As good as last night’s Big Love turned out to be, my personal highlight might have been getting to hear Norman Greenbaum’s “Spirit In the Sky” played over the final credits.

Somehow a song that fuses gospel and psychedelia by a Jewish one-hit wonder proved to be a perfect coda for a show focused on a fundamentalist Mormon polygamist running for political office. >Rolling Stone ranked “Spirit” exactly 333 on its list of the 500 greatest songs of all time. That’s a bit low if you ask me, but you don’t have to be a numerologist or a vinyl devotee to appreciate the purity of that number. Plus, “Spirit” is lodged right between Bob Dylan’s “Subterranean Homesick Blues” and the Rolling Stones’ “Do Ya Think I’m Sexy” shakin’ its bony white butt at 301.

But it wasn’t Rod that was played when Hunter S. Thompson’s ashes were shot out of a cannon, it was “Spirit In The Sky.” And the song's sonic appearance on Big Love, with it's wry undertones, proved an ideal ending to a genuinely funny episode—one that provided a break from the denser, almost gothic episodes of this season.

As Nicki said, “Experience has taught me not to ask big picture questions,” and the episode, “Sins of the Father,” dealt with Big Love’s many big questions through comedy. The episode was written by Seth Greenland, a screenwriter and playwright who also happens to be a novelist. His books, The Bones and Shining City, are sharp satires that retain a certain loving heart—as did last night’s Big Love.

A man’s troubled relationship with his wife can be tragedy. A man’s troubled relationships with three wives perhaps can only be treated as farce. What worked last night was that as Bill’s multiple lives crashed together like a bunch of asteroids that had broken free of their orbits, we could only laugh as he struggled to keep it all together and reestablish order.