This episode marks the culmination of seven seasons of nip/tuck!. We start with Matt, who sheepishly tells Sean and Christian that he’s going to Brazil with Ava to see a doctor who is willing to do the baby’s surgery and asks them to temporarily take care of Jenna. Christian responds by slamming the door in his face. Things look much better for Liz, who is surprised with a new lobby sign reading ‘McNamara/Troy/Cruz,’ signifying her new status as a partner. Liz’s first consult, which also marks the series’ last patient ,is octogenarian Japanese porn star Hiro Yoshimura who is flanked by two young hot porn co-stars. Hiro is transitioning to American porn and in an effort to appear more youthful, a quality coveted in American culture, he asks the doctors to minimize a huge scar on his chest from open heart surgery he had years earlier.
Losing Julia, the kids, AND Matt forces Sean to reevaluate the importance of family and he decides to abandon his dream of providing medical services to the disadvantaged in poor countries and focus on his McNamara/Troy/Cruz family. Sean goes overboard buying baby stuff for Liz and surprises her with a baby nursery at the office. Julia questions Sean’s newfound dedication to plastic surgery and withdrawal of his drive to do good with his talents. Christian assures Julia that Sean’s just finally come to his senses, but she’s convinced Sean’s in deep denial. Christian can’t fight his own denial forever, and when Kimber comes to him in a dream after a wild night on the town with Sean and says he stole her soul, that he’s stealing Sean’s soul and slowly killing him, Christian begins to face his cold reality.
Christian attempts good by striking a deal with Ava – performing her baby’s surgery in exchange for leaving Matt alone. She agrees, but when Ava sees the results and realizes that her baby will never be perfect, she abandons the infant to a trust fund and in the care of McNamara/Troy. Matt makes an exit speech of his own, begging Christian to let him take Jenna with the promise that he’ll go back to Ramona and start a normal life. But he’s learned a lesson from his favorite trannie, and when Ramona won’t take him back he surprises Ava at the airport, offering his perfect little daughter as the ultimate starter kit for their perfect life. She accepts and they fly off to Brazil to build their life together.
Like every season finale, we watch our Nip/Tuck family break bread. Julia, Sean, Christian, Liz, Annie, Conor, and Wilber come together one last time to say thank you and I love you before parting ways. Sean has agreed to let Julia take the kids to England and it’s bittersweet; they’re all doing what they must to move forward while saying goodbye to a shared and convoluted history.
Nothing could be as difficult, however, as the separation of brothers Christian and Sean. For once in his life Christian does the honorable thing and dissolves their partnership, making the practice Troy/Cruz, and buys Sean a ticket to Bucharest so he can return Ava’s baby to the orphanage and use his skills for pro-bono work there. Their goodbye at the airport is short, sweet, and honest. Despite all the tension between them it is clear they will always be family.
Here are some pictures of the last shot, the last time our cast and crew were together. Our UPM Chris Griffin did a rousing toast to all our departments, and Executive Producer Mike Robin was on hand to thank everyone for their hard work.
As we the bloggers say goodbye, we’d like to say thank you for the support and kind words we’ve received from you, our extended Nip/Tuck viewer family. From the writers, from the crew, from the folks at FX and Ryan Murphy himself: thank you for making the last seven years an indescribably fun and rewarding experience. We’re gonna miss you guys…
In the penultimate episode of the final season of nip/tuck (!), Holocaust survivors Walter and Edith Krieger come to McNamara/Troy to get their concentration camp tattoos removed as an display of appreciation for the great lives they’ve been able to live. Sean and Christian agree to do their surgery but get more intrigue than they bargained for when they discover that Walter wasn’t a camp survivor at all – he was a Nazi camp tattooist who tattooed himself and lived as a Jew as penance for his myriad sins. Edith is willing to forgive her husband, but their daughter can’t and has Walter arrested for war crimes. Some people cannot bear to forget the ills of the past.
Matt, on the other hand, turns the other cheek and makes a gesture toward forgiveness when he shows up at the beach house and personally invites Sean and Christian to his wedding. Julia arrives in town with news of her own engagement to an Englishman and drops a figurative bomb when she reveals her intentions to take the kids with her to England. Both men grapple with Julia’s return — Sean is pissed at the prospect of losing his kids AND Julie, and Christian is upset when Julia rejects his sexual advances.
All the joy of Matt’s impending wedding can’t trump the anxiety caused by the return of everyone’s favorite transsexual, Ava Moore. Ava asks Sean and Christian to treat her adopted baby whose little body has been ravaged by a skin disease and is covered in scars. Sean gets Ava to admit the truth about her baby’s adoption, which is that she stole the neglected baby from an orphanage. When Sean refuses to help her, Ava charms Matt to manipulate him into helping her. And when you think Ava can’t stoop any lower, she does so by showing up at Matt’s wedding and lures him away mere moments before he is to exchange his wedding vows. Sean, Christian and Julia watch helplessly as their son abandons his bride-to-be at the alter. Is this goodbye forever?
To keep it light after all this drama (ooooo that Ava!) here is Linda Klein with writer and Executive Producer Jennifer Salt (you may remember her from her acting days on ‘Soap’) horsing around in the McNamara/Troy lobby and reminiscing about some of their favorite nip/tuck episodes.
Time to play the opposite game! Former patients Maureen and Marshall Ayers want their face-lifts reversed and threaten to sue if they don’t perform the surgery. Meanwhile Sean entertains the idea of bringing hot dermatologist Jill Jacobson into the practice and tries out her facial injections. Christian isn’t too fond of the idea, and in retaliation, goes to Jill’s office and convinces all her patients that plastic surgery is far superior to endless injections. He then convinces Sean to give him a feather lift that he’ll tape and put on Youtube in an attempt to showcase how painless and easy the procedure is. While under anesthesia, Christian sees himself in a dream sequence where we get to have the dynamic Joan Rivers back on the show, asking Christian questions from a fantasy red carpet. The glitz gets ugly when the dream turns into a confrontation with Sean and his father, who tells him to stop fighting the darkness inherent in his DNA. Awakening from surgery, Christian has a newfound understanding of the asshole image he projects into the world.
Liz gets a confidence injection when drug rep (and previous married straight woman) Daniella Creighton asks her to dinner. During a night of passion, Daniella shocks Liz with a special and wet talent. Adding insult to injury, Daniella later tells Liz she’s going back to her husband and can’t be a lesbian. But Liz isn’t the only one who ends this episode hurting: Christian gets a big dose of humility when his Youtube video gets a quarter million hits with all negative comments on the barbaric nature of surgery. Has he sunk McNamara/Troy?
Getting a chance to direct an episode of Nip/Tuck is an incredible honor, especially when it’s your first gig as an episodic director. Our very own, longtime script supervisor, Diana Valentine was recently given the opportunity to hop into the director’s chair and sit behind video village. We stopped over to the set to check on Diana and see how her episode was going…all you aspiring directors take note!
Couples therapy does wonders for millions of Americans, but can it help Sean and Christian? In an attempt to reconcile their escalating personal and professional differences, Sean makes an appointment with therapist Dr. Griffin, who draws out Sean and Christian’s true feelings about each other. And the truth ain’t pretty: Sean wants out of the partnership and Christian comes clean about having taken out a mortgage on the business with Sean’s forged signature on the documents. Sean is enraged with Christian’s deception and punches him out. Liz is invited to the next session to provide an outsider’s objective perspective on Sean and Christian’s relationship. This time it’s Liz who drops the bomb: she’s angry that Sean and Christian never made her a partner in the practice and thinks they’re self-centered egotistical assholes. Oh and she’s pregnant…with Sean’s donor sperm.
Session three pulls in Matt, who brings his sexy new fiancé Ramona with him to tell his dads he’s getting married and never wants to see them again. While Sean and Christian argue over who is to blame for Matt’s decision to sever ties and Sean admits he slept with Kimber, an emotionally unstable former patient shows up in Dr. Griffin’s office and shoots him in the face. This violent act forces Sean and Christian to temporarily set aside their differences and work together to try to restore the doctor’s face. As the episode ends on Sean and Christian in another shrink’s office in another stalemate it becomes clear that their relationship may take much longer to heal than Dr. Griffin’s disfigured face.
You may have noticed that this episode was a bit different than any other you have seen before. Almost the entire episode takes place in one room and on one set. A lot of work was put into this set and it required the use of an entirely new stage! We caught up with production designer Liz Kay again to take us through this unique new set.
Whenever Sean starts to slide down a slippery slope, he always seems to find himself face-to-face with his ever-present nemesis…Escobar Gallardo. He is back again and here to haunt Sean until his last days. His return comes as Sean and Christian find themselves in yet another dead body disposal dilemma. Virginia Hayes is a victim of identity theft, courtesy of Marcy Hamels. Marcy posing as Virginia, deceives Christian into giving her a boob job. When Christian finds out the truth about Marcy, he flips the situation around and tricks her back into surgery. When she wakes up she has found that Christian has “foreclosed” on the implants and taken them back. His trick causes a problem when the real Virginia shows up at the McNamara/Troy offices and kills Marcy for ruining her life. This leaves Christian and Sean with a dead woman in their recovery room who wasn’t supposed to be there in the first place. Realizing there is no legitimate way to explain the dead body to the authorities without facing charges that could destroy their careers, Sean and Christian head to the desert to bury yet another body and secret. A secret Sean desperately wants to be rid of.
The conflict in this episode between Christian and Sean is perfect fodder for Escobar’s ghostly return and who better to hear from than one of Nip/Tuck’s most enduring and unique characters… Mr. Robert Lasardo aka “Escobar.”
Last night we learned about Lesch Nyan , the extremely rare and disturbing genetic disorder that afflicted the episode’s patient, Mr. Dan Daly. . As a child the self-mutilating disorder caused Dan to chew off some of his fingers. Years later as an adult, Dan is brought to McNamara/Troy, having chewed off his lips, and Christian and Sean attempt to repair the damage the best they can. While Christian and Sean figure out this shocking case, they also get a chance to celebrate winning the Albert Poland award by the University of Miami for their excellence in plastic surgery. They travel back to their alma mater to accept the prestigious award and the episode flashes back to the genesis of Christian and Sean’s friendship and partnership, and we see that the friendship they formed in college was forged on the lies and manipulative behavior that sustain their relationship to this day. At the award ceremony, Sean runs into his former college roommate who is being recognized for his altruistic work in providing medical care to impoverished countries…something Sean dreamed of doing until he was lured by Christian into the superficial specialty of cosmetic surgery. Events at the ceremony take a turn for the worse when Sean realizes that Christian essentially bought the award by making a huge donation to the school. Sean smashes the award upon their return to Beverly Hills, an act that would come back to haunt him when Dan Daly, their self-mutilating patient, uses a leftover shard to carve his face up. Is the shattering of the Poland award symbolic of the relationship of McNamara/Troy?
Wesley didn’t do it! He didn’t kill her!…. Poor Wesley from last night’s episode. As if the fact that he was too overweight to be executed properly wasn’t tough enough, turns out he also wasn’t even the real killer. The big moral question in last night’s episode is, if you were in Matt’s shoes would you have said anything? Matt wasn’t the only one with a tough decision to make. Kimber finds out she’s pregnant with Christian’s child and Christian makes it clear he does not want any more children so Kimber has to choose between the baby or Christian. Rather than raise another child on her own Kimber has an abortion to, as Christian said, “take care of it,” and complications during the procedure leave her unable to have children ever again. The good news is Christian and Kimber are getting married!
This episode marks the close of the penultimate season for Nip/Tuck. We hope you enjoyed this season and hope our blogging extravaganza brought you some insight into the world of McNamara/Troy. We will be back in January with more blogs and videos to bring you all the Nip/Tuck you can handle for what will be the final season of this iconic show. Thanks for watching, and we’ll see you next year!
Linda Klein, our lovely Nurse Linda on the show, is a real life nurse who shares with us some insight on one of her favorite episodes of nip/tuck. Here she is in her scrubs between takes.
Last night’s episode “Benny Nilsson” showed us we should all be thankful that we didn’t end up with Bjorn Nilsson as a father. Bjorn and his adopted son Benny come to McNamara/Troy to see if the doctors can make them look more like biological father and son. Unbeknownst to Sean and Christian, Bjorn hosts high-end gay sex parties with himself and Benny as the entertainment so the more they resemble biological father and son, the more deviant the act becomes, and the more profitable the parties become. Equally as shocking is the unexpected arrival of Sean’s brother Brendan, who ostensibly disappeared several years ago and was declared dead by the family. Brendan returns with a major meth problem and needs cosmetic surgery to repair the damage to his face from his drug addiction. Much to Christian’s chagrin, Sean agrees to do the surgery for free.
Christian is jammed up by the taxman and asks Sean if he’ll co-sign a loan against the practice. Sean refuses to put the business at risk, but in the name of brotherhood he offers a personal loan to Christian. But with Brendan’s return, Sean rescinds the offer and uses the money to help his real brother. This doesn’t sit well with Christian and he comes up with a plan to reclaim his position as Sean’s ‘brother’ by getting Brendan out of their lives. Christian also commits one of his biggest acts of betrayal in the history of the show, when he forges Sean’s signature on a second mortgage on the business to float himself some cash to pay off his tax bill.
With this episode now in the past we start looking forward to the bittersweet moment that is yet another season finale of Nip/Tuck next week.
Like everyone else, we work in an office with desks and chairs and grim fluorescent lighting. Check out where our writers and production staff create the Nip/Tuck magic!
Outside our Nip/Tuck production office, notice the bikes - its our main way
of getting around the lot! The golf cart is ours too, but the bikes are more fun.
Here’s the crew taking lunch on Stage 2, what we call our ’swing stage’.
Basically it’s a stage that we build different sets on - its been Michelle
Landau’s office in Season 4 and the old Miami McNamara house in Seasons 1-4,
amongst many other temporary sets.
This is where Julian McMahon, Dylan Walsh, Kelly Carlson, and Roma Maffia
take their breaks and enjoy some down time. They’re pimped out with flat
screen tvs, fridges, bathrooms, and a comfy couch.
This is just outside Stage 2. You might remember it from the Season 5
episode where Freddy Prune takes the boys on a golf cart ride around the lot
showing them the set of ‘Hearts and Scalpels’.
The entrance to our writer’s offices. They are connected by a hallway to
our production office.
Inside the hive: don’t let the apparent calm fool you, our production office
is the epicenter of the Nip/Tuck world. Buzzing with ringing phones,
whirring copy machines, and our awesome staff we couldn’t function without
it.
Every day our production team keeps track of the scenes scheduled to shoot
that day - their order, length, location, and start and finish times. We try
to keep everything on track for a twelve hour day.
When this light flashes, do NOT go in! It tells us when the cameras are
rolling so no one comes in and ruins the shot - directors aren’t so happy
when you wander into a scene.
Ryan’s immaculate sense of style doesn’t stop at our sets. Every
couch/lamp/ceramic horse is personally selected by the man himself. Just
above the metal lamp on the left you can see the entrance to Ryan’s office.
You may recognize the dog standing sentinel at his door from Kimber’s house
in Season 3.
The other side of our writers offices. The wooden table, daily strewn with
the trades, has been the centerpiece of many lunches and wild conversations
with Ryan and our writers.
Lets talk about sex, baby! Tracy and Skip Pierce are in a relationship without it and espouse the virtues of celibacy when they ask the doctors to make them look more like their idols, Barbie and Ken…the iconic toy dolls. This gets Sean thinking maybe the focus on physical gratification is what’s ruined relationships for him in the past, especially in light of Julia’s latest decision to take the kids back to New York. Christian has an eye-opening experience during a consult with Liz’s friend, a plus-size woman named Lola Wlodkowski, who proves to Christian that good things can come in large packages. When Christian admits to Kimber his infidelity (yep, they’re on again) she is surprisingly fine with the betrayal because it gives her the chance to indulge her inner fatty. Kimber’s food bender leads to gorging and purging, and forces Christian and Kimber to face what defines their relationship – and decide if it’s enough.
Sean ultimately realizes sex and intimacy IS vital and his passionate argument about the importance of human connection resonates with Tracy and leads to a down and dirty session on the recovery room floor. This works out well for Tracy when Skip admits he’s gay, but things don’t end as well for Lola, who learns she has skin cancer but finds an empathetic ear in Christian. The episode ends with Christian knocking Kimber’s and Tracy’s boots together while Sean spends the evening with an upscale hooker.
…And she’s (he’s?) back! Not only has Alexis decided to become a woman again by getting breast implants, but everyone in the Nip/Tuck family is trying to change something. Christian attempts to improve Matt’s prison situation by bribing the warden to get Matt a private cell away from the grips of his abusive cell-mate, Denny. Sean and Julia hire a lawyer to fight Erica’s charges, and Annie gets sucked into Renaldo’s world of fashion with seductive private photo shoots. Change comes with a price however, and Christian’s goodwill attempt leaves Matt bloody and beaten by an angry Denny who promises to continue to abuse Matt unless Christian gives Matt breast implants. Matt begs Christian to give him implants in order to keep Denny happy. Erica catches Renaldo sneaking a pair of Annie’s panties, and while nothing sexually inappropriate takes place, Eric won’t jeopardize her granddaughter’s welfare and she kicks Renaldo out of her life. Eric realizes her overzealous quest for youth clouded her judgment and she drops her custody case for Conor and Annie. Oh, AND Sean and Julia get it on.
But Julia can’t forget the pain her mother has inflicted. While helping Erica pack her bags to move back to Italy, Julia stashes a bag of cocaine in Erica’s carry-on – enough to get Erica arrested at the airport and out of Julia’s life forever. Christian refuses to give Matt breast implants but sneaks him a vial of chemical castration pills to keep Denny impotent. When Denny finds out he’s been drugged, he attempts to beat Matt again – but this time Matt fights back and kills Denny.
Little video for ya…thought you might like a tour of stage 4, aka the offices of McNamara/Troy. You know, where alllll the magic happens. We met up with production designer Liz Kay so she could show all the ins, outs, and secrets of the set.
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