Sweet Magnolias Season 4, Episode 9 ‘Dance Your Sugarplum Off’ prepares the town for Christmas—and for the season finale—by focusing on traditions, both old and new, friendships, both old and new, and the family you build, brick by brick. For Katie, that now includes a lot more people, including Cal (and his mom!) and Isaac, and that’s not just okay, it’s good. It makes the season better.
If there’s anything Sweet Magnolias Season 4 has done is re-establish this show as the ultimate comfort watch. Sure, there are issues—we still have to keep up the drama, after all, but in the end, this show is mostly about community and how people thrive when they can lean on each other through good times and bad times. That’s such a comforting thought in times like this, when it feels like we need community more than ever. And sure, we might not all have a real-life Serenity, but there remains the hope that, wherever we are, we can build a real-life or online community to rival the feeling the town gives us.
MORE: Where is Netflix’s Sweet Magnolias set?
RECLAIMING TRADITIONS
Maddie and her mom asking Cal’s mom about Christmas traditions and what tradition she would like to reclaim was a very sweet moment because it’s one thing to say this family is bigger, it’s another thing to put it into practice. And yet everyone in the family has done their utmost to welcome Cal and his mom into the family. Everyone has also gone the extra mile to welcome Isaac into the family—and that includes Cal himself, who uses his words this episode better than he has at any point in this show. Is that growth we’re seeing, Coach?
The thing about traditions is that they can evolve with time as you grow older, and busier, as your life changes. It’s not about the tradition itself, more often than not. It’s about what the tradition means for you and the people you started the tradition with. The feeling is the thing you want to recreate and that means that the tradition itself can adjust, as long as the people and the feeling remain.
It’s really important to take this into account for these characters as kids grow, people evolve and get new opportunities and things… well, start to change. Change is inevitable. And it doesn’t always have to be bad. You just have to know how to adapt to it.
MORE: What did we want to see in Season 4 of Sweet Magnolias?
WHEN YOU KNOW, YOU KNOW
In a way, it’s kind of absurd that it’s taken so long for Helen and Erik to get to where they are at the end of Sweet Magnolias Season 4, Episode 9 “Dance Your Sugarplum Off” because anyone who knows them could see they were meant to end up here from the beginning. But sometimes the path to the thing you want, the thing that works for you, isn’t straightforward. That doesn’t mean it’s not a path worth being traveled.
Sweet Magnolias has given us very different kinds of love stories. There’s friends to lovers. There’s second-chance romance. There are exes getting back together. There’s finding love again after your marriage falls apart. And whatever the show wants to do next, it seems like there are still a lot of stories left to tell in Serenity. Even if people come and go, and have experiences outside of town.
Because the thing about Serenity is that, above all the romantic tropes it does well, the show excels at found family. And that, well… that’s what sets it apart.
Agree? Disagree? What did you think of Sweet Magnolias Season 4, Episode 9 ‘Dance Your Sugarplum Off’? Share with us in the comments below!
Sweet Magnolias Season 4 is now available to stream on Netflix.
