We open in a cemetery, where the Botwins, joined by Doug and Lupita, are unveiling Judah's headstone. Shane's dressed up for his karate tournament, and he offers his dad a bow. Then Andy steps up and delivers an incredibly morose eulogy about how Judah Was A Man and Andy will be forgotten upon his own passing. He also mentions his absent father, who he says is currently in a poker tournament at Foxwoods, which automatically puts him on the list of unseen characters I hope to see soon, alongside Nancy's sister Jill and Doug's wife Dana. Anyway: Judah is mourned.
Hodes House. Celia and Dean stand grooming themselves in front of their twin bathroom mirrors, which is code on this show for "Celia and Dean are about to fuck up their marriage again." They run through their dull plans for the day, until Celia turns to him and announces, "I fucked a black guy." Oh, Jesus. And they made so much progress last week!
Botwins'. Andy, Doug, and Lupita return from the ceremony, Andy still droning on about Judah. Of course, his mind then drifts and he asks Doug if he wants to smoke up. "Is the Pope Polish?" Doug asks. Andy hesitates for a second, then goes, "...German, actually." Andy retrieves Nancy's stash -- which she keeps in a giant box of tampons -- "Where men fear to tread," says Andy -- but they discover that rodents have eaten through the box and a lot of the weed. Stupid hippie rats!
Shane's karate tournament. Silas bitches about having to be there instead of fooling around with Megan at home. Shane fills in the blanks for us on that last part. The karate coach points Shane to his opponent, a bigger kid who looks about ten times more aggressive. Shane looks apprehensive, to say the least. They line up across from each other, bow, and the referee calls "fight!" Shane yells, "Shema Yisrael!", charges at the kid, and clamps his teeth on the kid's foot. Of course he does. Weird little fucker.
Cut to Nancy, mortified and with Shane in a modified headlock, babbling to the kid's father, who we see is played by Martin Donovan. She motormouths about Shane just coming from his father's unveiling, which is a Jewish thing, even though she's not Jewish, she comes from Welsh stock, no, but her husband, who is dead, he was Jewish, and she'd be happy -- no, thrilled! -- to pay for a tetanus shot if that's what this kid needs and oh my God please say something! "He's not my kid," deadpans the dad. "Just kidding, my name's Peter." Nancy laughs her nervous laugh and shakes his hand.
At the Hodeses', Dean's following Celia around with the hair clippers, saying the rule apparently is: if you fuck around, you get your head shaved. Celia says the chemo will be taking care of that soon enough, thanks. Dean snaps that he's not going to let cancer be an excuse for this one. Celia's like, "And this from Helen Chin's tennis racket depository." Dean says she doesn't get to use Helen Chin as an excuse either. I tend to part company with Dean on that last one. Celia's earned a freebie. "His name was Conrad," Celia spits, but Dean says he doesn't care. He does care about Celia giving away all her clothes and furniture. Aw, that was when she was being nice! Celia can't win. She says they should have had this argument years ago -- 14 years, to be exact. Dean snits that they've been married for 16. "Yeah, but I liked the first two," she says. Before Dean gut a gut, turned into a robot, and bought this ridiculous house. Then...oh, this needs its own paragraph and direct quoting.
So Celia takes Dean into their atrium, which Dean seems to be awfully proud of. Celia would beg to differ: "When its raining, Dean, and I'm in the bedroom, and I want a cup of tea, I have to put on rubber boots so my slippers don't get wet on the way to the kitchen. When the Santa Anna's come over the hill in the afternoon, and our neighbors are all outside feeling the wind in their hair, do you know what I do? I open the dining room door, I open the living room, I then open the bathroom praying that my husband isn't sitting there taking one of his monster shits. I do this so that the air-conditioning can fake the sensation of flowing oxygen into our stuffy, claustrophobic, "open-air atrium." A room where plants come to die. This is the dumbest fucking room ever built."
Back home, Andy and Doug are tapping along the walls, hunting vermin with a pellet gun, and sharing a joint. Oh yeah. This'll work out just fine. Doug spaces out about the dark, empty space that a rat must live in inside a wall. Then Andy starts to freak out that they're smoking weed with plague-ridden rat spit on it: "Are we smoking plague?" Doug says not to worry, "fire beats plague. Soon as we lit up, we were safe." Meanwhile, Lupita's freaked out that Andy said Judah was still present in the walls -- she doesn't take ghosts lightly; they had one in Mexico that haunted the phone lines, calling out for its missing pants. Okay, Lupita's not even smoking, WTF? Meanwhile, Doug's dropping peanut butter on the floor and draws the rat out, but Andy misses it with the gun.
Peter and his son, Tim, have apparently decided to reward Shane's biting by treating Nancy and the boys to lunch. Lunch...with wine, I guess, which seems excessive given the situation, but since Nancy doesn't have a coffee to nuzzle, I suppose she needs something to cradle. Silas keeps his face buried in his Sidekick (he texts Megan that "this guy totally wants 2 bone my mom") and Shane obnoxiously eats his pasta face-first and then asks Tim if he was held back a grade. I'd be mortified, but with a season's worth of hindsight, everything Peter does seems sketchy, so whatever.
Back home, Lupita's out back, watering the plants, when she's alerted by the maracas rattling on the soundtrack to the presence of a Mexican guy in the yard. He's wearing a baseball jersey, so he's sporty, but it's unbuttoned, which means he's a free spirit. Anyway, this is Alejandro, the drug-dealing cousin of Lupita's maid friend (Serena, is her name) that we heard all about two episodes ago. You know, the one who said Nancy was cutting into his business? Alejandro looms over Lupita and tells her to tell Nancy that Agrestic is a one-dealer town, and she needs to get out of the weed-selling business. Then he hands Lupita a roll of pennies to give to Nancy, just in case she (and we) haven't put it all together yet. Andy walks out and thinks Alejandro is the pizza guy, and Alejandro grits his teeth at him and stomps out.
Ill-Advised Lunch Date. Peter asks Nancy what she does for a living, which is of course awkward, though it would have become more awkward if she'd have asked him the same. Instead, Nancy decides that the usual questions are boring, so they ask bizarre stuff like favorite body of water or whether they prefer lickable or self-adhesive stamps. Shane butts in with some personal questions for Peter -- is he married? Is he a fag? -- which earn him a few swift kicks from Nancy. Tim chimes in with some inappropriate questions for Nancy, and soon it's madness. You can totally see why Peter and Nancy would want to pursue this thing further.
Montage. Andy and Doug, high as shit, continue to hunt the rat, which is just running around the kitchen like it owns the place. Andy comes across a photo of Judah with the family and starts crying. Celia theatrically drops her wedding ring in the disposal and leaves Dean to fish it out. Shane sulks at dinner while Nancy pours herself another glass of wine. And flirts with a stranger. With her kids at the table. On the day of their dad's unveiling. I normally end up siding with Nancy even when she's being foolish and short-sighted and reckless, but this shit just makes me not like her right now. Take your boys home. Date on your own time. Doug and Andy gorge on homemade Chex mix and laugh their fool heads off at some movie while the rat roams free and eats. Celia and Dean sit silent and miserable in their depressing house.
So lunch has now turned to dinner, and the kids have gone off to God knows where, turning tricks in the parking lot for all Nancy knows, while she sits and drunkenly babbles to Peter about pennies thrown at her car and whether the rabbi today thought she and her family weren't Jewish enough. She stops talking long enough to get a good, long look at Peter. She tells him he's cute and starts kissing him. She's immediately regretful and pulls away, saying she's not ready for this.
Back at the Hodeses, Celia and Dean sit on the floor with their bottle of wine. Dean asks if "the black guy" was any good, and Celia tells him, without any malice, that he was. "Very." Then they kiss. Awkwardly.
Nancy and the boys return home the morning (seems like it was a planned overnight for the tournament), and Alejandro is watching her creepily from across the street. Inside the house, there's broken glass and peanut butter everywhere, Doug's passed out on the couch, and Andy appears to be still stoned, with his johnson hanging out of his shorts. Lupita keep trying to tell Nancy about Alejandro, but Nancy's too busy yelling at Doug and smacking Andy and grounding Shane to listen. When the rat comes crawling across the floor to feast on some more PB, Nancy grabs the gun from Andy and shoots it dead with one shot. Lupita finally shows her the roll of pennies and says it's from the man across the street. Nancy sends Doug home, orders Andy to clean up, takes the gun, and heads outside.
Nancy makes sure she has Alejandro's attention, then drives off in her car, while the flamenco music goes wild on the soundtrack. Nancy pulls into a back alley somewhere, gets out of her car, and starts flinging pennies at Alejandro's beater. Alejandro gets up on her face, trying to intimidate her, but she doesn't back down. The camera pulls in really tight as he tells her to know her place. She's breathing heavy from the adrenaline and he's kind of leering at her and it's a very charged atmosphere. Nancy has no plans to stop selling, which Alejandro says is a problem. And what's the solution to that problem? Right now, the solution seems to be fucking on the hood of Alejandro's car. Nancy! I don't know whether to be scandalized or kind of impressed at Nancy's negotiation tactics.
Hodeses'. Celia and Dean are afterglowing on the floor. They're still talking about Celia's dark lover, and she tells Dean his name was "Conrad." I like how this ended up being an aphrodisiac for both Celia and Dean. He asks whether this Conrad was "bigger" than him. Instead of asking "where?" Celia simply says "nope" and smiles.
Back at the alley, Alejandro's zipping up, which gives Nancy time to dig out her pellet gun and point it at Alejandro's crotch. She tells him this was "unexpected" and a one-time thing, and he's not to approach her, stalk her, or fling pennies at anything belonging to her ever again. Alejandro smiles as she walks away, seemingly impressed. Nancy is finally able to exhale as she gets back in her car. One the way home, Nancy gets stuck at a red light, which means she stop moving long enough to think about what the fuck is going on. She screams at herself -- "What the fuck are you doing??" -- and starts shaking. Her phone rings and it's Peter, who asks if this is a bad time. Nancy, still furious at herself and everything else in the world, tensely explains that she stuck at "the punishment light," a traffic stop where if you don't make the light, you're forced to sit there forever. Peter tries to make it quick, saying he really liked meeting her and would she like to go out sometime? Nancy says it's not the right time, and that -- and she starts half-sobbing and half-laughing at the newfound irony of this statement -- she's not ready to get intimate with anyone quite yet. Peter wants to know that if she ever is ready, he'll be around. Nancy seems genuinely touched by Peter's understanding, so much so that she saves his number in her phone. She wipes a tear away and the light changes. We see a long shot of the road she's driving on, all the lights turning to green. Looks like it's Go Time for our Nancy.