"Naked I came from my mother's womb, and naked shall I return. The Lord gave, and the Lord has taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord." - Job 1:21
In the Bible, Job is an interesting figure. A kind-hearted, relatively prosperous man who has everyone taken from him, including all that he owns and all those he holds dear, and yet despite all that he still believes. In the aftermath of all that loss Job questions his faith, before eventually returning to God.
Up until now, the character on The Path whose journey most resembles that of Job is Eddie, though he lost everything as a result of doubting his faith, instead of the other way around. But after spending the entirety of this season outside of the movement in which he originally found hope and meaning, he finds himself drawn back to the Light, the existence of which he had begun to question.
But this finale, and the season as a whole, added an interesting wrinkle: unlike Job, Eddie is given a choice between family and faith. At the start of the season, both seemed to go hand in hand. In the movement was his family and the faith that he left behind. On the outside, there was nothing but questions. But as this season has explored the balance between family and faith, we've seen that it's not that simple. While family is supposed to be a core tenet of Meyerism, too often are the characters forced to choose between their faith and their loved ones.
On a macro level, this has been explored through the denier policy, but this finale sees the show zero in on the idea, as Eddie tries to have it both ways. With Sarah on the run due to her blackmailing scheme, the finale opens with the Lanes (minus Hawk) hiding in Canada, appearing like a regular, functioning family. In the wake of Richard's death, Eddie now sees family as a priority once more, and has made the decision to protect Sarah from the law.
He has also returned to leading a group of deniers, a following that is only growing bigger. Wishing to abolish the denier policy and re-integrate his followers into the movement, he wishes to bring Meyerism forward. But in his attempts to protect Sarah, family and faith perhaps come into conflict. After all, Sarah's actions have done the movement great harm. Eddie isn't willing to commit to one over the other, and so he and Cal make a deal with DeKaan. She agrees to dismiss the charges in exchange for the movement dropping the Clarksville case, which they agree to. In his attempts to keep his family together, Eddie sacrifices the one good thing the movement has been doing all season.
Of course, Sarah is upset about this, and so she offers Eddie a chance to leave the movement behind so that they can start over, free from it all. Not only is this a huge leap for Sarah, who has always been the series' most devout character, but it's significant because it boils down the series' central conflict of faith vs family to a single choice, and "Job" chooses the former.
The episode's stunning final minutes see the deniers rejoin the movement, and Eddie's tragic choice is in sharp contrast to the joy and hope that fills much of the scene, as family's are reunited all around him. But while things appear okay on the surface, the finale does suggest that further internal conflict for the movement is coming. And so as Radiohead's "Everything in Its Right Place" plays over the closing moments, Meyerism is in a stronger place than it has been in a while, but at what cost?
Grade: A-
