing Willa a birthday party with the Fishers and Chenowiths around the table, and to Claire’s wedding to Ted.  

We also witness the deaths of the main cast with their birth and death dates displayed on the screen — Keith, then Ruth, David, Rico, and Brenda. The final death is of Claire, who is surrounded by her art and photos of her family. She lives from 1983 to 2085, dying at the age of 102. And as it’s done so many other times over the previous seasons, the show fades to white. 

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