OMG, the title is a pun. I can't believe I didn't figure that out in three whole weeks. Dang. Okay, so here's the deal: DEA agents Till and Schlatter are sleeping together. Doug is keeping Mermex Maria as a prisoner of his lust, and she's going nuts; Andy is aimless as usual. Shane is having threesomes with Goth skanks, and Silas is selling weed out of a cheese and sandwich shoppe. Celia is in a scary, scary rehab place with a crackhead who draws the line at getting fucked with mannequin legs -- if they're still wearing shoes. Nancy's dating the mayor of Tijuana, who is also running the entire border, and loves him; however, now that her spirit guides won't let her ignore the guns and sex slaves also coming through the tunnel, she's gone to Till. We meet again.
Nancy's still playing with her Rubik's Cube from two weeks ago, and knows that Schlatter is somewhere in the trees, listening into their conversation. She asks Till for "assurances," specifically: "Everything I ask for, I get." He says he's not her daddy, but she assures him she's not fucking around: this is information that very few people have. She issues her demands, which amount to nobody getting screwed in her crew by this bust, but most especially herself and her family: nobody puts her name on paper, nobody says it, her family doesn't have to go into hiding or Witness Protection, because there will be no reason for them to do so, because she doesn't exist. He agrees and finally interrupts her infinite loop, and she breathes. "There's a tunnel."
Scary crackhead lady from last week is telling another story. Bet it's awful! And awesome! Celia rolls her eyes, as usual, as the woman describes finally going to a foster home to see her son, who says, "Lady, I ain't your kid." Which she thought was the saddest thing in the world until that record title was immediately stolen by her realization, which was that she was so fucked up she'd actually wandered into the wrong house. "It was so devastating, I miscarried right there." HA! Celia finally breaks.
"I thought I'd hit bottom. But after hearing your stories, I realize it could be so much worse. The truth is, none of you have any chance in hell of ever pulling your lives back together -- if you even had lives to begin with. I am the only one here that has any chance at all. A chance to make amends and to start over. Fresh." She takes her purse and bounces, to I'm sure terrify and annoy everybody she's ever met, and the group leader just shakes his head. "Stupid-ass bitch," he says when she's gone, and oh, how the crackhead lady laughs at that.
Mermex enters the garden at the new house, where Andy's naked ass is taking an outdoor shower, but soon enough his dick comes swinging around to say hello. Oh, Andy. You and your dick and the trouble you get into. Maria's at least a little bashful at all the hot live nudity; he's more interested in finding a towel, of which there are none. She informs him almost immediately that she's there because he has been in her dreams, and he gamely offers that dreams are weird, like, he has this one recurring dream about playing pool with Lou Dobbs, and then scary teeth come out of the torn flesh of his big fat stomach. And like anyone would, Maria finds this story a massive turn-on, demanding that Andy make love to her. He tries to run, but the door is locked. So even if she hadn't shown up all willy-nilly like this, with the dreams and whatnot, he still would be ass-naked out in the yard with the door locked, although admittedly the illegal alien love coming right at him does ratchet up the urgency of the situation. She asks if he finds her attractive, and he says he does, but: Doug. She grabs his crotch and notes that he's apparently excited, and he suggests that probably it's just windy. Then she blows him, and he whispers, then screams, "Lou Dobbs!"
day, Sanjay's all about hitting on this male customer who's maternity shopping with his wife, but it's actually agent Schlatter, so Nancy's in a pickle because she wants Sanjay out of there for many reasons, but can't say any of them or else Sanjay will figure out about the tunnel bust. She tells him to re-dress the mannequins ("Finally! Can I do a theme?"), and ushers the couple into a dressing room, softly patting the door to the back room as she wanders off. Up front, Sanjay is all about how gay agent Schlatter is, and although Nancy points out that they're a married couple, he maintains that there's weirdness. Of course, in real life this would all be imaginary and Sanjay would be even more annoying than he just naturally is, but of course he's right, so Nancy is just stressed. She tells him to get his gaydar checked, and he offers a speech about "listen breeder, my gaydar is never wrong" and about how Schlatter ♥ cock and Nancy reminds him that at some point in the past six or seven months he ♥ that pregnant lady's vagina. Which actually made me laugh.
Nancy scornfully asks if Sanjay is suggesting that religious and societal pressures have forced him to live the lie of domesticity, because that's certainly a rare thing to have happen, and Sanjay pounces directly on the truth. "Or maybe he's a cop." Nancy nearly starts crying right then because goddamnit, Sanjay. But Sanjay's on a roll: Schlatter's a cop, undercover, looking to scope them out and then bust the whole thing wide open, "And then ask me out!" Nancy laughs and tells him to go do his vision in blue, and Sanjay offers one last piece of bullshit fag stereotypery which... I'm not fond of the Sanjay character anyway because his entire identity is "I'm really gay!" which lots of gay guys are like that, fine, but the show seems to think that that's enough.
Like, I don't like pot movies because I don't think pot is inherently funny. If you go "Man, I'm like soooo wasted," half the theatre will laugh their asses off, but I don't understand the joke, because there's not a joke: just a person fucked up on drugs. And one thing I love about this show is that, even with Doug, there's usually a second level to whatever he's doing where he can say the whole "I'm soooo wasted and high on goofy juice" or whatever, and there's still something funny going on at the same time. The time they went to the marijuana trade show was about the only time I've really gotten annoyed with the show doing that.
But my deal with Sanjay is that I, unsurprisingly, don't find homosexuality inherently funny. Like, if you go, "Man, I'm like sooooo gay," half the theatre will laugh their asses off, but I don't understand the joke. And a lot of times there's no second level with Sanjay: he's a faggot, it's funny, the end. Which bugs me but I don't really go there, because you're allowed to find emasculated shallow versions of homosexuals funny, because everyone on this show is a weak, shallow version of something. And it works, because that's what's awesome about the show: making them awesome anyway. I've never felt that Sanjay worked as a character, after he came out, because there's nothing else to him. There's no interior to the character, despite the actor's sometimes laudable attempts at playing him with depth. And I'm not getting PC on you here, I want to be very clear: my problem with this episode is strictly as a writer.
Because if you ever thought that the show maybe hadn't earned the number of gay jokes it relies on (Isabelle, every word out of Doug's mouth, the entirety of every Sanjay scene) -- and it doesn't, and it never has -- I don't see how taking a disc sander to the face of some straw-man queer that, as far as I remember, hasn't even had more than a single line of dialogue since he was introduced, and not playing it for anything other than a cheap thrill is going to solve the issue. I've kind of trusted this season to explain it to me at some point, because a lot of the gay humor has seemed forced in addition to being weak, like Doug's obsession with his long-gone son and whether Silas sucks cock. I don't, given what happens in this episode, actually think it's going anywhere at all, which means it's been playing to the cheap seats all along, comedy-wise, and playing to a greater hypocrisy, writer-wise. This is a show about a drug dealer who blew up an entire town, but who drives a Prius and thinks she's a good person; it's a show in which any character at any time can become a mouthpiece for the self-satisfied superior liberal inside us all, railing awkwardly about Bush or the war or Starbucksization or whatever. But if you're really relying on weak humor at the expense of people whose only personality trait is being historically degraded, isn't that just like smuggling drugs and people in your Prius?
What I do know is that if Till and Schlatter were women, the idea of sticking some random practically nameless lesbian cop in there to get her face disc-sanded at the last second would stick in some fucking craws. I do know that, and the reason that I know it is that it happens all the fucking time. It's lazy there and it's lazy here, and it does nothing to further the plot except to say, "Even Sanjay, who is himself one hundred percent gay as his entire personality, knows that this man is untrustworthy because he's gay."
Shane's smoking with the skanks behind the gym; Isabelle stands by being disapproving and asking them not to blow smoke in her face. The slightly gothier one tells Iz to dye her hair black, and they start talking about how bad-ass it would be to break into the chemistry room. Isabelle points out that this is stupid, being that it's the middle of the day, and the girls scream about how they just wanna get high. (Man, I wish they would make some uninformed decisions about substance use in their high school's chemistry lab: "This says 'hydrochloric acid.' Is that like hydroponic?" "I don't know, let's drink a whole bunch of it and then take a nap.") Shane, of course, immediately offers them pot, which Isabelle finds unimpressive to say the least. She gets ready to bounce, and the skanks tell her Shane's not going anywhere. He meekly agrees. "Wow. You two are totally making me reconsider fucking boys. You do them once and they become your puppet." Less-gothy girl, having just caught on, finds this inherently funny: "She's a dyke!" More-gothy skank says that in this case, she'd be better off dyeing her hair purple. It's a totally random, totally dumb, totally awesome little scene.
Silas is doing pot stuff when Shane shows up asking for a head cheese sandwich; Silas tells him to go to Subway. When Shane protests that they don't have what he wants, Silas swears that Cheese Gotta Have It doesn't either. Shane whines that Silas gave him a condom with which to fuck horrible girls, and Silas is great: "That was sex." He tells him to go to school, and Shane points out that Silas was smoking pot at thirteen, too. Silas explains that Shane is stupid enough as it is, and Shane tells a story about some asshole friend of Silas's who peed in their pool -- thereby causing Shane to avoid their pool for an entire year, which is a totally Shane thing to do, and under everybody's radar. Silas says he's not going to go all DARE on Shane -- which Shane agrees would be wildly hypocritical -- but he's not going to become his little brother's dealer either. Shane offers $300 and Silas tells him to go to school -- inflected in precisely the way mother Nancy would say it, "Go back to school. Shane." -- and Shane makes a sneaky face. Which I suppose means he's going to steal pot, take it to school, get caught, and bring his whole family down in a whole new fashion, except Nancy will do something sociopathic and entitled and make it go away. I'm just spitballing here.
Esteban plays a barcarola for Nancy, a gondolier song, and she notes that the boat motif keeps on trucking with him. There's a photograph of his three daughters on the coffee table, near a bowl full of bones; he admits to having hid it before now, which he knows is weird. "You make me do things I wouldn't usually do." He kisses her forehead; her head is in his lap. He asks where she's gone, as she's looking out into space, and the barcarola plays, Godfather-like, over what follows.
Nancy tries to tell Esteban about the girls in the tunnel, but he already knows. Sanjay negotiates his way around the tunnel and the men with guns to put today's retail take in the safe, then back out again. The SWAT team grabs him just as he's locking up the store for the night, pressing his face against the glass. Esteban tells Nancy they are in a business of "dark-hearted people," but that he and Nancy are not dark-hearted, and that there won't be any more girls coming through Nancy's tunnel. The DEA team blows a hole to the tunnel room, and they engage in a gunfight that drops several of Guillermo's men; Guillermo and Ignacio manage to make it down into the tunnel. The DEA follows.
Esteban asks Nancy to dance, and she remembers throwing up on her Prom date. She bites his neck, as he laughs. "Do you love me?" she asks. "Are you in love with me?" I believe that she's in love with him, or as close to it as the broken pieces of a person can be. If we all waited to fall in love until we were perfect, we would all be dead, therefore, she's allowed to be in love. The Municipal Police of Tijuana meet the SWAT team in the tunnel, both sides screaming at the edge of their jurisdiction. Ignacio makes it across, pissing off Till and grinning horribly, but Guillermo is taken away by the Americans.
Esteban doesn't answer her question, just asks her to take a trip with him. She says she'll have to ask her boss for the week off; her boss allows it. They begin to make out, and just then the bodyguard's phone rings. It's Cesar, calling in a Regaliz Rojo: Red Licorice. Nancy watches, worried, as he takes the call. "Call me when you know more," he says, and admits to Nancy that a "regaliz rojo" is very bad. She nods. Here we go.
Mermex watches Doug brushing his teeth at their hotel, perching uneasily on the bed. Andy arrives to go out to dinner, and they talk briefly about their scam: selling generic Mexican pharmaceuticals to old people without insurance. Doug is pretty unsubtle about the fact that he wants no Mexican food or anything with beans, and the douche chill is redoubled. Andy finally shrieks: "Maria and I had sex!" But only once, well, twice, but not two separate times. One time, and then again after that. Doug's not really interested in splitting that hair, or anything really: "You guys had sex?" They feel kind of bad, and Maria explains that she seduced him, but mostly it's Andy feeling guilty. He tries to explain how horrible he felt and how he had to come clean, but Maria keeps fucking it up: "I love him!" Andy says that no, she doesn't, and they both love Doug. "No, I love you, Andy! You are the best lover I have ever had!" Andy's weak defense is that if she ever lets Doug fuck her, she will be pleasantly surprised. After all, he's quite tall, and ... good with numbers?
"I was a fear fuck," Andy claims. "She's so totally into you." Doug has gone very quiet and scary, and you already know what he's going to do. He's even wearing camo shorts in this scene. Andy swears it'll never happen again ("It will! It will happen many times!" Maria screams) and Doug forgives them, but tells Maria it's awkward having her in the hotel room with him. She agrees, because yes it is awkward to be kept hostage by a man like Doug and constantly assaulted by douche chill waves like that. They leave him alone at his calm and friendly request, and of course he immediately dials INS.
Nancy tries to talk the freaking-out Clinique -- another one-note character about how retarded whores are inherently funny -- down about how she, Sanjay and the baby will be taken care of; meanwhile Esteban's having a similar discussion with one of his crew. They both hang up and Esteban fills her in on the aftermath. Lots of arrests, one death, somebody talked. He starts quizzing her: "The one with the drug problem, your lesbian lover?" Nancy laughs and assures him that Celia is terrified of her, and also that she's not a lesbian. He agrees to take her word for it. "What about the Asian homosexual?" She balks and asks why they're focusing on her crew, and Esteban replies that his people don't talk. Except for that one time when Guillermo swore to kill Nancy and her family, she points out, and he says he's looking into everybody. Nancy snuggles cutely in his lap like a kitten, like she always does when things get scary, and asks if that means her too. Should he? "Only if you don't trust me," she gurgles. He says she's reckless and impulsive, but not suicidal. She wonders. As he's reminding her she'll have her own issues coming out of this, since she's the manager of the store with the tunnel, but just then Cesar arrives to take him to the press conference, and Esteban tells her they can't see each other for awhile.
Esteban and Cesar agree that it's inconvenient, but not a huge problem: they're already digging another tunnel. And this one won't have Nancy's compromised conscience saying what goes through it and what doesn't. He tells Nancy to call Cesar if she runs into trouble, and the two of them send major vibes at each other. Cesar is kind of scary, did you notice? At the door, Esteban turns and tells her yes: he loves her. She smiles and Cesar sends death glares in her direction; left alone, she thinks about what's left.
Celia makes amends to Isabelle, who's sitting on a couch with Dean holding her hand while they sit patiently waiting for this new Celia bullshit to die down: "...And I'm sorry for the massive body issues that I've given you, and I'm sorry for judging your lifestyle choice." She instructs her daughter to "love those ladies!" and shouts about "vagina power," then offers to buy her child a big old strap-on for Hanukkah. Dean reminds her that this is totally inappropriate, so she makes amends for that last remark too. I love these half-assed amends she's making, so so much, because exactly. That's exactly where Celia is located. "Do you forgive me?" Isabelle is astounded. "That's it? That's ... all you're sorry for?" The blank incomprehension on her mother's face is answer enough, and she shakes her head. "Apology accepted."
Celia asks Iz to leave her alone with Dean for the set of apologies; it's like pulling teeth. Awesomely, Celia gives Isabelle a curtsey as she's leaving, physically hilarious and very Edina/Saffron in a way. That's probably my favorite bit in the entire episode, that little curtsey, because it so nails the character and the moment. Celia sits down on the ottoman and breathes deeply. "I'm sorry for being married to you without ever once -- I mean, not even for a moment -- being sexually attracted to you. I'm sorry every time we had sex I fantasized about other men. I'm sorry the sight of your naked body repulsed me to the point that I was forced to stray..." Dean points out that his ex-wife is being an asshole, but she keeps going. "I'm sorry I had children with you, sorry I made a life with you, that my hatred of you..." He finally stands up: "Enough!" She protests that she's just getting started, but here's the entire point: "Fuck your apologies."
She's so lost she doesn't even see the game she's playing, using her own fake journey to inflict even more damage than usual. He tells her to go to Quinn, whom she hasn't even seen in two years: she's the one that needs the apology. But Celia doesn't even know where her daughter is. I mean to say that the saddest thing in the world is being so fucked up you don't know where your child lives. I could miscarry right here. "Quinn is in Oaxaca, with a guy named Rudolfo," Dean says to Celia's hilarious disgust, "Find Quinn and make things right. Vaya con dios." The idea of Celia doing an Ugly American bitch take on Romancing The Stone is intoxicating, although I'm still obsessing on the idea of Celia becoming a self-help lesbian and running around instructing people on their use of "pussy" as a pejorative and constantly smudging them with sage and sweetgrass. I am so into that possibility.
Drugs on the table, as they say on The Wire: a press conference with a table full of guns and contraband, surrounded by the DEA team and feds, Esteban, and his Municipal Police. The speech is short and to the point: this is a story about how we all worked together, internationally cooperating to bring gun-runners and drug smugglers to justice; there's a Bushy kind of tag about how we will find you, we will get you, we will prosecute and punish you, and then it's over. He heads out through the crowd, smiling brilliantly and waving, but the second he sits down in the limo with Cesar, his face changes one hundred percent to scary mob boss. He is totally frightening! Cesar hands him something, pages, and Esteban asks what it is. They have an associate in the Police who knows somebody with the feds, who knows somebody in the DEA, who got an interview transcript with the informant. So in a way, the speech was true: all three agencies did work together to prosecute a rulebreaker. It's just that the rules they broke were dark-hearted. "You have my permission to read me that very carefully," Esteban says, "Then do what you need to do." Cesar almost smiles, and they drive.
Shane produces a head cheese sandwich, and the skanks go nuts. It makes him happy. Every single Botwin is now dealing drugs.
Till congratulates Nancy on still being alive, and tells her how it's going to go down: there will be interviews for him and a spotlight shining on the maternity store, of course. Tomorrow she'll be arrested and questioned, she'll pretend to know nothing, and he'll pretend to fuck it up on a technicality. She asks about Sanjay -- gone to Long Beach -- and Guillermo, who is going to jail along with his crew. However, there has been international confusion at some level, so he needs Nancy to give up Guillermo's boss. She swears she doesn't know, and he tells her he hopes it's the truth. After all, they play harder down south. She tells him to do his job, and it'll be fine, and leaves. Till dials Phil on his phone. Who's Phil? That's Schlatter's first name, and I think the first time we've seen or heard it, but it doesn't really matter. They play harder down south.
I wish I cared. It's like, I loved Vaneeta. She never did or said anything remotely interesting, but she was funny and beautiful, she had presence and a charming way about her. Most importantly, she tied into people that mattered, Conrad and Heylia, and was given enough lines that she was a distinctly wrought character. And while I do love this season very much, and most episodes have been gems, I would have to say that this season's chief issue lies with insufficient development of character. All it would have taken was one scene where Schlatter speaks, or even did anything beyond being creepy with Celia one time and getting fucked by Till, which was played for shock value anyway, before disappearing again until now. I just don't get it. I used to love Guillermo, but all he's done is make that scary angry black-eyed face of his once an episode for most of the season, and that's it. Sanjay, once upon a time, was a person; even Clinique came onto the scene with a personality.
The deal is that Nancy needed a crew, so they built one out of spare parts, but then told us nothing about the parts. Till, we meet again, but Till's never been a particularly defined character either, beyond the Peter stuff. I guess the point is that while we miss Conrad and Heylia as people, I realize now that I miss them even more for what they were, which is: real people, with lives independent of the plot and thoughts inside their heads that didn't amount to one single idea repeated over and over whenever they were onscreen. And that's, I'm sorry, just lazy writing, because you have to feel that Nancy lives in a world, a complete fictional world, and peopling it with a bunch of carbon copies and metaphors...
I mean, crackhead lady is a perfect example of somebody that works, and we've only seen her in two scenes and we'll never know her name or see her again, but she works as more than a plot device to get Celia out the door. Her scenes sparkle with wit and deep dark comedy, but mostly she's a person you could meet on the street, as insane and OTT as she is. Schlatter? Menaces Celia, has sex, lurks behind a tree, and then gets his face sanded off. So is it enough, like with Sanjay, that he's gay? Is that enough of a persona -- or enough of the kind of persona that we don't ask questions about, because we're predisposed since like Philadelphia to impute a certain amount of false sentiment and false tolerance and false sympathy and bathos -- that I'm supposed to care now?
He's just a guy I barely know, getting his face sanded off by a guy I barely know. His entire existence is predicated on being forced to say two words: "Nancy Botwin." And I can't help thinking that a stronger man wouldn't have given her up. And week when it's Dark Willow Till versus Innocent Nancy, fighting over the case of the Dead Gay Lover & The Mob Boss Mayor, it'll still feel imbalanced. I mean, don't get me wrong: I love the show. I love everything about the show. This episode feels weak, and the Till storyline has been aimless all along, but I'm super excited about week. And hey, now that once again 90% of the supporting characters have vanished, I wouldn't really have much to bitch about even if I were so inclined.
Anyway, a whole new kind of regaliz rojo for one Phil Schlatter: A disc sander whirls, covered in blood, as Cesar checks Schlatter's phone and lets it go to voicemail. He's obviously been torturing Schlatter for a while, asking again and again who "Informant" is in the transcript. The dude manning the sander points out that Schlatter's running out of skin to effectively sand, and Cesar tells him to switch to the other side of his face. Schlatter whispers a name, and Cesar tells him to repeat himself. "...Nancy Botwin." Schlatter shivers in pain as Cesar absorbs this information, and then shoots him in the head.
week: episode fifty and everything changes. Again.