Episode Report Card Jacob Clifton: A+ | 1 USERS: A+ YOU GRADE IT The Deep End Of The Ocean
By Jacob Clifton | Season 5 | Episode 13 | Aired on 08.31.2009
Nancy congratulates them on their new understanding, and Pilar says apologetically that yes, she did think Nancy was bad for Esteban, but the pollsters have proven otherwise, and she can admit when she's made a mistake. She tells Nancy that he could even win married to her, but that still she'd be best off staying in the background. "Don't mind me," Nancy says, and without pausing: "Could you leave my house now?" Esteban shivers warningly, and Pilar says she needs to go anyway. There's a big fundraiser tonight at Pilar's house, where Nancy is invited to stay for exactly 30 minutes before begging off with a headache. "I promise to deliver him back before dawn," Pilar says, and kisses his cheek goodbye.
I think the problem with this season is the same as with Battlestar Galactica, or The Deathly Hallows: that story-fatigue thing that happens in late seasons or chapters where the story becomes a stilted self-abnegating Cliff's Notes version of itself. Moment to moment it's interesting, but you're still only getting the outline of the actual story: Not what happened, but what was going to happen if anybody bothered to actually write it. It's a collection of neat ideas, a skeleton: What if Nancy did this, what if her sister showed up, what if Shane actually finally went crazy, what if there was a baby and Nancy married a man she thought was her equal, what if Nancy finally realized that relying on a man has only gotten her fucked up and trailing a line of broken and dead men from her shoe. Great ideas that exist only in the interstices of the references to them, that never actually come to light of their own accord.
And so in the finale, of all places, we're finally being told outright what we could have been watching all this time: Pilar is the U-Turn that Nancy couldn't overlook, because she is a woman. She uses all the tools Nancy has and lots of tools Nancy doesn't have, and has been creeping unseen into every aspect of Nancy's life until she's not sure who the Boss really is. Because in a way, Nancy's been trying to become Pilar as fast as Celia's been trying to become Nancy, and they're both doomed to failure because they don't know what the fuck they're doing or what it costs. Pilar exists as a powerful woman, then, to deconstruct and transcend the Nancy/Men and Men/Boys binaries that Nancy's been operating on (in Jungian terms, she's the tertium non datur, the irrational symbol that transcends the signified opposites, allowing Nancy to bring the possibility of a new path up into consciousness). And that would have been a great story, and it's the story we're being told we got, but it's not actually the story we got.