‘Desperate Housewives’ is all about Bree

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.

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