3.22 Our Wedding

Episode: 3.22

Title: Our Wedding

Written by: Diane Frolov and Andrew Schneider

Directed by: Nick Marck

Aired: May 11, 1992

Log line: Adam and Eve decide to wed for the baby’s sake; Maggie avoids Joel like the plague, still believing that they slept together in Juneau; Officer Semanski serves Maurice with an official complaint.

Listen to our podcast discussion of the episode here.

The sudden wedding of Adam and Eve brings together the whole town in a joyous (yet also anxiety ridden) celebration. It is “Our Wedding,” as townspeople work together to fold 1,000 paper cranes in order to bless the union with good luck (and decorate the church in a most beautiful way). This episode is about the union of two people, Adam and Eve, but it also features a number of couples of all kinds: Chris & Bernard are once again reunited; Holling and Shelly are overwhelmed with the wedding; Maggie & Joel continue their ‘will they or won’t they’ dance; Maggie & Ruth Anne are paired in ‘toilet paper bride’.

Yet at the heart of the episode lies the question around the nature of men and women. Eve, who is against the wedding, takes a feminist view, “This is part of a much larger issue — my identity. Do you know how hard it is for a woman in this society to earn recognition on her own, to be respected as competent and independent? And then to throw it all out the window by getting married, by allowing herself to be consumed by some hirsute man!” Bernard sees the sexes as fundamentally dissimilar and in conflict  “I mean, what are man and woman if not members of two very different and warring tribes?” Chris shares the same view of men and women being made of opposites: “Marriage is the union of disparate elements – male and female, yin and yang, proton and electron.”

Although we learn from Shelly that the wedding colours are blue and white (as the saying goes, “Married in white, you’ve chosen right…married in blue, you’ll always be true”), at the wedding itself, we see that the colours are pink and blue. These colours, of course, remind us of the traditional signifiers for boy and girl. We puzzled over this a little, and assumed that the colours are a reference to Eve’s pregnancy (will it be a boy or girl?), but we realized that colours play a significant part in illustrating the conflict between men and women in the episode.

We realized that red (a bolder shade than pink) and blue were prominent in this episode, and often shown in the same frame. Characters in repeated scenes are shown wearing these colours, and even the background actors were dressed in these colours. We cannot help but believe that the clashing of red and blue highlight the struggle between men and women (much like how the same colours illustrate the struggle between Democrats and Republicans in 3.15 “Democracy in America”).

Here are some examples:

We would be remiss if we failed to note that in an episode of battling reds and blues, we do have a smattering of purple, the union between these two hues. After all, this episode does end with the union of two souls in matrimony, and despite the differences between men and women, they still get together and find peace by the end of the episode. The contradictory thing is, of course, while men and women may often be at odds with each other, we still need the other sex and long for some kind of reconciliation.

Themes / Recurrences: Men and women; relationships.

The Good: Every scene with Adam and/or Eve stands out for us, and the wedding itself is wonderful. Also: Chris’ wedding vows!

The Bad: The scene between Maggie and Joel where she wishes that he hadn’t controlled himself when she was sleeping troubles us, still. We just can’t get over how wrong it seems.

The Notable: The final, lingering shot of the un-caught bouquet. It emphasizes the episode’s ambivalence towards marriage.

On’s Rating: 8.5 out of 10.

Shane’s Rating: 8.0 out of 10.