Episode Report Card Jacob Clifton: A+ | 1 USERS: A+ YOU GRADE IT No Country For Newmans
By Jacob Clifton | Season 6 | Episode 7 | Aired on 10.04.2010
Leveling with him, the way she does when she's alone with him, she explains: "Shane, listen. It's my job to make sure you don't turn out to be a psychopath, okay? So if that means dragging you to some amusement park or... Or slapping you on the head every time you say cunt or bitch or... Motherfucking cunt, I'm gonna fucking do it, okay? Because I'm still your mom, and I haven't finished... Trying to be your mom. Okay? Understood?"
He understands. He thinks it's lame, but he understands. At some point you just have to say it like that. She swoops in for a peck, hopes it'll take. A mobile home is like a snail: It's a house that runs as fast as you do. It's also a good way to take all your baggage with you, because you can't ever leave it behind; you can't outrun the bear. But what she wants to be for him, for her children, is beginning to see the light, and it takes form from both. The good parts of both: To be nimble, to be the center of a unified family. To be one less wolf at the door, or bear in the cave, and part of their lives in a way that can't hurt them.
After a lovely conversation with awesome John Ross Bowie that could go on and on forever as far as I'm concerned, "father/son team" Randy and Mike realize that it's not a butter-sculpting contest, which Andy would admittedly rock, but in fact a butter eating contest. Which is just the grossest thing in the entire world, but gets the point across: They're not in Kansas anymore. They're in a bear cave where men are men and boys eat butter in thirty-pound bouts. The sculptures are all of "Montana's sons and daughters": Gary Cooper, Phil Jackson, Evel Kneivel, Jeanette Rankin, Joe Montana. Good thing they are potheads, because that shit is nasty.
Shane thinks maybe they should cut in the rollercoaster line, because it's ridiculously long, but Nancy tries to explain that the Venn diagram of what they just talked about is larger than shooting people and saying "cunt." It's about respect and self-control, two things of which she is a poet laureate. "Outlaws," Shane opines, "Don't wait in line." He wants to go rogue, like a Teabagger; he wants to talk about going rogue even more, like a Teabagger. Real independent thought, not just rerouted Republican hate. "Outlaws also don't refer to themselves as outlaws, just FYI." If ever there were a line that called out for an iced latte straw-suck it's... Yep, there we go.
So they're going to wait. As a little fat kid spills slushie all over her shoes and his yucky dad's on Bluetooth going, "How much fucking government-subsidized corn we can grow on that land? Fact: We don't have to grow it, and they'll pay us!" Go to the Heartland looking for values, and this is what you get. Dad's still bitching about the line as Nancy and Shane agree that they should do more things together. That they miss Judah.