Jamie Caliri’s opening titles for United States of Tara feature a host of frighteningly good characters mostly hosted by the brilliant Toni Collette’s Tara, herself a Kansasian mother and artist suffering from dissociative identity disorder and related memory suppression.

Tara’s alters; “T,” a temperamental teenage tart, Alice, a strong (and strongly repressed?) 50’s housewife, and Buck, the brawling, chain smoking, self-proclaimed war vet all pop up for reasons unknown. At the end of the sequence Tara emerges in ascension as it is she who shelters her alters. And she is derailed. And she is saved.