Episode Report Card Jacob Clifton: A+ | Grade It Now! YOU GRADE IT Never Let Me Go
By Jacob Clifton | Season 5 | Episode 1 | Aired on 06.08.2009
ot anymore. This decision was made before the baby; this decision was made the day she met with Till. She was in a whole new world and she didn't even know it; she still dressed up for him and hoped for the best. She still loved him, she was still attracted to him. He's letting her go; he's already let her go, and she looked right past it. She lies on the table and waits for them, and cries.Speaking of humiliation, Rudolfo leads Celia back into the tent, having taken her out for a bathroom break. "You're supposed to wipe front to back! If I get some infection..." He ties her back up while Quinn scowls; she opens up to her daughter, in a way. "Enough is enough," she says: Quinn's proven her point, she's angry. Celia must make amends, for her many mistakes. She still has no idea how to do that, or what it means; she has no idea it's basically impossible, after Casa Reforma and the fifteen years of abuse that led there. Her idea of amends, her proposal, is to charge ("and worry about it later!") a week at a spa. Quinn is amused. She left spa treatments a few miles back. Celia's actually serious: she wants Quinn to forget "all this silliness," and go have some rehydrating facials: "You look a little dry there, honey."
Quinn gives some weird, shitty dramatic laugh and brings the laptop around to show her mother a very intense picture of that guy in the bathtub of ice that is burned into your head and mine. "They're gonna saw you open, Mom." They'll slice out Celia's corneas, kidneys, lungs. Not the liver, considering her past, but they'll take the rest and put it in coolers and sell it on the black market, and Quinn will net $100,000 easy, and toast her mother's memory from the deck of her beach house. Celia shakes her head sadly. "Oh, honey," (beat) "You can't buy a beach house for 100K." Heh. Quinn's not listening: she wants to be there when they take out her heart, to prove she has one. To be just a body, not the woman inside it.
"I survived cancer and rehab for this?" She asks for a drink, then; Rudolfo jerks to his feet. "You had cancer?" Quinn screams at him not to start empathizing, but that's not the point: "You had chemo?" Chemo, radiation... Celia stays on topic, asking for more of those roofies they used on her, if nothing else is available. Rudolfo slows down, to explain the black market to Quinn: they won't take her organs, all irradiated and poisoned this way. "And a double mastectomy!" she says triumphantly, pointing at her daughter.
And I guess this, I really do like, because there's always been a sort of rat-poison saccharine thing with Celia, where her strength is her toxicity in just this way: the things that have happened to her, that have warped her, have always been what protected her. I have terrible allergies in Austin, because we love the earth here; in Houston, where the air is hot and dead and full of particulates, I never had a single sneeze, because there was nothing alive there to kick the histamines up. I loved it in the city. So I guess this is the same thing as the Coke bottles, in a way: her hail of frogs was diet soda, but no less desperate or mythic, for all that. And although all of Ren-Mar couldn't be less interested in saving her body, the bad guys are no more interested in selling it for parts. Jail, rehab, that scary crackhead that got fucked with a mannequin leg: when the world ends, it's going to be Celia Hodes and the cockroaches. And that is power, my friend: Bitch never missed the bear, and she never will.
Quinn attacks her mother dreadfully, knocking her chair backward and kicking at her like a soccer ball, and eventually Rudolfo is horrified enough that he shoves Quinn down and tells her to get out of the tent and his life. "You are a mean person!" She takes this in stride, bouncing immediately after a lunge at Rudolofo and a last little chuckle at his cringing away. "Have fun together!" The second she's gone, of course, he collapses weeping and Celia -- still tied to the chair and on her back, still covered in spaghetti or whatever -- rolls her eyes. "Oh, good Christ."
"My eyes! My eyes!" Doug screams, playing with some kid toys, and Silas tells him if he doesn't help pack everything up, he can't come with. Doug whines predictably about this and that, and Shane comes in worrying about Andy, who's stress-baking a million loaves of banana bread. Doug spills the beans about the baby, and Shane's shocked and confused. "Knocked up, Private! Baby on board! Muffin in the muff! Argh!" scream the soldiers in his hands; Silas yells at him for telling Shane about the baby, and Doug's like, "What! I didn't knock her up!" Shane's pretty much horrified, but I mean, let he who furiously masturbates to a picture of his own mother cast the first stone or whatever.
Nancy comes in sniffing, trying to tease Andy back into being on her team, making a show of how he's not talking to her by talking directly to him about the banana bread. He's like, "Pregnant woman have heightened senses or whatever," and she points out that he's talking to her. "Well, I've been thinking. Just because you've been a slutty irresponsible slutty slut who had unprotected sex with a Mexican gangster doesn't mean we can't be friends, right?" Hated that wordy word word tic the first season, still hate it five years later. It's not even funny, no matter what profanities or pointlessly gross words you toss in there. "Wanna lick the spatula?"