Episode Report Card Jacob Clifton: A+ | Grade It Now! YOU GRADE IT Never Let Me Go
By Jacob Clifton | Season 5 | Episode 1 | Aired on 06.08.2009
In a hurry? Read the recaplet for a nutshell description! Finished? Click here to close.Nancy has just told Esteban -- the Mayor of Tijuana and a boss in the Mexican drug trade -- that she's carrying his son, so he won't have her murdered for shutting down the border tunnel. Esteban takes out everybody who knows beyond two goons in a way that's hilarious, offers good drama for Mary Louise, and involves a hilarious and very subtle American Idol in-joke. Then he takes her to a Mexican doctor, where she experiences life as an object, and he makes it quite clear this is only a temporary reprieve from her death. This is only slightly more awkward than her sleepy revelation of the pregnancy to brother-in-law Andy, in the middle of his declaration of eternal love; he spends the rest of the episode in a whiny funk.
We check in with the rest of the characters through a round-robin series of calls from Rudolfo the Hot Mexican Revolutionary, who is attempting to ransom Celia after he and her daughter Quinn kidnapped her last year. Needless to say, the entire cast is heartless about her plight and hangs up on him in a variety of rude and hilarious ways. But also needless to say, she starts playing mind games on Rudolfo and Quinn immediately, eventually getting Quinn out of the tent and working the supportive revolutionary angle with Rudolfo. I wish she could stay in that tent forever, but we know he's got Southland to deal with.
Finally legal Silas pulls together a plan to grow pot in the Mexican forest, resentfully getting Doug on board. Recipe for success. Meanwhile, due to the increasing danger and general stress of having people up in her business all the time, Nancy sends drug-dealing younger son Shane to stay with her bitchface sister Jill (the highly anticipated and always wonderful Jennifer Jason Leigh) in the Oakland Hills. Andy is only too happy to accompany him, because he's still grumpy about the baby. Finally alone, Nancy gets a few minutes of sunlight and happiness when an open-air flashmob dance party erupts around her, but the lurking resentment of Cesar reminds her she's got about twenty-five weeks to live.
The good: the dialogue, sharp and acidic (and occasionally sophomoric) as ever. The bad: not much, beyond recycling Sanjay's already-stale cocksucker punchlines. It's nice to see Nancy find out what those girls felt like all the months they were coming through the tunnels before she found time to have drug-induced guilt about it, and even nicer to see her admit that she loves Andy right back, just not in that way. I love the shocked lemon-sucking face Nancy summons up every single time someone finally calls her an asshole; after all, she's only had four seasons of entitlement to prepare her for it. And of course, the suburban-mom timeliness of way cool things like flashmobs is quaint and adorable -- we're looking forward to jokes about Twitter and Lindsay Lohan in Season Six -- although luckily it's brilliantly used, and returns us to Weeds at its best: bitter and bright, in equally huge amounts.
Want more? The full recap starts right below!Previously, Nancy Botwin was installed in a maternity store that housed a tunnel from Mexico after a man named Guillermo burned her city down to keep her safe and nudged her into drug trafficking. This led to a meeting with the Mayor of the TJ and major drug boss guy Esteban Gonzales, who fell in love with her. They both made bad decisions, including an ayahuasca trip in which Nancy realized that drugs and guns weren't the only thing she was trafficking: also young girls.
Flipping out, she flipped on him and went to the DEA, where a man named Till was going crazy because Esteban's men killed his lover. Guillermo went to jail, and Nancy was discovered to be the rat. Esteban summoned her to Tijuana for judgment, on her elder son's birthday, and she played her last ace: her third son, Esteban's first.
Esteban stares at the ultrasound while his right-hand man Cesar yells that it's just Nancy stalling. She stares at her lap while Cesar bitches that she absolutely must die, and Esteban explains that things have changed. Cesar pulls out a gun and shoots the other two flunkies in the room, to keep the secret safe, and Nancy hits the deck. The only other person who knows is Sucio, but he won't talk. Esteban tells Cesar to send some flowers to the men's families, and Nancy sort of clears her throat. He offers to have Cesar take her home, and she stalls, saying she's got her car -- Cesar should have time to process the "sudden death of two work friends." Cesar protests, and she stares up at impassive Esteban.
Finally, Nancy shakes her head and asks them to just kill her, not to do the "let's go on a drive" thing. She swallows the end of her sentence, but Esteban tells her again to go home, she has enough backbone left to cough, "Alone?" Yeah. He says he'll be in touch, and she grabs her purse, standing. She does an awkward pee-dance pirouette with the bodies, and they tell her to use the other door. "Talk to you soon," she says with a terrified smile, and he nods. "Oh, yes." Cesar is, as usual, unimpressed.
Dean and Isabelle Hodes are being adorable, playing gin rummy, when his phone rings. "Mr. Dean Hodes?" It's Rudolfo, getting all revolutionary down in Mexico, where he and Dean's absolutely broken daughter Quinn have drugged and kidnapped her mother, Celia. Quinn slaps at the mosquitoes and tries to paint her toenails. "I have your wife! You send me money!" Rudolfo wants to finance la revolución, Quinn just wants money and to fuck with Celia for packing her off to Casa Reforma, which is where she met Rudolfo -- then a mild-mannered Poli Sci teacher -- in the first place. Dean shrugs. "Yeah, she's no longer my wife?" Rudolfo spits, "Then I will kill her! She dies!" Dean tells him he's broke, so whatever. "I will kill her! I slit her neck! I smash her head!"
In the background Celia -- covered in the lunch into which she took a faceplant earlier, when the drugs kicked in -- starts to stir. "Knock yourself out. Bye bye!" He puts down his cards: gin! (This whole thing is very funny. Even funnier than when the exact same thing happened last year, where everybody fingered Celia for the grow house. Come on, guys.) Rudolfo gets very upset, and Quinn tells him Dean probably couldn't understand his "fucking lame accent." Whatever, Q-Dawg. You're looking at Kevin Alejandro in old-timey pants. That's about as good as it's going to get this week.
Up north, Isabelle asks who was on the phone. "Someone's kidnapped your mother," Dean says, and her jaw drops a little. "Seriously?" Who knows. "Another game?" She grins and settles into the next game; meanwhile, Rudolfo is into autorevolutionary screeching about "workers everywhere" until Quinn clonks something at his head, then knees his crotch. Then giggles psychotically as he groans. Celia wakes up, chained to a chair, woozy and adorable: "Jesus. What the... hell's going on here?"
Nancy's at the mall, sucking on a smoothie and staring at a maternity store across the way, post-traumatic and phased out; she notices a spot on her purse, and when she rubs at it, slowly perceives that it is blood from the double homicide she just witnessed, before fleeing to the mall. It's deafening. She stares, and wipes at it, breathing slowly for a moment before standing up, tossing the napkin in the trash as she heads home.
There's a gift basket, terrifically, on the kitchen table at the Ren-Mar house. "Silas, You Are Loved. Me. Mom." They're digging into it, stoned and hungry and carefree: Silas, Andy, Doug. They are men. Andy eats the butter cookies without knowing what they mean: "So simple, yet so delicious." Silas wants to run to the forest or farmlands down south, and start a real operation. Doug pooh-poohs this idea, saying that growing in Mexico is a terrible idea. The water's full of "paraquat and Mexican sewer poop." And there are the hassles of crossing the border, etc. Andy asks about the marks around Doug's neck, and he barely pauses before fessing up about jerking off with a noose. "Nice!" Andy says.
Shane enters about six feet taller, with a haircut and an earring which Silas wastes no time in telling him is in the wrong ear. Shane wigs, but he's kidding; these are his male role models. Not that his female ones are better. Doug says they should grow in a national park and then says some words I don't understand ("Gift with purchase? Nelson Mandela!") that I assume are pot- or Doug-related, and therefore gross. Shane mentions Cleveland National Park, and Doug asks if he's on drugs: they're not in Ohio. He laughs and says the park is in San Diego County, but Doug's on a roll: "Cleveland, Pittsburgh, what's with you and the Rust Belt?"
Nancy enters just as Silas is calling her room and Shane's fighting him on it. Andy, who realized recently that he is in love with Nancy -- once Doug explained it to him -- flips out on them about how, if she is dead, they're going to cover the whole thing in plastic. He shrieks that they are animals; they try Rock Paper Scissors. Nancy finally strolls in, rolling her eyes and apologizing for her temporary survival. Andy does a little dance, giggly and squirmy and happy she's okay, and then quietly whispers an explanation for the marks on Doug's neck. Being appalled at him is like a luxury these days.
Next morning, the phone rings. Nancy answers it from bed, sleepily. "I have your friend!" She's woozy and exhausted, asking what the hell he's talking about. "Celia Hodes! I chop off her ear!" She doesn't even open her eyes as he asks for forty thousand dollars: "How van Gogh... It's too early for this. We're really not friends." He desperately marks her down to thirty as Nancy's hanging up. She barely closes her eyes before Andy comes in, acting squirrely.
"Nance, I got a plan: We should flee. That's my plan, fleeing." She smiles at him. It's the Mexican Mafia. There's actually nowhere to go. But he doesn't want to just sit there: "You finked! And they know it! They're playing with you! You're a cat toy, and they're cats! Mexican cats. Gatos!" She laughs at him, and begs for sleep. He kneels at the side of the bed, speaking tenderly now. "We're going to Denmark." She's grinning, sleepy. "They won't find us in Copenhagen!" He explains that it's wonderful there: "Wonderful, wonderful. AndIloveyou."
She sighs his name, puts her hand tenderly on his chin. He smiles, and inside his pointy little head the violins swell to an almost unbearably aching, sweet finish. "I'm pregnant," she says, and he swallows his smile. "And I need to sleep." She looks into his eyes and he stares, wiggly and embarrassed and hurt. There was a whole story right then, and she broke it. They were going to be on the run and in love, and she fucked it up. He laughs and stands up, heading for the door. "Andy? Wait, what." Nothing. He smiles at her and feels retarded; he's a million miles away. She sighs. Great. He vanishes and the phone rings again; she stares murderously at it and finall