Episode Report Card Drunken Bee: B+ | Grade It Now! YOU GRADE IT Welcome to the Border
By Drunken Bee | Season 4 | Episode 1 | Aired on 06.16.2008
Sanjay, Doug, Dean, and Isabelle are in the waiting room at the DEA offices. Doug and Dean are totally baked, Sanjay is worried that going to prison and getting raped there will make him not like being gay, and Isabelle is the only one talking any sense. She tells them all to get their stories straight, that they're going to want to know who was running things. Dean suggests they turn in Conrad and Heylia. Sanjay says they're long gone and Doug feels the injustice of it all: "Of course they are. The black guys never go to jail." As Doug gets called in, Isabelle whispers to him "you know the name, use it." Cut to them all turning Celia in, talking about how fierce she is and then pretending to not know anything about sweet little Nancy Botwin. Ice cold, man.
At the beach, Dad Botwin and Andy go at it. Andy accuses him of leaving Bubbie while he went to the track, Dad Botwin is pissed that Andy just busted in there and "with Not-Francie no less." Shane is confused and Dad Botwin explains that Francie is the woman that Judah should have married; she's an eye doctor with tiny hands that bring sight to the blind who married a cantor and has four children. Nancy shuffles by with a plate of food and sits down behind a TV tray. Dad Botwin asks her what she's eating and she tells him that it's "Spiegelbratten, ratten, spaetzle, I don't know." Dad Botwin is incredulous: "You're sitting in my mother's living room, eating German food and smelling like gas. She was in Auschwitz for Christ's sake. What kind of a monster are you?" Nancy doesn't miss a beat, tells him that it's been twenty years and he needs to get over it. They go at it some more, back and forth, until Nancy works a mention of her burned-down house into the backbiting conversation. Andy suggests they just get a hotel and get away from the family cesspool but Nancy tells him only very slightly under her breath that she'd rather not leave a paper trail with a credit card purchase. Dad Botwin perks up at that: "What are you on the run?" He says that he can at least get his mind around that problem, and assigns them all rooms. Nancy gives him a kiss, and Dad Botwin wonders what Andy did to get them on the run.
Andy is uncharacteristically shuffly and self-conscious and wants to know why his father always treated him so much worse than he treated Judah. Dad Botwin says he's never been sure Andy was his son and so he kept some emotional distance, and then segues into your standard father-son topics by informing Andy that he (Dad) "gets laid all the time and I shit like a Swiss train, you should be so lucky." He tells Andy to go in the kitchen because he has to change grandma's diaper and clean her feeding tube. "It's not going to be pretty." Andy says he can handle it, but scurries into the kitchen at the first sound of Velcro. Dad Botwin says that he likes Shane, despite his "stupid cowboy name" because he at least doesn't look like a Goy. One more heave to roll grandma over and Andy is cowering in the corner.