Episode Report Card Jacob Clifton: A+ | Grade It Now! YOU GRADE IT I Am The Table
By Jacob Clifton | Season 4 | Episode 8 | Aired on 08.04.2008
And that's your explanation for this season, and last season too. Celia's a good mirror for this: if Celia stopped dancing for five seconds and looked around herself, she'd go quietly insane because her whole life is gone, it burned up in a fire. It was gone before then. So her best bet is to do a bunch of drugs and live this fake half-life where she barely notices her child or her job or the fact that she has no permanent address, and she's completely unprepared for any of that. Nancy? Same exact deal. She's an addict. She's been an addict since Judah died; maybe before, but remember how she wanted her cover business to become her real business so that she could stand on her own? She keeps burning her life down, so she can stay in the game. All Guillermo wanted was for her to run the maternity shop, and she's done everything she can to fuck that up. Why?
If Nancy stopped dancing for five seconds and looked around herself, Judah would still be dead and her kids would still be entirely too fucked up for words. So she's addicted to one thing, which is anything but calm, which takes her further and further out into space, which intensifies the fucked-upness of her life at every turn, which suits her just fine, because as long as she's dancing she doesn't fall apart. Except, like any addict, you have two problems there: one being that nobody can dance forever, and two being the fact of diminishing returns on the high itself. She likes Esteban because he's just like her: no showing fear, no admitting anything real, looking for the next high. And because he's smart, like her, and because he's going to give her permission to go crazier than even she has ever gone before. He makes it look good, he makes it look professional. People have been getting into dangerous and weird sexual relationships with government officials since the dawn of time because it's simultaneously powerless -- which is to say responsibility-free -- and completely empowering, by association. Take a little blood, give a little blood.
Andy and Doug put the ersatz baseball team on a bus and say farewell to Davenport, finally realizing that he's going to Florida and not Iowa or whatever. Andy is somewhat sad to see him go; it's only about ten minutes later -- after a long talk about what great people they are for being coyotes, "doing God's work" -- that they realize they forgot to get paid.
Celia runs back in for more soccer shoe -- "Futbol shoe, whatever you call it" -- and he tells her to fuck off. "It helps me," she whines, and offers to pay. "Let me check my purse," she says, by which she means the till. This is just getting better. Every story about drug dealers is also a story about addiction, because addiction is the gas in the machine.