Just as the “Sons” episode itself was jam-packed… so was the wedding, in a very good way, when it finally happened.

“Shaun Robert Murphy, do you take Lea Abigail Dilallo–”

“I do!” exclaimed the groom impulsively. Endeared chuckles rippled through the small gathering of friends seated before them; as they died down, Shaun realized his error and took his eyes off his bride just long enough to let Dr. Andrews know it was okay to continue. 

“--To have and to hold, to honor, to treasure, to be by her side, through sorrow and joy, through the good times and the bad… and to love and cherish her always?”

“I do,” Shaun repeated, much more deliberately this time.

“Lea Abigail Dilallo, do you take Shaun Robert Murphy to have and to hold, to honor, to treasure, to be by his side, through sorrow and joy, through the good times and the bad… and to love and cherish him always?”

Her groom continued a steady gaze her way, rocking excitedly back and forth on his feet all the while. As she watched him, and listened to the vows she’d soon affirm, her smile only grew bigger and warmer. The long wait to say the words was finally over, and her assurance in saying them had only strengthened over time.

“Oh yeah, I do.”

Dr. Andrews then called for the rings; as Lea was given one from Maid-of-Honor Jordan, Shaun was handed the other from his Best Man– the one he now clearly recognized as the “father” in his life. Dr. Glassman gave Shaun a reassuring pat on the back as he turned to face Lea again, holding the heirloom band of gold delicately. 

With the slightest of his trademark “Okay”s, he slipped it onto her outstretched ring finger… the reverence of the action growing with every second between them. Lea then did the same, her eyes mirroring Shaun’s wonder and quiet joy. This was it. This was happening.

“Then by the power vested in me by the state of California… I now pronounce you husband and wife!” Andrews announced as now both of them could barely hold still with their happiness. Lucky for them, they didn’t have to anymore.

“You may kiss the bride… and you may kiss the groom!”

Lea had been the one to take the lead and kiss Shaun when their love officially took flight two years earlier. This time it was Shaun, confident and convinced, that reached out and pulled Lea to him in their first kiss as a married couple. Their friends whooped and cheered their approval, soon rising to their feet as Shaun and Lea turned to face them and raised their joined hands in triumph.  No more “when”.  Their time was now. 

It’s not about the details, I’ve concluded.

If I went to everyone in #Shea Nation one by one and asked “Was there anything missing from the final draft of the wedding that you really wish they’d included?” I could probably drum up a decent list, with some minutia seeming much more important than other minutiae. My contribution would be the following… and to save time, I’ll cover the rebuttals to each parenthetically:

• I wish they hadn’t defaulted to a “hospital” wedding.

  • (Yeah, but having it on the rooftop was way better than the lobby.)

• I wish Shaun’s tux purchase from S1 had been acknowledged/used.

  • (Who cares; and for all we know that WAS Shaun’s S1 tux.)

• I wish they’d written their own vows (and or that we’d actually gotten to hear them if they did).

  • (Yeah, but they had a totally inspired alternative in adapting the vows Lea and Morgan heard while watching POTW’s wedding video.)

• I wish Lea’s flowers hadn’t been inadvertently re-purposed from what now looks to be a most tragic situation.

  • (Eh, Jordan didn’t know any better so Lea had no idea. No big deal.)

• I wish Lea’s parents had been there.

  • (They aren’t central to Lea’s life; at least, not that we can tell. We’ve only seen them once, after all. I didn’t miss them.)

• I wish Claire had been at the REAL wedding.

  • (At least we got to see her involved in the almost-wedding.)

• I wish they had a real wedding cake (or cakes, as per Shaun’s early suggestion), topped with tiny toilet paper rolls. Or a little model car. Or batteries! 

  • (That’s true, but it’s not like they forgot the cake altogether… and having to use an abandoned birthday cake instead was a testament to its spontaneity.)

• I wish there was more “power vested in” Andrews than a simple reference that his father was a minister earlier in the episode. 

  • (Yeah, but if anyone at St. Bon’s was capable of marrying people it would be him, right?)

• I wish Lea had been given a scene where the women of St.Bon’s scurried to find her something old/new/borrowed/blue. And what if Glassy was able to contribute something along those lines… wouldn’t that have been lovely?

  • (I know what you mean, but the Shaun/Glassman moment that we witnessed was by far the more important one.)

• I wish they’d had a “first dance” to music that was actually rooted in their history.

  • (Yeah, but we DID get a little “Islands in the Stream” during “The Shaun Show”...)

• While the “garter toss” tradition I could take or leave, I’d have enjoyed a bouquet toss on Lea’s part. Oh, the speculation it might have generated depending on who caught it!

  • (Traditions like this rarely make it into TV weddings anyway.)

• And while I knew the appearance of a “real” honeymoon (or even their first wedding night) was not very likely, I’d have appreciated a hint that something was coming in the near future. Something other than Shaun having to immediately ditch his tux for medical scrubs, that is.

  • (At least they alluded to the “fake honeymoon” they got after they ghosted the other wedding…!)

Whether your wish list matches mine or not… or, you couldn’t care less about such stuff… my point remains: It’s not about the details. 

What it IS about is the overarching wedding storyline of S5. In writing #Shea’s “wild ride” to the altar, I think TGD created a road so fragmented, with so many loops doubling back needlessly, that by May 16 Shaun and Lea were exhausted and ready to accept anything… and so were we, as an audience. As is often the case the show did just enough, in the end, to make it worth everyone’s while. I’m not particularly surprised by this… and yes, I do treasure every second of the wedding we finally got. But the “what ifs” and “If onlys” are many, and they didn’t have to be. That’s the crux of it for me.

• We started the season, quite literally, with Lea’s outdoor wedding nightmare… and much ado about Lea’s need for this wedding planning/process to be “perfect”. (By the way, did everyone notice that they got married outdoors after all? And if you did, did you further wonder if the attacks on Lim and Villanueva ultimately equate to the lightning-struck tree falling on Lea? But I digress…)

• But overshadowing much of this were two things: 1) the Salen Morrison/EthiCure takeover, and 2) Glassman’s post-midlife crisis, which manifested itself as an abandonment of Shaun (among other things). These factors, along with Lea’s choice to delete Shaun’s poor patient satisfaction scores (arguably a by-product of the Salen takeover), led to all kinds of breakdowns… the most visible being Shaun’s, as none of us can forget him curled up against the pharmacy wall, sobbing, with a balled-up wedding site contract in front of him and a stunned and distraught Glassman and Lea on either side.

• Then came “Dry Spell,” “Growing Pains,” and “Potluck”--  three episodes in a row that did nothing at all to advance the wedding subplot.

• By the time we saw “My Way,” which introduced Sophie’s reality-show idea, a month had passed in real life since Shaun’s proposal (who knows how long in TV time??)... and while Lea signed on to the Hulu series idea in part because “planning a wedding sucks,” there didn’t seem to be a scrap of evidence that Lea had done so much as booked a single reservation, haggled with a vendor, or waited endlessly for an email reply. 

• Then, obviously, came the “Shaun Show/Lea Show” detour of the next two episodes… and while I’ve already detailed my likes and dislikes with both contributions quite recently, the biggest problem of all, in retrospect (for me, anyway), was the weird quantity-over-quality thing. Because by the end of 5 x 17, what exactly did we have?

  • Time spent in churches, but no wedding.

  • A few minutes trying on a wedding gown that was not to be used anyway.

  • Several more minutes dealing with formalwear that didn’t meet Shaun’s needs and negated his previous formalwear fittings.

  • Gifts that were discussed at length that looked like they would be returned, unopened (though they had great fun with this theory in “Sons”)

  • Parents that supposedly came into town, but we never saw.

  • A dear friend who flew in as a surprise guest, but never got to witness a wedding ceremony.

  • Discussion of food and decorations that went unseen and/or unappreciated.

  • Discussion of wedding vows (Shaun’s, anyway) that went unheard.

  • No bridal shower to speak of, an ill-advised “stag party” that fell apart before it began, and no wedding rehearsal.

  • In other words, it was a whole lot of WEDDING… that somehow amounted to no wedding. And no wedding plans going forward.

  • So by the time they got to the season finale (“Sons,” 5 x 18), it was as if TGD had #Shea fans exactly where they wanted them– screaming just let them get married already! alongside an exasperated Lea saying she was tired of dress fittings (um, she had an actual dress fitting somewhere in there?) and guest lists (wait, had she been involved in a guest list since the fall??).

  • Next thing we know, Shaun and Lea are minutes from departing for the courthouse when Glassy & Co. swoop in to announce  “ a proper wedding” that just happens to press enough of the right emotional buttons and fit perfectly into the final act. Is that an evil genius at work or what? 

  • Because in addition to all that, lest we forget– the wedding joy served as the perfect counterbalance to the sadness of Asher’s dying father….AND a grisly attack on Lim and Villanueva, several floors below. 

  • For David Shore’s Pound of Flesh must be collected anytime Shaun and Lea hit a milestone in their lives. That much feels certain. Claire’s departure coinciding with Lea’s proposal at the end of “Vamos” (S4 x 20) currently stands as the least grim situation to date. But as some of us have intimated on Twitter already, God help the rest of the cast if Shaun and Lea ever bring a healthy baby into the world…!

  In all seriousness, I’m not crushed about TGD’s need to saddle the wedding with a shocker/cliffhanger… especially as follow-up articles indicate Lim (Christina Chiang) is not leaving the show. 

  Having said that, here’s what I would have done differently aside from the details I mentioned earlier:

  • Kept the buildup to the wedding more consistent once it was clear Shaun and Lea were moving forward with it. How are we supposed to know how they’re feeling about things if we don’t see it? (HAHA, don’t answer that. Assumptions are king on TGD sometimes. This we know.)

  • Either done the reality show idea more comprehensively, or not at all. Many see the whole thing as a way to prolong the actual wedding wait, but it didn’t have to be that way.

  • For one thing (and I know others have said this too)-- both “The Shaun Show” and “The Lea Show” should have had the same writer or writing team. For another (and this feeds off the same idea)– what if they HAD carried out the reality-show wedding, but Shaun and Lea had dug in their heels on what suited them as a couple rather than capitulate to what was wanted for the sake of the spectacle? With the result being something similar to what we ultimately got, but back in episode 19 where it didn’t have to get shoehorned into an episode about three other things? (Oh, and of course that idea would also allow Shaun and Lea to set a great “reality TV” example by donating the unspent funds to a charity of their choice. I heard that idea a couple times as well.)

None of that matters now, of course. As I’ve said before, showrunners seldom seem to need, want, or even care that much about viewer input. And doing what we call in the States “Monday morning quarterbacking” (AKA the kind of thing I’ve done here) is easy stuff. 

That’s why I started this whole thing off with a little narrative on what actually DID transpire on the show. Because THAT is now part of #Shea canon.

And that scene with Shaun and Glassman just before the wedding– my goodness. Does it erase a multitude of storyline explanation/resolution sins from earlier in the season? I won’t answer that one just yet. It grabbed too many by the heartstrings to give a definitive answer.

And Glassman’s (makeup) toast, followed with the hug-and-kiss for Lea that we weren’t sure we’d ever see? The way that served to bookend what he did in the season premiere–! Wow, that was powerful stuff. It almost requires me to cut some slack for their insistence on putting the #Shea wedding where they did.

Well…almost.