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
Shane's uncle, fucking Shane's aunt. Anybody else on the planet takes this picture, maybe they're related to one or the other person in this little vignette: Shane is watching his uncle fuck his aunt, his father's brother fucking his mother's sister. Think about that: the boy who missed his mother and father so much that he masturbated to the cheesecake pictures one took of the other. The boy who watched his father's image so much that he fell off the roof, and went ballistic when the camera died; whose father's image, already shaky, is now almost gone forever. Whose father he only knows as a captured image, now. This is a reiteration as they tattoo hate across each other's faces, eyes tight squinting, creating images in their minds and rejoining, re-linking okay, Price and Botwin, in a whole new way. Genetically speaking this is the closest thing he's had to a family in a really long time. Take a picture: his mother's almost-twin, this man who's become more of a father than Judah ever got to be. This must have been what it was like.
"It is still an open question, however, as to what extent exposure really injures a performer." -- Harry Houdini
Nancy's smoking a cigarette; she's smoking this cigarette at a sushi bar, with adorable chopsticks in her hair. The chef tells her to put it out, and she drops it in her beer. "What's the one thing you wouldn't want a person leaving this earth to not have tasted?" she asks him, and he asks her if she has any allergies. Just one. She waves him off: "Bring it on." And another beer, and a whiskey, and one for her new friend the sushi chef. "Arigato!" he says, and she laughs.
"When I was ten," Nancy says, "I jumped off the Morristown bridge." The chef, her new friend, the chef's smile falls. She doesn't really notice. "It was in the newspaper: Daredevil Girl Survives Fall!" He can't look away. "It wasn't a fall," she tells him; a secret they can share. She laughs. "It was a leap!" She nods. "Big difference."
The only difference is choice, a hairsbreadth wide: she was going off that bridge either way, Nancy Botwin's explaining to her friend the sushi chef. She was getting out of that cage, that uncertainty, one way or the other. It could have been a fall, but it wasn't. It was a leap.
He offers her the shot, and she gives herself a second to think about it before she decides, before she makes the choice I mean, to knock it back. It's easier than you might think. Kanpai! she calls, and they clink and drink. She feels gross, but this is how you do it. This is a leap. This is part of a leap, the preparation for the leap; this is preparation all daredevil girls must do before the leap: sounding the waves, the direction of the wind, making sure your shoes are tied so that you don't do it poorly. Tucking hair behind an ear, so you can see it coming. Leaving no part up to uncertainty or chance, so that you can say it wasn't a fall, there wasn't anything unplanned or fearful about the leap, that it was a choice from the bridge to the water, all the way down. Only if it's executed perfectly is it a leap.