‘Alaskan Bush People’ Season 10 Finale: ‘The Big Push’ (RECAP)

In the Alaskan Bush People Season 10 finale episode “The Big Push” (September 8), the Brown siblings struggle to finish their ambitious homesites as the ground begins to freeze. Later, the Wolfpack gets the call that Rhain Alisha has gone into labor and races to the birth of baby Eli.

 

WINTER IS RIGHT … WHERE? What in the hell is going on? Last week the Browns were pretending to hurry up and finish things before winter. This week, winter is over, and the Browns have to hurry up and finish things before SPRING IS RIGHT THERE! We’re dealing with some half-assed alternate Bush Space-Time Continuum here.

Billy and Mother Ami are in the barn just gushing over the colt that was born in last week’s episode. I didn’t mention it in the recap, but the gestational period for horses is 11-12 months. Billy got the horses during the time of the canned pheasant hunt and feast, which supposedly took place after Thanksgiving. So either A) The Browns are really stupid and didn’t know they bought a very pregnant horse, or B) The pregnant mare is not one of the two horses that Billy purchased for Birdy and Rainy. The production likely borrowed a pregnant horse and filmed the birth.

Mother Ami thinks the colt should have a special name. This is the best she can come up with.

That’s just terrible, but still better than Merry Christmas Kathryn Raindrop Brown.

Meanwhile, the family is busy carving out their mountain paradigm [sic].

It’s finally time for the Brown siblings to achieve their independence by living on their overbearing father’s property and being financially shackled to him and his miserable TV show.

For Birdy, the top priority is fashioning a broom out of some branches so she can make her house nice and tidy for her seven cats. “I think every house needs a broom, to be honest,” she says.

She says “to be honest” as though this were something one would lie about. Is this some great revelation? Is broom possession a controversial subject? I am thinking about this too much, and it hurts the brain. Now I understand why Discovery Channel viewers don’t really think about stuff.

Youngest daughter Rainy is going to live in a trailer, which is a very realistic goal for her.

Rainy’s going to build a little “she shed” type of place that someone on the production crew saw on Pinterest. It will look something like this, only much sadder.

Gabe helps Rainy drive the trailer to her piece of land. It’s an incredibly long and pointless scene about Gabe driving too fast through the muddy roads and Rainy getting behind the wheel and taking things nice and slow. As we’ve seen before, Gabe gets really excited in the driver’s seat.

We now go to Coeur d’Alene, Idaho. It is here, more than 200 miles and four hours’ drive from Brown Star Ranch, that Noah and She Who Will Not Be Named have settled to give birth.

SPOILER ALERT! Elijah Connor Brown was born February 26, 2019. Noah and She Who Will Not Be Named were married in August 2018. You might be thinking that She Who Will Not Be Named got knocked up three months before the wedding, but, you know … Bush Space-Time Continuum.

The expectant parents are living in a hotel room. If you believe the show’s timeline, they’ve been renting this room for nearly three months. They’re catching up on important stuff like writing a blurred-out labor wish list. (There will be no Pitocin administered during the delivery. Neither of them has any idea what Pitocin is, but they insist on having none of it!)

They also test out the car seat on a very realistic looking doll. [DIGRESSION! I tested our first car seat using a Bart Simpson plush doll.] It looks like Noah and She Who Will Not Be Named have everything that new parents need, except for real jobs and health insurance and little stuff like that.

A great deal of this episode consists of the Browns telling us that Mother Ami likes to give birth in really creepy places.

This is the third or fourth different account of Rainy’s birth that the Browns have given us. They can’t even keep track of their own B.S. Here’s another good one.

And another.

What were the Brown kids’ childhoods like? “Imagine munchkins. Now throw them in leather jackets and 1980s hair styles and give them chains and bats,” Noah says. They haven’t changed a bit.

Back at Brown Star Ranch, Gabe and Birdy are busy cutting lumber for their various housing projects. There’s some Unnecessary Drama involving Gabe almost dropping a tree on himself and Birdy getting agitated about it.

Gabe then has to consult the Bureau of Bush Weights and Measures to determine how many Birdies of wood they need to cut.

Gabe says they need a lot of boards, which gets translated as “borage” by the closed captioners, who are the hardest-working people involved with this show.

Borage is “a herbaceous plant with bright blue flowers and hairy leaves, used medicinally and as a salad green.” It’s also rich in borophyll. Right?

Sorry. On to the next scene of Unnecessary Drama, which involves Bam and Bear hauling Haydite blocks up to Castle Ridge in an effort to start laying the foundation of Noah’s deathtrap. I don’t know why they’re suddenly calling these blocks Haydite — which is lighter than concrete — since the stuff they pulled out of the demolition site in last week’s episode looked like regular blocks, not fancy blocks. My brain is ouchy again.

Last week, Noah said he would need just over 300 blocks to build his castle. Someone did the math and determined it would actually require about 4,000 blocks. So the Browns should be done with this around Season 17-ish.

Bam is driving the Chevy Suburban with its trailer full of Haydite blocks. Bear is just being a pain in the ass. The Suburban gets to a point on the hill in which it just can’t take any more of this fake stuff and quits. Bear wants to get out and push, which sounds like an AWESOME and EXXXXTREME way to die.

Bam says the only way to get up the hill is to ditch some of the blocks on the side of the road and come back for them later. It looks like there are 32-ish blocks in the trailer and they unloaded about 12. At this pace, it will take them 125 trips to get 4,000 blocks up the hill. I’m sure they’ll show us EVERY FREAKIN’ ONE of them.

Up at Castle Ridge — I really need to come up with a more fitting name for this place — Gabe and the others are trying to lay down the castle’s foundation according to Noah’s plan. The ground is frozen, so they first have to start a bunch of fires to thaw the dirt. Then they have to drain the swamp from the snowmelt before they can level out the ground. As tedious as it is to do, it’s 20 times more tedious to watch.

They think they’re doing Noah and his family a favor, but it’s just a complete waste of time. Noah’s the kind of ingrate who will bitch about any little imperfection or deviation from his design, and he’s just going to make them tear it down and rebuild it anyway.

In an integral subplot, we find Bear washing his hair inside one of his shipping containers. He explains that when a hairbrush is unavailable, he combs his hair with a spork. Was the spork clean before this? Will the spork be cleaned after this? Why do I torture my mind with questions such as these?

Birdy is feeling wistful about there being another baby in the family. She reminisces about a time before little Rainy had Instagram, when Birdy had disturbing visions of her and Rainy still living together in the future with their husbands. Now that Rainy’s getting her own trailer, Birdy’s all alone with her seven cats and her sap.

Finally, it’s time for She Who Will Not Be Named to squeeze out a little Brownling. The suspense has been LITERALLY killing me. Noah has everything packed up and ready to go. Noah chooses to leave his weapons at the hotel, a decision he will surely regret.

Word gets to Brown Star Ranch that She Who Will Not Be Named is in labor.

The Browns (even Cupcake!) pile into their SUV. Bam makes the smart decision to drive separately, because spending four hours in a car with his family would be hell on earth.

All the Browns leave their weapons behind, a decision they will surely regret. “I don’t mind leaving my weapons because I am a weapon!” Bear says.

Thanks to Gabe for saying what we’re all thinking. I love how Bear doesn’t even realize he just got owned.

Mother Ami makes this episode’s second forced Wizard of Oz reference when she claims they’re following the Yellow Brick Road leading to their first grandbaby. I can’t wait to wake up in Kansas and find out Alaskan Bush People was just a poppy-induced hallucination.

Part of the reason the Brown kids are messed up is that they’ve witnessed Mother Ami give birth. Well, they weren’t actually seeing the crowning and the “business” going on down there, but still. Matt’s seen the most births of all of them, and look what happened to him.

At the hospital in Coeur d’Alene, She Who Will Not Be Named has been up all night with irregular contractions. At least she has her idiot husband with her to impart knowledge from his “extensive research” on childbirth and a woman’s pain threshold. (Did you know I can withstand 10% more Alaskan Bush People than the average human? It’s true!)

While the Browns are sitting in the hospital waiting room talking about how great the arrival of the first grandbaby is, I should remind you that Elijah isn’t Billy’s first grandbaby. Billy had two daughters from his first marriage. Remember Twila? Twila has two daughters. Sadly, one of them died in a truck accident at age 14. Twila’s other daughter seems like a lovely young woman. They are Billy’s flesh and blood, but he’s totally discounted them because they don’t fit into his Bush family fairy tale. Billy is just a garbage father.

Noah finally emerges from the delivery room and gives the news that little Elijah has arrived. Eli is a cutie. He even smiles, though we know that’s just gas or something. And Noah’s wearing his Bush smart watch again.

Yeah, I’m cynical about the Browns, but I’m not a heartless bastard. I wish nothing but health and happiness for young Elijah. I hope this is the last episode of Alaskan Bush People we’ll ever see and Elijah won’t have to grow up as a clown in his family’s three-ring circus. I’m almost certain that’s not going to happen.

I even have some happiness for Mother Ami, who I’m sure at some point during her cancer battle thought she wouldn’t be alive to see this day.

Spiel time! All the nice warm feels I just had for the Browns’ new arrival got wiped away by Billy’s self-important load of verbal feces.

I love how the show’s editors thought a scene about Rainy’s potty chair would fit nicely in the middle of Billy’s big, important season-ending sermon.

It’s like no matter how grandiose Billy thinks he and his show are, the whole enterprise is essentially just poop in a bucket in the corner of a trailer.

I have no doubt there will be another season of Alaskan Bush People. Ratings will continue to drop, but Park Slope will keep cutting corners and delivering shorter seasons to keep this show cheap and profitable for Discovery.

There’s still more Billy Brown Syndrome, more marriages, more grandbabies, more gold-diggers, more trips to Walmart, more livestock to rent and more things to fake build. There’s just always going to be … more.

It’s time for the season finale edition of “That’s Matt!,” in which we take a social media look at Matt’s sober offscreen adventures:

Matt posted a short video on Instagram of tree sap “turning into amber.” His claim didn’t appear to be scientifically sound, so I researched it. Amber is made from tree resin, not tree sap. Also, amber is the “fossilization of resin that takes millions of years,” so Matt will be waiting a long time for no amber. This video had nearly 21,000 views. Every single person, myself included, is now dumber for having seen it.

Alaskan Bush People, Sundays, 9/8c, Discovery Channel