Episode Report Card Jacob Clifton: A+ | Grade It Now! YOU GRADE IT Daredevil Girl Survives Fall
By Jacob Clifton | Season 5 | Episode 2 | Aired on 06.15.2009
Dean keeps getting distracted, and she finally has to grab him by the eyeballs and force him to "focus on the potential sudden and unfortunate death of Nancy," if he doesn't mind. The thinness of the "potential" in that sentence momentarily overcomes his essential selfishness and he gets back to it: Silas becomes Shane's legal guardian. He's earned it. Dean's phone rings and she hangs it up for him, determined to get through this and the next two things without stopping. When Dean asks if Nancy's going skydiving she doesn't exactly say no. There are lots of words for it; that'll work. We'll learn more.
Dean asks Nancy -- "out of curiosity, and poor self-image" -- what it was that made her come to him. "Because I trust you," she says, "And because you're a parent." He smiles; he glows. "Because you're all I could find on short notice." His smile drops, and she leaves with a parting shot: the hair's too much. She's not wrong.
When Rudolfo returns to his tent not only is Celia still there, but she's rearranged the whole thing, the entire HQ, and is ordering his revolutionary men around. "Oh, hi!" She says, ignoring his obvious questions, and tells him she was hoping to have it done before he got back: "Ta-da!" The whole thing is organized, now, so he can find his toys. "Good organization calms people," she explains: "It's a fact. Order is soooooothing." She sits him down and points to the shelves like Vanna, while his eyes get wider and wider. "Aqui: bullets, in descending order of caliber. Down on this shelf, empty magazines and grenade shells. Down here it's all handguns..." He's impressed. "Then," she says, pointing at the bottom shelves, "Machetes and knives, separated by blade length!"
There's more stuff she isn't sure about; she picks up a semiauto and waves it around, asking where he would put something like that. He takes it away from her with a quickness, sighing, and shaking his head. She's beyond charming, as is her way. "What. Machetes up top? You're right, machetes up top." He stares at her and she gets serious. "Please. Let me stay." Not pouting, not playing, not acting, just asking. He's thrown, yet again. "I don't have anywhere else to go," she explains to his amazement. "I like it here. My hair doesn't frizz... I'm useful... Do not make me go back there. Everyone hates me. I have no friends." He shakes his head: she's right, but damn.
Andy fucks Jill Price-Gray in her laundry room, and in fact it is not Jill Price-Gray-With-The-Hyphen, Andy has learned, that's the bitchface: it's Nancy Botwin who is the bitchface. And so he's screaming at Nancy, back and forth: "Fuck Nancy! Fuck me! Nancy! Fuck me, Nancy!" And you can imagine for a second that he's tattooed her face across her sister's. And she's screaming at Scott, the ceaseless elven monologue, and you can imagine for a second that she's tattooed her husband's face, okay, across that of the man who's fucking her, and outside this little tableau -- this little vignette in which the people are not, and this is key, pretending to fuck the person they are pretending to fuck, but are actually fucking somebody else to hurt the person they're pretending to fuck, which is an expression of power and a reclaiming of their own bodies against this terrible force that keeps taking away their sovereign personhood, sketching out this decision and this numb hatred against each other's bodies, which makes them war buddies at the least but not really sexual partners in any intimate sense -- outside this tableau, this room where no love really ever was, Shane Botwin takes a video or a picture with his cell phone, and grins.