Episode Report Card Jacob Clifton: A+ | Grade It Now! YOU GRADE IT Daredevil Girl Survives Fall
By Jacob Clifton | Season 5 | Episode 2 | Aired on 06.15.2009
Then last season was a treatise on the power of motherhood, and the pitfalls. The maternity store, Quinn's last-minute takedown and Isabelle's maternal role, Sanjay's baby, Silas's MILF and Shane's proclivities. What could have been a crowning and ever-so-fertile moment of empowerment: Nancy's pregnant with your baby! You are powerless! Has become, in two episodes no less, a concept around which the most demeaning, horrific, scary occasions have accumulated.
There's never been a point at which this wasn't loudly and fabulously a feminist show. The original log line is a masterpiece of Marxist feminist critique: the suburban housewife's skills are systematically devalued both economically and culturally, so White Lady has to jump to a shadow economy -- run, in the beginning, by a black woman and her single pregnant daughter -- because the white man's burden is never having to say you're sorry. She spends two seasons hoping to come back to the fold -- for her cover business to become her actual business, to do the housewife version of economic success, to have a little bakery and coffee shop -- and it only takes a season after that dream dies before the suburb itself is consumed in the flames.
"My professional life has been a constant record of disillusion, and many things that seem wonderful to most men are the every-day commonplaces of my business." -- Harry Houdini
Which brings us here: a second (and third, if you count the cheese shoppe) attempt at legitimacy is undermined by agents of the white man's economy: the maternity shop is shut down, because the shadow economy also purveys guns and drugs. Not women, not the reason she personally brought it down: guns and drugs. Which impinge on the white man's economy, if you see what I'm saying. She ignores the etiquette, and is repaid in kind. Last year she was a figurehead, this year she's less. "Knocked-up Puta Whore" is not a great job description, but it's -- allowing for the misogyny of the appellation -- also not that far off the beam. She is cornered by this, saddled with unfair expectations and the sure threat of death, and a complete lack of respect from those who opinions matter, men, or interest in her internal life. Which frankly, and outstandingly horrible assault notwithstanding, is where she started. It wasn't a leap, it was a fall.
It was also one which she survived.
"Time to go," Cesar says, and Nancy quirks an eyebrow at the camera: Tried that. Didn't help.