‘Desperate Housewives’ is all about Bree

[Spoiler warning: This story speculates on what will happen on "Desperate Housewives" this season. Don't want to know? Don't read.]

It's easy to pick a favorite character on ABC's hit "Desperate Housewives." Some viewers identify with quirky Susan, the lovable goofball who lets her daughter mother her more than she should. Harried Lynnette may not be June Cleaver, but her troubles with an army of bratty children is at least recognizable. Up until her husband's prison woes and her own unplanned pregnancy, Gabrielle lived a dream life — glamorous looks, tons of money, little responsibility (or morals, it seems). Edie too has her fans, since she's one of the few Wisteria Lane residents to tell it like it is.

But in the first season of "Housewives," it was Marcia Cross' Bree who held the show together, and it was her tragedy in the season finale that will direct the second season of the hit show.

Bree had it all together when the season began. She was preppy-lovely, if a bit of an ice queen. Unlike Susan, her marriage had (seemingly) held together. Unlike Lynette, her children were beyond tantrum stage and required less of her attention. Unlike Gabrielle, she seemed to have a solid sense of herself and her place in the world. She was a mother, a wife, a woman who'd done her time in the trenches of child-care and struggle. Her life was neat, her china polished, her designer ensembles perfectly pressed.

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From her position as the oldest member of the "Housewives" coffee klatch, she could dispense advice to the younger women. In fact, when Lynette was at the end of her rope with the terrible twins, it was a smartly administered, good old-fashioned spanking from Bree that snapped the boys, at least temporarily, back into line. (Lynette was at first horrified, but later wasn't above using future Bree spankings as a threat to encourage good behavior.)

But Bree's perfection was itself a mask, and it started cracking early. In the very first episode, her family rebelled against her starched family dinners, and it's at a restaurant that husband Rex asks for a divorce. In response, she nearly kills him in a most domestic way, serving him onions despite his deadly allergy. She claims to want counseling, but even there, her decades of stiff perfection interfere — she's so focused on a loose button on the doctor's jacket that she can't, or won't, face the dissolution of her own marriage.

The dark side of Bree
Bree is no innocent, undeserving of blame for her problems. She did some awful things in the show's first season, understandable perhaps, but still things that would cause Miss Manners to faint dead away. She told an entire dinner party about Rex's tendency towards tears at, uh, intimate moments. When she discovered her son, Andrew, had gone to a strip club, she took the door off his bedroom. When Rex leaves her and gives the children gifts, she tells them they'll be kicked out of her home unless they return the gifts. Bree isn't quite Mother of the Year material.

Sometimes there was a good heart deep inside the Chanel suits. Bree often acted according to the rules of her preppy code, then regretted it. When Andrew caused a hit-and-run accident, she wanted to help him cover it up, yet also slowly became shocked at his lack of remorse. When she discoverd he was smoking pot, she dropped an anonymous tip to his school, getting him kicked off the swim team. She has few qualms, it seems, about sending him to a juvenile detention center after he's expelled from school. But once he's there, she's all but destroyed by his lack of affection for her — although not so much as to accept him when he claims to be gay.

Bree's own childhood was hardly blithe. When she helps Mary Alice's son deal with his mother's suicide, we learn that her own mother was killed when she was a child, and are left with the chilling image of a young Bree washing her own mother's blood off the street. It's apparent that she started burying her worries in domestic duties at an early age, and never outgrew it.

Has Bree lost any love she once had for her husband? She appeared horrified that Rex has taken to visiting Maisy Gibbons, the neighborhood dominatrix, but her own attempts at intimacy with him are interrupted by her domestic OCD — during a tender moment, she's too distracted by a burrito to continue. Yet when she began seeing creepy pharmacist George, she claimed she was still in love with her husband. What that love meant to her is never clear. Was there something about Rex as a person that still appealed to her, or has that been lost in the decades of child-raising and managing a home? She's as cruel to him as she is to her children at times, but her battle to hold her family together continued.

Why Rex won’t be back
The events of the "Desperate Housewives" finale changed the lives of all the Wisteria Lane women. Gabrielle went from rich and responsibility-free to penny-pinching and pregnant. Lynette is heading back to work, while husband Tom will stay home, corralling their children. Poor Susan, who just wanted love, now finds her life, and the life of mysterious boyfriend Mike, in peril. But it's Bree whose life was changed the most irrevocably, the most dramatically, when she was told by a doctor that Rex had died in the hospital.

Many viewers didn't believe the show had actually gone so far as to kill off Rex. Sure, characters had died before, but we never knew Mary Alice, and no one liked Mrs. Huber.  And the circumstances surrounding Rex's demise were suspicious. None of his family was there when he breathed his last, and the news was delivered by phone by a doctor who was a friend of Rex's. That combined with some of his earlier musings led many to believe the death was faked, that Rex believed Bree had killed him and hoped to force her to confess.

But series creator Marc Cherry told a meeting of the Television Critics' Association that Rex is indeed dead, no question. Another scene would have made it perfectly clear (perhaps a hospital scene?) but the show was running long, so he left the doctor's phone call to deliver that information. He didn't count on the creative minds of devoted fans, who weren't ready to see Rex go, and easily imagined numerous scenarios in which he wasn't dead.

Since he is, Bree's life has shattered more than any of the other women's, irrevocably so. Whatever her feelings about Rex, he is both the father of her children and the man around whom she built her life and her image. She played desperate, nasty games with him and with her children, and she paid dearly for it.

Kudos to the writers, they neatly created a season-ender in which each woman must restart her life, facing a host of new problems. They've been torn down, and now they must begin again. There's a William Butler Yeats quote: "Now that my ladder's gone, I must lie down where all the ladders start, in the foul rag-and-bone shop of the heart." Bree's ladder has been torn out from under her, and more than any other character, she must start almost completely over. Instead of blaming Rex or trying to circumvent or punish him, she now has only herself.

Gael Fashingbauer Cooper is MSNBC.com's Television Editor.