Episode Report Card Jacob Clifton: A+ | Grade It Now! YOU GRADE IT I Am Highly Flammable Right Now
By Jacob Clifton | Season 5 | Episode 4 | Aired on 06.29.2009
she eats dogs, and she tells him to "Get the fuck out," calling him an "asswhore," and Silas thinks about that but doesn't reply.(I sure am glad they didn't rent that space! I'd hate to see one more empty stereotype that exists solely for cheap laughs on a show that once prided itself on skewering stereotypes and now just seems to enjoy them. That would really suck. Maybe Clinique can come be a fat-assed illiterate black whore on the corner outside the chinky old bitch's drycleaning service and she can say everything with the "izzle" in it while the old bitch keeps replacing her /r/ and /l/ phonemes and calling assholes asswhores and actual ass whores, like Clinique, she can call them assholes. Or Clinique could turn that faggot bottom babydaddy out, and he could be both! He'd love it, too, you know, because he craves having all kinds of things in his rectum, almost as much as he loves talking about it. That would be so fucking funny, I'd really get a kick out of it. And oh, so edgy.
I love the show enough that I keep jumping back to feeling like there's something I'm not getting, but here's the deal: if the characters do it, that's one thing, because you're saying something about the characters. Silas worries that all Mexicans look alike to him, so he asks for clarification: that's funny, and sweet. But this isn't the characters doing it, it's the show doing it. This isn't Doug's idea about what other people are like: this is the show creating stereotypical characters in order to laugh about and at them, and for no other real reason. And then somehow Doug's racism on top of that makes it okay? It doesn't. It's gross. Go back to Sarah Silverman School, and actually fucking pay attention this time, Lampanelli. There is a difference.)
Whatever, so Nancy can't force the "plastic demon from hell" to snap into place; ironically, the script can't get "the 'X demon from hell' joke from 1992" to snap into place either. WTF, guys. Seriously. For such a great episode, this sure is a shitty episode. The swing stares at her, zenning calmly, and she lies back on the floor in her cute cowboy boots and stares at the ceiling. "Mommy... Needs to get drunk," she whines, which would be funnier if she, um, hadn't done that like yesterday, and then Ignacio drags Roy Till's unconscious form past her, in the front door and through the house.
"He looks little! He's heavier than a sea turtle!" She sits down on her bed, upstairs, looking at Till's prone form while Ignacio breathes heavily. Apparently Till was looking in the window, presumably trying to find Nancy. She laughs and asks what the hell he'd be arresting her for now, after all she's done for him, and Ignacio laughs because obviously Roy Till is coming to kill her: "Pistola. Cuchillo. Puño de hierro," he says, pulling them one by one off Till. And dripping from the last? "Sangre de hombre muerto!" Sorry, Sucio.
Ignacio, I guess not figuring out whose blood it is, licks the brass knuckles, which freaks Nancy and all of us, and then tosses his wallet and the Dirty Dancing photo on the bed beside her. "No badge. Today he's no cop, today he's Rambo." He nudges Till awake joyfully, the better to tase him again, and tosses the taser to Nancy too. What's he going to do now? "Put him in the tub!" Ignacio giggles. "Oh, because he peed his pants. Right." Yes, but that's not all: Ignacio burbles sweetly that he will also be burning Till's clothes, draining his blood, and most exciting of all, melting Till's bones with acid. "Oh, right..." she says vaguely, and then tases Ignacio too. "Not in my tub," she says quietly.
"What's that thing supposed to be?" Shane asks about the swing, and Andy mournfully tells him. "Domestic bliss." It does, indeed, look like someone shit out a Tilt-A-Whirl. Andy asks him, as the moral center of the family, if he should impersonate his dead brother and "pseudo-steal" the money, "for the greater good of the family." (And you know, I think he means that part.) Shoving headcheese sandwiches into his bag, Shane nods and says all Judah's passwords are up in his sock drawer, and tells Andy to wear a hat due to their filial resemblance being somewhat thin. (There's a whole dark/light thing here, with the siblings, but you can't say that was really planned. Well, maybe Jill was the latest one on purpose.)
Andy's happy for the direction the moral center provides, and asks what Shane's up to with all the pot he's ganking. Why, selling it to his English teacher, and if it pleases Andy to assume this is for "the good of the family" -- the family, of course, that recently tried to ship his ass to Oakland -- he's welcome to do so. Andy is alarmed, dismayed, fearful that Silas will kill Shane, but mostly he's regretful that Shane's "true north" is no more. "What can I say? I'm a Botwin. We're not responsible for anything we do." (In the parlance of the day this is called being "on the nose," and it is both fulfilling and irritating sometimes.) Shane spins a piece of the baby swing like a compass gone mad, and leaves Andy to his thoughts.