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
Doug doesn't get it, neither do we, because of the million things we don't get to know about Nancy and her husband is that Judah was a rollercoaster designer, like, for a living. A bit on the nose, Daredevil Girl and Coaster Boy, but also pretty lovely nonetheless. The boys get starry-eyed, even Andy, talking about Judah's pet projects and his designs, and the more they talk the more it starts to look to Nancy like parenting, and the more she thinks about being a parent the more she's not interested in Andy being in charge, so once again she takes the reins. "For old time's sake. Plus, Shane has been kidnapped. It's very traumatic, being kidnapped." Doug whines, it's settled, she zooms right into yelling at the boys about hygiene because apparently today is Be Your Kids' Mom Day. I had no idea.
Andy lectures Nancy about keeping covered up at the fair, going on a sort of paranoiac rant -- "That bearded lady over there? Not a lady at all!" -- before heading into a metaphor that falls apart on him: "You're a squeaky field mouse headed into a bear cave, except the cave is a swarm of people, okay? And the mouse is your own ego. Wait, the cave is..." Nancy gets his point: This is about her ego, and expressing power over Andy as usual: "Willful defiance. Because I laid down rules, but you had to break them."
While Nancy continues to present the case that this isn't about that -- which it is -- but about Shane and how he is losing his childhood moment by moment and killing ladies and autodidacting and pulling guns on Ignacio. Which it also is, vide Shane bragging to Silas about how Ignacio caved like a "coal mine" and a "fucking payaso amateur." Silas begs him to get over himself, and Shane says he's just bitching because he's jealous that Nancy likes him better now.
Which is the best thing of this episode, the running conversation about how Shane has inherited Daredevil Girl's rollercoaster tendencies, and that he's a mirror she can see herself in, as a parent but also as a person. And that all of them, seeing this doubled horribleness or darkness or depravity or whatever you want to call it, are inspired to not be crazy or depraved like Shane and Nancy. So it inspires a sort of belief in right action that, as usual, is cruelly disproved at every point.
I don't know, something about the bald way they all talk about it lends it a certain credence, even likeability, because if you remove the circumstances it's a pretty common thing we've all thought. My mom's bad with money and prone to rage, my dad's extremely emotionally vulnerable: Is it my fault that I am these things also, or is that on me? And then the Silas position, which is: So shouldn't I just automatically try to oppose or at least be better than that, since I know where the trapdoors are located? It's like Buffy or something, the way that the weirdness makes it easier to touch the reality of it. A TV show about normal parents is not half as relatable as a TV show about magically or somehow unnaturally fucked up parents.