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
"You need the fish," she says conspiratorially to him, as they plop his feet down into an aquarium and the fish start eating off the dead skin of his feet. Now that he's stuck, she glances at a curtain, and stands up. He grabs her wrist and she smiles. "What. Bikini wax. You interested? My treat." She whispers: "Hurts like hell, but Esteban really likes it. And I know you like to please the boss..." Something shiny in the left hand so you can't see Houdini fiddling with the keys with his right. The women massage Cesar's hands, and the fishes nuzzle and bite; he realizes something's wrong, and jumps up, casting them everywhere. They scream at him to come back, to pay them, as he runs to the waxing room. It's empty; he's a little sad. He needs definites and definitives if he's going to find her, but now she could be anywhere.
"Only one man ever betrayed my confidence, and that only in a minor matter." -- Harry Houdini
Doug's babbling at Silas as they backpack through Cleveland National Forest, an unceasing monologue of his historical indignities and homophobic slurs; Silas holds up the GPS and does some math. What grade is Doug up to, in the history of his shame? Sixth. They've been walking that long. This is the place. Doug sits down and drinks a Monster and a fake-ass CGI butterfly, blimmering and blue, flutters close to him. He's taken by it. "Alight upon me!" he commands the butterfly, hilariously. Silas heads off to a clearing. "Alight upon me!" Doug is once again disappointed. "Fucker!" He stands and heads off to find Silas -- "Draining the main vein?" -- and comes upon Silas in a garden of pot, huge shrubs of it in ordered rows, at gunpoint.
Guillermo throws his weight around, tossing all the other criminals out of the room so he can sit down and talk on the phone with Nancy. "Lacey LaPlante? The name threw me off." She nods: they check ID at the door. But that's only half the answer. Nancy's gone now, for the rest of the episode. This is how we know. Nancy's not here right now. He smiles and notes how she always keeps her ass covered; he asks if she brought him Krispy Kremes and she laughs hatefully. She offers to send him a care package, like the Jesus bobblehead; she offers to put on a show for him. She thinks about the brick dance and she looks through the glass at him, in his cage.
Guillermo says he'd prefer a story, the one about the gringa princess who calls her DEA buddy and gets a magical tunnel shut down. She counters that she doesn't know that story, just the one about the old woman, lived in a giant shoe. He gets angry; she likes that. "You stepped over the line," he explains, close to losing control, and explains that since she's acting like a big boy now, she'll be treated like a big boy. But a boy isn't what she is; it's what her power has always relied upon and now it's what her survival depends upon: not being a boy. "Yeah," Lacey spits, "I don't think I ever acted, nor desired to be treated like, a big boy."