Episode Report Card Jacob Clifton: A+ | Grade It Now! YOU GRADE IT Big Rocks and Candy Mountains
By Jacob Clifton | Season 5 | Episode 12 | Aired on 08.24.2009
In a hurry? Read the recaplet for a nutshell description! Finished? Click here to close.What a fabulous (mostly*) episode! I think the quality in any given week is directly proportional to the amount of Nancy/Andy overlapping dialogue in the episode. I mean, even without him giving Nancy what for, which at this point feels a little repetitive, it's still amazing to watch. You can see their whole history in every word.
What actually happens is that Cesar, Andy and Nancy head down to the TJ to see if they can get Esteban out of jail and/or figure out why he's in there. The reason Andy is with this is to beg Nancy for Bubbeh's engagement ring that Judah gave Nancy, which of course Nancy's not interested in giving up, especially since Andy's been dating Audra for exactly one day. They spend all day hanging around the soul-killing DMV-like Mexican jail offices, fighting about the nature of love, truth, and Nancy's terrible choices... Then, by the time they get answers, learn that he's actually been free for a few hours.
*(Dean is menacing Celia -- who has dyed her hair brown and is dressing like a Nancy Botwin Halloween costume, down to the iced lattes she always used to slurp -- in blackface for some reason, which sends her first deal with Ignacio sideways, and he shows up at her house dressed like El Perro Insano, and that Asian laundry lady comes running in with like a gong, bowing at people and going pee-pee in their Coke, and Sanjay shows up with eight dicks in him, and there's an Eskimo in a parka with a fish on a spear. It's all very droll.)
It's lockdown at Casa Reyes, so the Brady Bunch has to make its own fun. In this case that means Adelita inviting some popped-collar douchebags over to smoke heroin and gang-rape her. Silas and Shane watch this disinterestedly but when it starts getting serious, they go into action. Silas fronts on the guys, but it's Shane's Perro Insano training that sends them screaming.
Back home, it turns out the whole jail/release thing was Pilar's doing, presumably because she felt threatened by his growing support as an independent. Luckily, that also means that Nancy's drug kingpin husband is in cahoots with the woman she's trying to have murdered, which adds just the spice a marriage needs. If you are bugfuck crazy like Nancy is.
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Want more? The full recap starts right below!The credits take the form this week of a fake policeman, his badge and gun, his minty fresh gum, at the end of a long hard day. But this is the beginning of that day: Nancy, drinking wine on the couch and telling Shane she's been drinking all night, not that it's helping. He asks why, and she says, "Because that's what I do when my husband... God it feels weird to say that... I'm drinking because they took him away in handcuffs." And the second they did, he stopped being scary and he stopped being useful. And Nancy can only love you if you're one or the other. He was both, now he's neither, and she's saddled with him nonetheless.
Shane asks for which of his many crimes they took Esteban away, and puts forth the idea that Pilar set the whole thing up. As usual, he's thinking more clearly than anybody. "I don't know, Shane! They just... Took him away." Shane notes that it's about fucking time, and she watches him slurp his cereal. "Ever wish you go back to right after Dad died, and do things differently?" She assures him, with a dead look in her eyes, that she tries not to think about it. Which is how they got here. She smiles instead of crying, and answers a call from Cesar, who has located Esteban in Tijuana. She heads off again, and Shane asks if she should be driving. "Probably not," she giggles: Put that on the list.
When Isabel shows up at Celia's awesome condo with coffee, she's greeted by a horrible mess: Celia is dressed like Nancy, sucking on one of her It's A Grind iced lattes. Remember when Agrestic burned down and all the people were on fire? That was so awesome. Celia informs her daughter that she's on top, and staying on top this time: "Like Nancy. I'm gonna out-Nancy Nancy." With the long brown hair and the ruffly lavender top under a leather jacket, Isabel thinks she looks like a prostitute. I just think she looks scary as hell, so at least she's got that part down.
"Nancy had the right idea. Life is not about making good choices in order to get good things. Life is about admitting what you want and not being afraid to take it." If that's how Nancy's life looks from the outside, I can see her point. Celia brandishes a big wad of cash in Isabel's face and informs her daughter that she is quote "off to swap this cheddar for some heady nuggets" and then "perhaps eat a salad" and get her "Sapphic freak on." Isabel admits that this time, she threw up all the way into her nose. "Throwing up is slimming down," Celia sing-songs in a way that might make you think that's a thing human beings say.