Episode Report Card Jacob Clifton: A+ | Grade It Now! YOU GRADE IT We Are The Table
By Jacob Clifton | Season 4 | Episode 13 | Aired on 09.08.2008
He breaks the spell, staring at her like a portrait, like those Sammy Davis Jr. photos, older and more real, asking if she wants a towel, or "two washcloths," and her voice saying his name, sharp finally, finally focused, brings him back. "Sorry." He remembers why he came in there to being with, and asks if she's going to jail. She says no, but can't say more than that. He says, less in protest than as a reminder, that in fact she does have to tell him. That's what their family is, what it means. That's who El Andy is now: the person she tells. She sighs and asks with a tiredly sexy smile if he'll turn the taps back on, and add some bubbles to the water. She's so desperately sad now, at the end of things. Now that she's going to die, she's allowed to be sad.
"I used to be able to rationalize the things I did, Andy." He says it's always been one of her greatest traits, and he's not wrong. "Not any more. At some point recently, everything became right or wrong. Right or wrong." She dives down, under the water in the bathtub, completely naked. There's nude and there's unclothed, but what Nancy is right now is naked. He sits at the edge and waits quietly for her to come back up. When she does, she's gasping like an infant, hanging over the side, terrified, holding on like vertigo. "What did you do?" She rests her head on the side of the tub, and tries to explain what happened and why, which means starting at an awkward place and filling in the blanks. "There was this girl, in a blue dress. She was so young. She had this bag with a butterfly on it. She kept looking at me..."
I told you before that I have a lack of faith in conventional addiction therapies, because there are as many ways to get out of hell as there are to get in. Pretty rehab didn't work, for Celia, and ugly rehab didn't work, because she's too smart for either. What happens to Celia in the revolution is her rehab, just like this is Nancy's. But that doesn't mean the Steps are wrong, or don't make sense. They're just different ways out of hell: the same truth told twelve different ways, in a certain sequence. Admitting your powerlessness is the first step towards admitting that you're not the table.
I think the God thing throws people off because it looks like the point, because normally when God comes up the person's trying to tell you that it's the point. But the God thing is just another way of telling you that you're not the table. Addicts don't have to believe in a higher power because they need to dwell on His strength: addicts have to believe in a higher power because they've convinced themselves that they're God. Their needs are the only ones that exist, their perspective is the only rational one, everyone else is a tool to feed the bear. They are the table. And on it they spread the world, and eat it bit by bit, until there's nothing left.