Elsewhere in New Orleans, others are struggling to swallow the bitter fruits of their success. Janette in particular is having trouble releasing the control she feels she deserves to have over her restaurant. She wants to take the crawfish ravioli off the menu, resenting its status as the signature dish of her restaurant, not to mention the fact that crawfish is going out of season. This leads to one of the many dust-ups she has with Tim over the course of the episode, including firing one of her chefs and the simple use of her name at the benefit. It’s a very real way to illustrate that in bringing her restaurant to life, she’s basically had to sell herself to a devil she wasn’t quite ready to dance with. When she looks up at the restaurant from the outside, she wears the same expression as someone staring at a prison.
Davis, too, is struggling over a few events in his life of late. Fed up with the music scene, he records one final track on his R&B sampler simply titled “I Quit,” but thanks to the viral success of the song on YouTube the R&B sampler flies off the shelf, putting Davis in something of a quandary – how can he come back to music and capitalize on the success of his song when the song itself says that he quit. Worse than that, his friends have been throwing gigs at him as charity to help during his tough times, including a Bar Mitzvah wherein he is upstaged by the man of the hour himself, a teenager who can tickle the ivories with aplomb.
Annie gets her record put out, and in the celebration that follows she takes up with one of the members of her band, who spends the night with her. It’s a final nail in the coffin of her relationship with Davis. There’s a heartbreaking scene at the end with her leaving the house they shared, piling her things into her bandmates’ van and casting one forlorn look back at Davis. The relationship may have been on the rocks for a while, but the final bit of closure is still hard to take, considering how much I loved those two as a couple. Still, this is the way the world works, and sometimes something good falls apart in the wake of two lives going off on their own direction.
Speaking of things falling apart, Del and Albert’s work with the jazz center comes to an end after they realize that even if the project gets off the ground, the fence around Armstrong Park will remain. Del even gives back his consulting fee, which leaves Nelson flabbergasted. This happens at the benefit concert for Ladonna, a centerpiece sequence that brings together the most characters of this series in a single places that I believe we have ever seen. A wonderful tracking shot gives us an idea of the full depth and breadth of this series.
The best part of the shot may be when Ladonna – holding a fresh plate of food from Janette – runs into Albert, wearing a fresh new fedora to cover his newly bald head, and gets a lift home from him, walking out as Desiree walks in. Somewhere in the background at Sonny and Linh, who are happily engaged and married by the end of the episode during an equally impressive montage charting our main casts’ fortunes. Sonny sat on piano for Del, and after saying goodbye Sonny tells Linh he might not be able to give up music, at which point she says she never asked him to. If Annie and Davis can’t make it, I guess we just have to pin our hopes on Sonny and Linh for a happy romantic ending.
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