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
The three Botwin boys sit around the house, realizing there's no Italian birthday dinner tonight. They remark on how you never know where she is, prompting Shane to wish that she really would get arrested, so they'd know where she is at least -- aww -- and then he suggests that they come up with a plan. A plan, to survive without her. Because it's always so close to happening. And they don't even know where she's going. Silas points out that he's now 18 and can be Shane's legal guardian -- Andy yelps and Shane says he can "still hang out" with them -- and Silas names her sins. Unreliable, unavailable... Possibly going to prison. ("Or worse," Andy muses, then retracts immediately.) He agrees with Shane that all three of them need to man up and stop waiting for her to provide for them. Are we not men? Silas's brilliant -- and so Quinnlike! -- plan is to move to Mexico, and grow a small plot. Enough to serve the clubs and some buyers, but no hubris. "No stupid expansion, no stupid mistakes. Small. Mellow. So I don't drop dead of a heart attack from the stress of trying to maintain this bullshit lifestyle."
Andy pitches in with his coyote money, and Shane asks how he can be involved. They tell him to be a little kid and he brings up Nancy, saying that he too has nothing to say to her. Andy tells them both to stop bagging on her: "We love her. All of us. Love. Her." Silas stares at him because he's being weird, even for El Andy: "In a mom-loving way [Which, rimshot, was exactly the problem]. Not in any other way," he says into the pillow, muffled and confused and a little creepy. Silas doesn't doubt the strength or ferocity of his mother's love -- again, how did he get so awesome? -- but he knows it's not the point. The point is the facts on the ground, the cards on the table. And she's not making her stake. The end. Shane offers popsicles and Andy asks for one in a cutely childlike way -- and in the freezer, he sees the headcheese and grins wildly, because he just figured out how he can contribute to the new plan, and this time the only architecture or engineering involved is the total fucking breakdown of their family in some new awful way.
"Dear Silas. S-I-L-A-S, that's my son. Dear Silas. Happy birthday. Happy eighteenth birthday. Um... Don't write 'um.' I think you're an amazing son. I'm so proud to be your Mom. 'Be your Mom' ... sounds like bullshit. Doesn't it? Um. Dear Silas. If you never see me again, I've probably been murdered. Enjoy the dried apricots and butter cookies," she laughs to herself, and Carol at Terrifically Gift Baskets interrupts to remind Nancy that butter cookies are extra with the Sterling Celebration. "Yeah. Uh, could you stop talking? For a second? Please? Be quiet. And listen. Just listen." Carol says she's listening, and you can hear it in her voice. Amends. Confession. Somebody has to be there, to hear it, so that we remember that we are not the table. Our responsibility to Silas, to Shane, to Andy and to Celia; to Doug and to Agent Till and to Esteban; to Judah. Our responsibility to Carol at Terrifically Gift Baskets, who's listening. Five miles to the border.