Killer tension in Desperate Housewives season finale

Last night's Desperate Housewives season finale tidied some loose ends in as orderly a fashion as Bree's housekeeping.

We now know that the dead narrator Mary Alice killed Deirdre who was Zach's junkie mother. And that Mike, the mysterious plumber, was once Deirdre's boyfriend. We still don't know whether he is Zach's father. Or whether, when the series returns, Zach will kill Mike because he thinks Mike has killed Mary Alice's husband Paul.

And we don't know whether the phone call from the hospital telling Bree that husband Rex is dead was some sort of trick. And whether, if he is dead, Bree will be charged with killing him with bananas.

Bananas? Well, he possibly died, or didn't, of potassium poisoning. But the whole thing has been pretty much bananas.

The tradition of clearing up a mystery, while introducing a few more is in the time-honoured tradition of the cliff-hanger. But isn't Housewives supposed to be innovative telly? It wasn't exactly innovative to introduce a new family to the street on the last night of the season and make them, ooh, a bit mysterious.

Despite all this and - as I wrote about the first episode - the sometimes lurching tone, Housewives looked as though it might be worth the hype.

And the finale had its moments. These moments are often Gabrielle moments. She went to court to testify that husband Carlos was not a gay basher. She did this not out of any love for Carlos, except love for his wallet, but because she's pregnant with (probably not) his baby. She struck a deal. If she testified, he had to do all the baby minding including doctors visits because "I'm not putting a car seat in my Maserati". But what about breast feeding? asked Carlos. "Honey," said Gabby, "if you can swing that one, more power to you."

Right. So that's the much-debated feminist component, I suppose.

Or are the men fighting back? Lynette's husband Tom has quit his job and decided that he's going to be the stay-at-home-parent, and she's going back to work. Secretly, he told her, "you miss the pressure and the deadlines and the power lunches".

There's a fairly obvious dilemma just waiting to be played out tediously along those age-old lines: What do women really want?

What I really want is for Mary Alice's little from-the-grave-homilies to be given the chop the way she gave Zach's mother the chop. Now that her secret has been told, is there any reason for her to go on bleating? Oh, probably. It's a gimmick.

The finale ended with her giving little potted assessments of her hopes for her girlfriends. How she hopes one gets what she wants, how one "has hopes for life to be perfect again, even if she realises it never really was," and so on.

Which is about what we might be thinking about a second series. We might have hopes that it'll be perfect again, even as we realise it never really was.