There's something beautiful about just how mercenary this season finale is. Nashville spent the better part of this season only grudgingly accepting that it was going to have to become a soap if it wanted to survive, and by the time this episode ends, it does. This was my favorite episode since the pilot, but it also feels like a very different show from the one we were promised in that first episode. That’s not necessarily a bad thing—soap with occasional, acutely observed family drama looks good on this show—but it felt in that pilot like Callie Khouri was going to thread an incredibly difficult needle, and at a certain point, she just stopped trying to do that.