A flirty-flirty "don't stand me up" conversation tells us that Nancy has tamed another lion. They chat about how sexy Nancy is, and how her thighs tastes like white chocolate, et cetera, and Cesar is like, gross me out. End result: they set up a date. "You will eat lobster and I will eat you," Esteban says in a passably sexy way; Nancy assures his ass that he will be doing just that. She chats with Silas about how she smells like she has a date, and Nancy remembers to ask who he's dating and why he's moving his stuff to the Cheese shoppe; she starts to put together the whole thing about his MILF. Doug also deduces that she's been stood up by the smell of her perfume, so she adorably protests and reminds him again to get out of her house. He offers to paint her toenails and let her listen to his "cry tape," so she gives in.
Celia's just making up prices at this point and telling customer to give her cash. She pockets the money -- a discount down from imaginary $164.17 to imaginary whatever the lady has in her pocket -- and then gets rid of the credit card machine altogether. Ohhh, Celia.
Andy's shaving outside the one damn bathroom listening to the unmistakable repetitive sounds of masturbation and thinking fondly of his own constant masturbation; Shane comes out of the bathroom seconds later and hides something in his chest of drawers (Andy's all, "Just shaving my dirty whiskers!") and heads to school. Andy opens the drawer and locates the Sammy Davis, Jr. biography (Uh Huh!), then the naked pictures of Nancy inside it. He goes from joyful to see them again, to troubled by the connecting dots, to... sad, for Shane, who is doing it wrong on like a cosmic level.
I was really hoping this episode would start to show some development on the fifteen bubbling horrors that have been under the surface all season, so this is already a great episode. I hadn't really thought about who the agent would be on this particular reveal, though, and I'm glad it's Andy. While there are plenty of people in this world who are "nonjudgmental" insofar as they judge you without telling you about it, the number of people in this world who simply do not judge are far fewer, and they are precious. Basically, they are: Andy.
Hilariously, Silas has tucked his little pot plants into this, like, Crate & Barrel linen shoe rack from olden times, back in the Cheese Shoppe. He talks and talks about pot or something, but the important thing is that he's going to jump this lady in a... there we go. She complains that she has a customer and he returns the serve with the fact of his boner, and they laugh and kiss all the way out into the shoppe's foyer, where of course Nancy Botwin and her Daisy Dukes have come to wreak some semi-annual maternal havoc. Hey, when you only act like a mom twice a year, it pays to really go for it.
Nancy lays down the white lady smack on Lisa and Silas, who are scared for a second. Silas asks why she's there, and she says she wants to make sure he's not doing anything stupid. "Like trafficking with the Mexican Mafia?" And then it is on. She basically gives Lisa this whole speech about what it takes to have a grow house, i.e., to be a caregiver for Silas, and it's very sad because it's very obvious that she feels like her kid is being abducted by another mommy, which is what is happening. Which leaves Silas out of the equation altogether, of course, so he starts defying his mom about all the things he already totally knows about having a grow house. Which he knows from the last time Nancy didn't feel like parenting and dropped him off with Conrad. "I won't let anything happen to him" Lisa says, and Nancy calls her out for being a MILF: "Rad's gonna be seventeen sooner than you think. He's a good looking boy..." Silas is amazed by this exit line; Lisa just stands there with her mouth open and wonders how it so quickly went from hot teenage dick to all this drama.
Celia needs another eightball because she already snorted the one from yesterday; Ignacio points out that she is beyond fucked up. She lays down a hardcore "Give me. The Fucking. Blow." Then sneezes blood all over his face. CELIA!
Andy reveals the horrible secret of Sammy Davis, Jr. Nancy is unimpressed -- she thought it was a gun! -- but when she flips the book open, and sees the pictures, she gets totally squicked out. Andy promises that he's jerking off to them, and Nancy tells him to fix it. They gossip about Silas and Shane's respective bullshittery, until Nancy hits the brakes. She takes the pictures and worries, asking if perchance this is one of those normal boy things that we don't talk about. Andy assures her that his mother was not hot enough to jerk off to: "Flappy upper arms, strange moles." Nancy wishes it had been a gun instead.
Ignacio is freaking out: why? Because Celia is wandering through the tunnel to Mexico with a thousand tissues up her crazy nose offering to fuck strange Mexicans underground for coke. Ignacio apologizes and says he had to take a crap. "And this is what came out?" asks the guy. I grant you that Celia is not being her best self right now, but that's still kind of harsh. They bustle her back upstairs. I hope she does not die; on the other hand, I'm not thrilled with this storyline for reasons I can't quite nail down. It's totally in character for Celia to become a coke whore at this point in her life, sure, but the great thing about Celia has always been her terrifying willpower. She's become weak and gross in a way that's only barely justifiable.
An old lady recognizes Doug's picture of the Mermex and asks for a bribe. "Don't tease me, you crusty whore," he says, but offers her a shot of tequila. Not enough. "You cock-juggling thunder-cunt!" he screams, breaking a bottle, and Andy hands over actual cash. They chat about how excited Doug is to be seeing Maria again -- and then the old lady disappears around the corner faster than anything. Bad Coyote Belt-Stealer Guy comes gimping around the corner, scaring Andy. "I will shoot your knee, and shoot your balls. I will shoot your belly and feed you to the sewer rats." They stand at gunpoint, about to die, but then all the immigrants come out and speak on Andy's behalf, then begin to riot and kill Bad Coyote. Andy calms them down and tells him to limp away and be unharmed, as is the way of El Andy. Hector, who does not speak English, breaks Bad Coyote's head with a bottle. Excellent.
Ignacio and tunnel guy have Celia tied up in the back room at Maternity World with a giant bra in her mouth like those horses that pull carriages. Tunnel guy explains to Nancy that Celia is "loco" and has snakes in her head. Awesome! Nancy agrees. Ignacio says she has a good heart, and Nancy fires her in order to keep her alive. She begs them not to tell Cesar what happened, and mangles some Spanish in offering tunnel guy clothes from the store. He says it is a store for women who hate men for making them fat, and Nancy asks if there are any women he knows that are pregnant or that he wants to impregnate. His sister, he says, which causes Nancy to freak, but Ignacio clarifies that the sister is pregnant, by her husband. Nancy tells him to fill a bag of stuff and forget about all this. Nancy tells Ignacio she's going to wear something fun to Celia's funeral, and cleans up her pretty face. "I have a very sick child on my hands," she tells Esteban -- who is watching Celia's reverse-abduction out of the tunnels on his videotape.
Cesar reminds Esteban that this is not the first trouble Nancy's caused, and worries that she's putting him in danger. "Did you show her your lion?" Cesar asks, and gets sad. Hmm. Esteban tells him to make a fucking drink -- "something dangerous" -- and laughs to himself.
Nancy tears the pictures into tiny bits -- adios, awesome naked pictures of Nancy! -- and flushes them, then downs some white wine in preparation for explaining to Silas and Shane, respectively, that you don't fuck or masturbate to your mom, ever. It's a neat scene, intercutting the two conversations -- as Shane slides down the couch and pulls a blanket over his face and Silas gets snotty about once again having his total number called -- just in case you didn't see the parallels before. Needless to say, MLP blows it right out of the water. There's our girl.
"It's a little... I don't want to say weird. Maybe another word that means weird, without all the... weird connotations of weird, like... peculiar, maybe, or eccentric... How about quirky? Okay, it's quirky, it's a little bit quirky to masturbate to pictures of your mother. To have this sexual kind of... relationship, or connection, or... Hookup with a stand-in for your mother. You may think it's okay, because this woman isn't actually your mother..." And in comparison, Nancy doesn't look like the pictures in question (she actually totally does), but in any case, Freud said "a lot of people wanna have sex with their mother, or substitute for their mother, and it's normal in the planning stages, but... it should stop there. And I realize there's a lot of hormonal compulsion, some of it... beyond your control. And it's nothing terrible, or unnatural, or... anything we need to talk about in gory detail. Because sex is good! Freud said, or Annie Sprinkle, maybe, said sex is great! And you should have sex, safely, with your peers like Megan or Tara... Or Playboy or Penthouse, or Juggs if you're so inclined to that particular body part, you should go ahead! Fantasize about having great sex with these people! But you should probably avoid the areas which include having great sex with your mother, or a substitute for your mother, and I mean, things, you know, happen. It's understandable. She's blonde, she's got a... cheese store... You hide them in a biography of Sammy Davis, Jr., it happens." She swears to never, ever, ever, speak of this again. Silas gets up and walks out of the house, totally freaked out. Nancy drinks her wine and watches the statue of blanket-Shane put its hand to its head.
Nancy's getting ready for her date with Esteban when he calls and stands her up again. Scars on her back, dress on the bed. At the hotel, Isabelle wakes Celia up in a pile of booze bottles, Restylane boxes, drugs, and assorted junkie trash. There's a needle sticking out of her forehead, which Isabelle removes and asks if she's shooting heroin. "It's for my lips!" Celia exclaims brightly, looking kind of like she's had a stroke, and Isabelle points out that it was in her forehead. "It works there too!" Isabelle suggests that Celia is in serious need of help and Celia nods: "Okay. I'll hold out my lip and you put it in!" Isabelle threatens to call Dean, and then Celia sneezes blood all over her daughter's face.
Shane walks through the halls of the school, mission accomplished, as the kids whisper about how he's "psycho," how somebody heard he killed his dad, how he wears a necklace of Dan's teeth, rides to school in a limousine, has crazy eyes and a huge dick and is a bad ass. Two goth girls show him their tummies, on which they've scrawled SHANE and BOTWIN; they invite him to party. Bear officially eaten.
Silas and Lisa make "sandwiches" as pot-delivery systems; Silas says that Nancy is not the kind of person to get upset about anything or have actual feelings, and besides, it's just silly because he's almost eighteen. Anybody who's seen the show this season is waiting for that particular party, methinks. They bring the fake sandwiches of marijuana out to some snarky potheads, including Whitey/"Oh Face" guy, and Silas -- exuberantly and also to prove Nancy totally and irrefutably wrong -- jumps into Lisa's arms and suggests that they move in together... So time you see Silas, he'll have been dumped, I'm guessing.
In the TJ bar that Doug and Andy have been hanging out in as Coyotes, there are several velvet paintings: Pancho Villa, Zapata, Julio Cesar Chavez. And now there's one of El Andy, who looks lovely as he gives a little speech about how Coyoting has been his "passion project" for "a few weeks now." Heh. He says it takes a village to smuggle a human, and says that when he sees his portrait on the wall, he smells the breath of every sun-stained face he's liberated. End of speech, El Andy. Gross. They cheer and cheer and drink and drink, and El Andy buys a drink for poor Doug, who is still Mermexless. "The man is in love with a beautiful notion," Andy explains to the tiny cute bartender. El Doug says that while it is beautiful to be in Mexico chasing a dream, it is less fun to be the sidekick. He compares himself to Andrew Ridgeley, whom Andy points out at least never got arrested for random restroom sex. That makes me feel bad for Andrew Ridgeley when you put it that way. Although not sad enough to have sad bathroom sex with him, because come on: he's Andrew Ridgeley. Doug says this is entirely his point, and tiny bartender tells El Andy that they collectively will "help the sad tall angry baby-man" to find Maria. Of course, he does this while completely ignoring El Doug and making it clear this is all for El Andy's benefit.
Nancy's doing laundry in a cute purple mom-type outfit when Silas comes home, looking kid-adorable in a big backpack and slurping on a Big Gulp and activating her mom feelings. He's downcast, because of course Lisa dumped his leg-humping ass: "Lisa and I have, um, decided to slow things down and nurture ourselves more. Replenish our reserves of oxytocin." Nancy nods, because she accomplished that, and then, at a loss, offers him the opportunity to "raid the fridge, take the car, play your music too loud..."
But there's a huge difference between "substitute" and "replacement," which is what the MILF and Sammy Davis are actually about, but if you admit that you're admitting that people don't owe their existence to you, and if Nancy thought that was true for a second she really would lose all control. Mothers and sons have been doing this since Seth and Abel and Cain; single mothers have it one thousand times harder, widows twice that bad, and that's just the normal bits. Every family is different and it's always hard to know what is universal and what is specifically an issue with your specific family, and in this case you couldn't blame Nancy for being weirded out about not knowing which is which, because all Judah did was die. She's done way worse to them.
This is a tiny scene but in some ways it's the big one, because she's fighting a war on so many fronts: he's growing up, he's putting the drug thing between them like always as a way of asserting his eldest-boy freedom, he's resentful as hell but still young enough to need his mom, which also galls him, and that's all normal shit. Add to that Shane's concomitant freakout, the fact that Silas's already-troubling sex is with a MILF, the fact that they're all drug dealers, the fact that he's now a totally independent contractor doing the dumb shit that Nancy was doing back in Season 2. (Fast-forward to Sanjay falling in love with him and burning down the Cheese Shoppe.) And all of this mom stuff, and drug stuff, and then trying to have a relationship on top of it, and on top of all of that, trying to be a woman. Nancy, which is the bear. So Nancy's spent three and a half seasons trying to keep all those Nancies in their little boxes, and no matter what she does it overlaps, and that's what life is like. Which sucks. So when Nancy sees lights out on the porch, and finds a tin-lamp light show of sailboats whirling on the walls, and goes to the porch and cuddles beside Esteban in the silence, with huge bodyguards standing outside, that's about feeling safe for five seconds.