In a hurry? Read the recaplet for a nutshell description! Finished? Click here to close.
That's what I'm talking about. A summons from Guillermo means Nancy needs to ditch her new full-time bodyguard, Cesar. She visits Guillermo, taunts him about prison rape, and then he explains to her that -- without a ring on her finger -- she's going to end up in a landfill. Realizing that the baby isn't really half the ace in the hole she thought he was, Nancy makes post-mortem arrangements with Dean Hodes and attempts to piss off Esteban enough to kill her ahead of schedule by getting drunk, smoking cigarettes and eating sushi, informing the chef that she jumped off a bridge when she was ten.
Esteban responds by demonstrating for Nancy that she is not in control of their arrangement -- or her own body -- in this or any other way. It's a comment on how far gone she is that she actually thinks they're doing it, and doesn't realize she herself has been raped until about ten seconds after he's slapped her ass and left. Suddenly, prison sex isn't so funny. This is what you call rock bottom.
In other news, Celia has taken to organizing Rudolfo's revolutionary weaponry by caliber and blade length, and ends up begging to stay with him in Mexico, while Silas and Doug are ambushed in the national park by a sexy dude who takes their pot but lets them live. And up in the Oakland Hills, we finally meet Jill Price-Gray, Nancy's amazing sister. It's wonderful enough to watch Mary-Louise Parker act each week, but seeing Jennifer Jason Leigh riffing on it is even more delightful. I cannot wait to see them together. So Andy and Shane are entertained by Jill, her unappreciative husband Scott, and their spooky twin daughters. Eventually, of course, Andy and Jill get afternoon-smashed and do it, calling out the names of their respective underappreciators, and since Shane's apparently still working on becoming Jack the Ripper, he takes some phone video.
week: Everybody returns to Ren-Mar HQ to create lives for themselves after this little failed jumpstart, and the season proper begins. While the act that proceeded it was, needless to say, unforgivable, I think the slap on the ass was a good thing: at the least, we won't be dealing so directly with Nancy's self-destructive tendencies for a few weeks. She's now officially out of illusions.
Which will be welcome rest, especially considering the dizzying way this episode puts gender in a paint can and makes an insane milkshake out of basic gender facts -- pregnancy, rape, breasts -- until nobody knows who's on top anymore. What's more daring than being "daring" is simply presenting the truths: Nancy's power resides in her Caucasian femininity, which is most powerfully expressed through this pregnancy. She parlays this into a power play by questioning both Guillermo and Cesar's masculinity, only to have the empowerment and survival factor of her pregnancy/femininity taken away first by Guillermo and then by her own daredevil tendencies. Then -- while Celia/Rudolfo, Jill/Andy and Silas/Doug perform their own complicated gender dances, north and south of the border -- Esteban reasserts his masculine primacy in the grossest way he can (followed up with A Camp's "Love Has Left The Room," in case you were thinking this was meant to be a grey-area occasion), which is the only avenue he feels is available to him, which is why prison rape happens to begin with.
All of which subtext, and even the point of the episode, is lost because the writers forgot one simple fact: viewers are so intrinsically excited about getting self-righteous whenever rape is mentioned or implied that their brains stop working, trivializing the entire concept for their own propaganda and taking on the brutal history of the word to make themselves feel like heroes. God forbid somebody use the word "retard" week and we can have another conversation about how defending the story is not defending the acts in the story. But it's also fascinating because, in all the years of this show, we've never really gone into Nancy's side of the family, her childhood, or exactly how fucked up she was before she even married Judah. Looks like we're going to take that black box apart this season, and I can't wait. I've always wanted to understand her.
Want more? The full recap starts right below!When Nancy comes downstairs in her flowy shirt, there's a gun on the kitchen table to Cesar. Nancy feels caged. Everybody's gone, it's just supposed to be her, and there's Cesar looking hard and bored with a gun. She asks what he wants, and he says he's just there to keep her company. She assures him that she doesn't need company, but he thinks Esteban would disagree. She calls Esteban immediately from inside the cage and tries to get her control back: flirting, humor. "I never imagined I'd say this in real life, but: Call off your goon. Call me, we need to talk." There's barely a quaver in her voice. You'd have to be looking for it.
No answer immediately forthcoming, she asks Cesar to level with her: Is he her bodyguard? Is he her killer? What's Esteban going to do, where's his head at? She can't strategize if she doesn't know where Esteban's head is at; she needs definites and definitives if she's going to figure this one out. She's Houdini: stick him in cuffs, tie him in chains, drop him in the lake and he's fine. Leave him in the desert, all alone, and he's a goner. Nothing to push against, nothing to use. Cesar tells her nothing; no definites and no definitives. Uncertainty is a cage. He doesn't evince entirely a lack of enjoyment. "You look a little green," he says; he suggests ginger.
Nancy leans against the windowsill and stares out at the patio furniture: a little Jesus bobblehead, like Guillermo used to spy on her, that disastrous day she tried trafficking. It's a sign and a signal; she doesn't know what it means because it doesn't matter what it means. He burned the world for her; he hates her now. It's something to push against. She smiles at it, watching her from the table, and picks it up: "I Miss You, Blanca. Come See Me Now." He'll have facts. And if he doesn't have facts, he'll at least fight with her. And if he doesn't fight with her, he'll still be in a cage. She can go look at him.
"Fire has always been and, seemingly, will always remain, the most terrible of the elements." -- Harry Houdini
Cesar shakes his head at the bobblehead and she gently ribs him about what he terms his "selective" religious stance. The whole Thou Shalt Not Kill thing, for example. "And I support gay marriage," he says. It's a punchline but it's also a fact. She can use it later. She's barely thinking about him; she's thinking about getting free of the immediacy of him, the oppressive existence of Cesar that pulls her thoughts off-base and makes it hard to deal, and how to go see Guillermo in jail. In the cage where she put him, how she can go look at him in it, without Cesar coming along to ruin everything. Distractedly, she claims to have errands -- "mani-pedi, stretch mark cream" -- but of course he has her keys. He's there to keep her company.
The perverse thought of bringing him along -- torturously, a little cage of her own, wielding the oppressive and undeniable existence of her pregnancy like a sword, putting him in a cage with her, a grotesque husband analogue holding her purse while she shops -- on made-up girly errands becomes the answer. She's given herself a fact to push against, and come up with a solution. A momentary freedom from the cage.
Shane's asleep on a strange aunt's couch with his haircut and his earring -- Is it the right ear, or the wrong one? It really matters, ask Doug and ask Cesar and ask Guillermo, it's essential -- with Andy couched on the other side of the taint. Two creepy twins stare down at them while they sleep it off, having arrived late last night at the home of Nancy's sister Jill Price-Gray, who keeps up a constant personal monologue about her sister's selfishness that requires no response from anybody, because that's what she does all day, talks about what's going on, in the soft and put-upon voice of the obviously brilliant and obviously forgotten and it's only a slight tilt in her tone that signals she's actually addressing the twins, "ham or pepperoni?" and they say it together, "ham," and she pops two ham Hot Pockets into the microwave while never quite ceasing the hushed susurrus of her complaint: What is this, a hotel? Are they expected to be awake all night, like vampires? The twins sparkle at the kitchen bar, "Catfish," in one voice like that: "catfish!" and without turning to look at them, accustomed to their shared non sequitors and secret languages, without even turning from the microwave she goes, "Whut?" and they explain that catfish are nocturnal, as are hedgehogs; and without ceasing she incorporates this information into her monologue: yes, exactly, like a hotel, like vampires, like catfish or hedgehogs, they're expected by her sister to be nocturnal, and then the microwave goes "bing!" and without ceasing she incorporates this information into her monologue: "bing!" just like that, answering the microwave the way she answers the girls: "bing!" and then she drops its contents on plates and serves them up to her daughters; Hot Pockets, bizarrely, for breakfast; and when she says, "yumyum" like that, all one word, she's still not talking to them, because it's all a monologue, because nobody else talks to her and if she doesn't talk to herself she'll go as crazy as her sister.
Jill has two daughters and a husband and a burgeoning resentment toward everyone and everything. Her sister Nancy has two sons, with another on the way, and no husband whatsoever. Jill predates Nancy by eighteen months: practically twins. But they were not, I think, ever twins like this; while they are both grey girls in a certain way, the Price Girls were never like the Gray Girls, or we would have seen Jill before now.
Andy doesn't want to get up just yet; he's not naked on his sister-in-law's sister's couch, but he does have a boner -- "comfy couch, happy dreams" -- and before you know it, without even really turning their heads, the twins exclaim that the boys are awake, and Jill snaps the fuck out of it, putting on a smile and focusing her eyes on something outside the one-foot circle that takes up most of her day. She asks the usual questions without really being interested in the answers, and her husband Scott Gray comes in with his bike helmet on and pounds Shane on the shoulder and says hello and asks if Nancy's there too and says hello to Andy and Jill asks to speak to him and he puts her off, without ever really looking directly at her, focused on the twins and past the twins -- "lock and load!" -- and tells Shane and Andy, empty, to get some sun. "You're in California now!" Jill's appalled: "We've been to their house, Scott," she says, pointing out that they've lived in California this whole time; it's just that the distance is longer than it seems.
Shane points out that they've moved but still technically live in California and the whole time Scott's doing this efficient dance around his wife where he never actually has to look at or touch her despite needing about thirty things in the kitchen, so he's like this human tornado in a bike helmet and she's standing there like in a movie when the party speeds up around the person and they just stare at the camera, the only unmoving thing. I've mostly but admittedly in fits and starts loved Nancy Botwin unconditionally but never pretended to really understand her; Jill I feel like I already do both. He kisses her head and vanishes with the kids and she offers the boys a Hot Pocket, admitting she didn't even know they'd moved to Ren-Mar. "Nancy doesn't talk to me?" she explains -- breezily, knowingly, angrily; too hilarious and too sad to look at directly -- and all of a sudden the family resemblance is sort of shockingly and commandingly present.
Nancy's in the chair getting her manicure when she first floats the idea: that Cesar, being bored, being a man in a woman-centered place, being uncomfortable and tired of standing around being menacing, might like to go for a walk. The whole time the ladies at the salon are doing this efficient dance around Cesar where they never actually look at or touch him. He is impassive. Houdini pats the chair beside her -- "At least get out of the way!" -- and puts her environment to use. The women swarm him, making jokes at his expense, racist and otherwise, that he can't hear or understand. We know what they're saying, because we have the benefit of the subtitles, but for all he knows they're talking about how attractive he is. They pull off his shoes, oohing and ahhing, and she laughs along with them, telling the ladies that Cesar needs the fish. They agree.
"You need the fish," she says conspiratorially to him, as they plop his feet down into an aquarium and the fish start eating off the dead skin of his feet. Now that he's stuck, she glances at a curtain, and stands up. He grabs her wrist and she smiles. "What. Bikini wax. You interested? My treat." She whispers: "Hurts like hell, but Esteban really likes it. And I know you like to please the boss..." Something shiny in the left hand so you can't see Houdini fiddling with the keys with his right. The women massage Cesar's hands, and the fishes nuzzle and bite; he realizes something's wrong, and jumps up, casting them everywhere. They scream at him to come back, to pay them, as he runs to the waxing room. It's empty; he's a little sad. He needs definites and definitives if he's going to find her, but now she could be anywhere.
"Only one man ever betrayed my confidence, and that only in a minor matter." -- Harry Houdini
Doug's babbling at Silas as they backpack through Cleveland National Forest, an unceasing monologue of his historical indignities and homophobic slurs; Silas holds up the GPS and does some math. What grade is Doug up to, in the history of his shame? Sixth. They've been walking that long. This is the place. Doug sits down and drinks a Monster and a fake-ass CGI butterfly, blimmering and blue, flutters close to him. He's taken by it. "Alight upon me!" he commands the butterfly, hilariously. Silas heads off to a clearing. "Alight upon me!" Doug is once again disappointed. "Fucker!" He stands and heads off to find Silas -- "Draining the main vein?" -- and comes upon Silas in a garden of pot, huge shrubs of it in ordered rows, at gunpoint.
Guillermo throws his weight around, tossing all the other criminals out of the room so he can sit down and talk on the phone with Nancy. "Lacey LaPlante? The name threw me off." She nods: they check ID at the door. But that's only half the answer. Nancy's gone now, for the rest of the episode. This is how we know. Nancy's not here right now. He smiles and notes how she always keeps her ass covered; he asks if she brought him Krispy Kremes and she laughs hatefully. She offers to send him a care package, like the Jesus bobblehead; she offers to put on a show for him. She thinks about the brick dance and she looks through the glass at him, in his cage.
Guillermo says he'd prefer a story, the one about the gringa princess who calls her DEA buddy and gets a magical tunnel shut down. She counters that she doesn't know that story, just the one about the old woman, lived in a giant shoe. He gets angry; she likes that. "You stepped over the line," he explains, close to losing control, and explains that since she's acting like a big boy now, she'll be treated like a big boy. But a boy isn't what she is; it's what her power has always relied upon and now it's what her survival depends upon: not being a boy. "Yeah," Lacey spits, "I don't think I ever acted, nor desired to be treated like, a big boy."
That's right, Guillermo nods: trying to dig down underneath her placid calm, trying to assert himself over her another way: "You're all cunt, ain't ya?" It still doesn't work. Her smile turns steely bright: "Yeah. And titties." She fires off the word like a gun, insulted in spite of herself. She returns the serve, putting him back in the cage. "Speaking of which... Is it true that in prison, sometimes the bottom guys get tattoos of titties on their backs, so that the big daddies can imagine they're looking at a woman when they're raping you?"
He smashes his fist against the window and she giggles: mean, icy, plastic and fake. Full of hate, blaming him for the tunnel and the fear and the family, gone, the maternity store, the boxes full of guns, the little girls in the tunnel. "Do you know about that?" she asks, quietly, smiling like a best girlfriend, and he tries again to come out on top, staring her down. "I know you're the rat, and rats die." Trying to scare her with boogieman tales, big boy stories; she could laugh.
"The eating of burning brimstone is an entirely fake performance." -- Harry Houdini
"You might not want to cause me stress," she says meaningfully, trying to come out on top. "I'm in a very delicate state. Can't you see I'm glowing?" His jaw drops and she nods, grinning at him; on top.
"Oh, wow. You got me!" She nods meanly again, but he's on top. "I thought you were smart? You're a fool!" She has no ring, she's not the wife: she's the knocked-up puta whore rat. Her smile falls, and he pushes his advantage. "She end up in a landfill, lady parts all chopped out, face all unrecognizable..." She slams the phone against the tabletop, angry. He likes it. He wins. He keeps going, slamming it back at her, making her believe, eyes wide and nearly crazy as he screams hilariously, "You were an interesting person to know, Nancy Botwin!" He tells her to get her affairs in order, because he's not the one she needs to worry about. Not anymore. "Fuck off," she grits, and storms away. He took it all away, and stranded her in a desert without a key or a cuff or a single fact. It's all up to Esteban, now; the baby doesn't even matter. The baby is as worthless as her life.
"No performer should attempt to bite off red-hot iron unless he has a good set of teeth." -- Harry Houdini
Rudolfo is still freaking out, a very revolutionary activity, and throwing things around: he can't find his ammo or his other toys. Celia snarks at him -- "Buck up, sourpuss!" -- and 101's him that this is about Quinn, without whom he is so much better off. He's a rebel leader -- played by Kevin Alejandro, no less -- which women go wild for, so why would he care to be with somebody like Quinn, that treats him like shit? Because he loves her. Or, Celia suggests, he's just telling himself that he loves her; that's what she used to do, because she gave birth to Quinn and thought she was supposed to love her. And yet, Celia says, there is and was always this expression on her face, like she is and was always smelling bad cheese. Rudolfo has also noticed this face she makes, and they share the mystery of why Quinn is like that. The important thing, Celia says, is to consider all the hosts of "non-cheese sniffing girls" out there waiting for him. Suddenly he goes back to flipping out, asking why Celia is even there, sticking her pointy fingers into all his romance, and says she reminds him of Quinn. "I'm nothing like her! How dare you compare me to that little bitch?" Celia slaps him, as an object lesson in how much like her mother Quinn actually is, and he screams aloud. She apologizes, his eyes mad and hurt, and offers the idea that perhaps he's just built that way: he makes women want to hit him. He tells her to GTFO of his tent and his life, because she is a mean person, and for once Celia Hodes is caught completely off-guard.
Andy tells Jill the reason for their visit, which is not so much a reason as the empty space around the lack of a reason, namely that "stuff" is "going on," and Jill incorporates this into her monologue, explaining that she is unable and uninclined to get involved in Nancy's "stuff," said "stuff" possibly encompassing anything from a massive shoe-shopping spree to a totaled car to an affair with a married guy, and that last one puts Andy's eyebrows up because it's close enough, so he starts lying about how she witnessed a Korean gang war in the parking lot of a golf superstore. It was the Choi Brothers against the Sun Hu clan, nunchuks escalating to Glocks, an old rivalry resulting from the fickleness of one Mitzi Sun Hu (trans. "Fragile Flower") who eventually made the jump to the other clan, and Jill sits down, because either this is really interesting and true, or really interesting because it is not true, and Andy turns on the charm, explaining that this isn't about Nancy or her "stuff" but really about Shane, keeping Shane safe from the Sun Hus, and the Chois, and she stares at him and notices that he's basically pretty hot and she makes the preliminary not-real step toward a decision in her mind and heads for a bottle of wine, probably the organic Rioja to start, in order to more fully commit to said decision, which is so in its infancy that we don't even really need to start talking about the general sketch or outline of what that decision will eventually be, but whatever it is, sometimes it takes a bottle or two of wine to get there, am I right ladies, yes I am.
Silas and Doug are hostages; Silas mourns his once-proud dream of working a plot of land in Mexico, in the Voltaire mode, and drinking legally. Doug protests that it is not his fault, but as usual it's entirely his fault. An outrageous hottie in fatigues, big as a redwood, arrives to menace them, and Doug claims to be a naturalist, a butterfly collector. As Silas backtracks and tries to explain they were just looking around, the forest hottie goes through their stuff and finds Silas's Tupperwares of pot; he's impressed. Silas gets proud, describing his botanic genius, and the hottie takes a knee.
"You know, usually in this situation... What's your name?" He puts a hand on Silas's knee and explains that normally he would shoot them and dumb them in the creek. "You and your Dad," he says, motioning toward Doug. Silas is quick to explain that his Dad is dead, and Doug tangles himself up in explanations that he's a friend, a family friend, nothing sexual going on no matter how often he mentions sexual things w/r/t Silas, that his Dad is also dead. Nothing about his poor gay cocksucking son. Hottie realizes that Doug is basically retarded, and tells his people to untie them. They aren't a threat. He orders Silas to thank him, and he does; he explains he's keeping their stuff, their weed, and asks them to leave before he is forced to shoot them in their heads after all. Silas makes haste, while Doug wanders around purely at random.
Jill Price-Gray is now drunk and noshing on Famous Amos and complaining wildly about how she works very incredibly hard; there are about ten bottles of wine on the taint and she asks Andy to open another one, but he's confused by her rabbit. I have seen the consternation on the faces of people with the rabbit in their hands before, flummoxed by its symmetry and the elusive ease of its use: you pull the top lever up -- the "rabbit" shape comes from the top lever, I have no idea what these are really called -- and clamp the pincers around the neck of the bottle, don't be afraid to hold it tightly, and then you force the ears of the rabbit back toward its back, forcing the corkscrew into the cork, and then the really insane part happens, it gets easier and more amazing than you could have imagined, because you pull the one chrome ear back forward again, pulling the cork somehow straight up, out of the bottle, then you put the bottle down or begin serving, and then more amazingly you repeat the whole process again, forward and back on the ear lever, which causes the cork to come spinning back off the corkscrew. You must not use the rabbit on a rubber cork. It doesn't work like that.
Jill thinks of herself as a "little elf" that feeds the family and takes the twins to Irish Step-Dancing Class and works ceaselessly in the background, opening the bottles and doing all the dirty work that nobody else can see or even wants to know about. She feels like a passenger and a stage manager and the underclass in her own life; this is a terrible fate she is describing, spread out across random edits as they sit on the couch and she spits out random parts of the ceaseless monologue, the brightest and funniest bits: "They take and they take... and they bike" -- and mourns the loss of her entire life, job and friends, all gone, and for what? So that she and Andy can be magically underappreciated elves?
Jill asks a dozen times if she's talking too much, she's not talking too much but it's been so long since anybody listened to her she feels like any amount of talking is too much talking; the wine is making her forget herself. They don't even care, Nancy and Scott, about the elves that they, Andy and Jill, are; Andy says this is allowed because they are "so cute," and Jill spits that they, Andy and Jill, are cute too, which means that Andy is cute, which means that Jill has noticed Andy is cute and on some level would like him to know that, and also to acknowledge it and in some way return the favor; she moves on to Nancy: "I do love her, she's my sister, but she's... Miserable. Am I talking too much? [still: no] A miserable cunt," in fact, she says daringly. That word.
"She plays the victim, but she always has time to put mascara on," Jill says, the truest and funniest explanation of Nancy Botwin I've ever heard, and the saddest. And Jill turns from a really unpleasant person with a minor in Endearingly Quirky, in this moment I would say, into a real person with probably very real grievances, and in fact the embodiment I shouldn't wonder of a lot of Nancy's entitlement shit and the price, or the Price, that you pay for it. Celia got warped so bad playing the mirror to that she's barely human anymore, and Peter's ex-wife was more than anything a victim of Nancy's ceaseless whirlwind of destruction and causing everybody to go abruptly crazy around her because she's amazing: she plays the victim, but she always has time to put mascara on.
But in fact, Jill will have you know, she is the real victim. And Andy is a victim too, because she, Nancy, doesn't appreciate him, Andy, and "you're cute" she says to him, stretching it out to "your cuteness," which is basically the same statement but less daring, less like a decision has been made and more just a statement of fact. Andy's cuteness is undervalued. A married woman can point that out; a victim can commiserate about that with her fellow victim, no problem.
Jill reaches out: "You have... Um... Eyelash." He doesn't. She laughs, it's a weird unfamiliar sound to us and to her both: "You know what, it's just your skin!" Getting a little scary now, a little slurry, as she reiterates that she, and Andy, both deserve to be appreciated, because it's been a long time since she was "appreciated," she airquotes freely now, and they stare at each other and he says, "I can appreciate that," and the decision's made and it's mission accomplished. Elves triumphant. But Shane appears, the kid they forgot about, and he grins at them scandalously as she gives him a hearty, boozy greeting and tells him to hit the mall if he's hungry. His eyes and smile are wide, because it is early to be this drunk and she's pretty married to be this up on Andy's jock; he vanishes and Andy's on her before the door closes.
First things first, affairs in order: she goes to Dean Hodes's hotel room, and lists all her secret stashes and life insurance policies; he's distracted and interrupts to show her his new brochures, pinnacles of tastelessness he's been stashing in ER waiting rooms: Dean Hodes ("You can't spell misfortune without fortune!") with what she kindly terms "quite a healthy head of black hair" and a whole terraced community photoshopped in. He thinks the hair gives him a certain Atticus Finch quality; she goes on to tell him more about the money, the arrangements, the facts and figures of her life once it's over.
Dean keeps getting distracted, and she finally has to grab him by the eyeballs and force him to "focus on the potential sudden and unfortunate death of Nancy," if he doesn't mind. The thinness of the "potential" in that sentence momentarily overcomes his essential selfishness and he gets back to it: Silas becomes Shane's legal guardian. He's earned it. Dean's phone rings and she hangs it up for him, determined to get through this and the two things without stopping. When Dean asks if Nancy's going skydiving she doesn't exactly say no. There are lots of words for it; that'll work. We'll learn more.
Dean asks Nancy -- "out of curiosity, and poor self-image" -- what it was that made her come to him. "Because I trust you," she says, "And because you're a parent." He smiles; he glows. "Because you're all I could find on short notice." His smile drops, and she leaves with a parting shot: the hair's too much. She's not wrong.
When Rudolfo returns to his tent not only is Celia still there, but she's rearranged the whole thing, the entire HQ, and is ordering his revolutionary men around. "Oh, hi!" She says, ignoring his obvious questions, and tells him she was hoping to have it done before he got back: "Ta-da!" The whole thing is organized, now, so he can find his toys. "Good organization calms people," she explains: "It's a fact. Order is soooooothing." She sits him down and points to the shelves like Vanna, while his eyes get wider and wider. "Aqui: bullets, in descending order of caliber. Down on this shelf, empty magazines and grenade shells. Down here it's all handguns..." He's impressed. "Then," she says, pointing at the bottom shelves, "Machetes and knives, separated by blade length!"
There's more stuff she isn't sure about; she picks up a semiauto and waves it around, asking where he would put something like that. He takes it away from her with a quickness, sighing, and shaking his head. She's beyond charming, as is her way. "What. Machetes up top? You're right, machetes up top." He stares at her and she gets serious. "Please. Let me stay." Not pouting, not playing, not acting, just asking. He's thrown, yet again. "I don't have anywhere else to go," she explains to his amazement. "I like it here. My hair doesn't frizz... I'm useful... Do not make me go back there. Everyone hates me. I have no friends." He shakes his head: she's right, but damn.
Andy fucks Jill Price-Gray in her laundry room, and in fact it is not Jill Price-Gray-With-The-Hyphen, Andy has learned, that's the bitchface: it's Nancy Botwin who is the bitchface. And so he's screaming at Nancy, back and forth: "Fuck Nancy! Fuck me! Nancy! Fuck me, Nancy!" And you can imagine for a second that he's tattooed her face across her sister's. And she's screaming at Scott, the ceaseless elven monologue, and you can imagine for a second that she's tattooed her husband's face, okay, across that of the man who's fucking her, and outside this little tableau -- this little vignette in which the people are not, and this is key, pretending to fuck the person they are pretending to fuck, but are actually fucking somebody else to hurt the person they're pretending to fuck, which is an expression of power and a reclaiming of their own bodies against this terrible force that keeps taking away their sovereign personhood, sketching out this decision and this numb hatred against each other's bodies, which makes them war buddies at the least but not really sexual partners in any intimate sense -- outside this tableau, this room where no love really ever was, Shane Botwin takes a video or a picture with his cell phone, and grins.
Shane's uncle, fucking Shane's aunt. Anybody else on the planet takes this picture, maybe they're related to one or the other person in this little vignette: Shane is watching his uncle fuck his aunt, his father's brother fucking his mother's sister. Think about that: the boy who missed his mother and father so much that he masturbated to the cheesecake pictures one took of the other. The boy who watched his father's image so much that he fell off the roof, and went ballistic when the camera died; whose father's image, already shaky, is now almost gone forever. Whose father he only knows as a captured image, now. This is a reiteration as they tattoo hate across each other's faces, eyes tight squinting, creating images in their minds and rejoining, re-linking okay, Price and Botwin, in a whole new way. Genetically speaking this is the closest thing he's had to a family in a really long time. Take a picture: his mother's almost-twin, this man who's become more of a father than Judah ever got to be. This must have been what it was like.
"It is still an open question, however, as to what extent exposure really injures a performer." -- Harry Houdini
Nancy's smoking a cigarette; she's smoking this cigarette at a sushi bar, with adorable chopsticks in her hair. The chef tells her to put it out, and she drops it in her beer. "What's the one thing you wouldn't want a person leaving this earth to not have tasted?" she asks him, and he asks her if she has any allergies. Just one. She waves him off: "Bring it on." And another beer, and a whiskey, and one for her new friend the sushi chef. "Arigato!" he says, and she laughs.
"When I was ten," Nancy says, "I jumped off the Morristown bridge." The chef, her new friend, the chef's smile falls. She doesn't really notice. "It was in the newspaper: Daredevil Girl Survives Fall!" He can't look away. "It wasn't a fall," she tells him; a secret they can share. She laughs. "It was a leap!" She nods. "Big difference."
The only difference is choice, a hairsbreadth wide: she was going off that bridge either way, Nancy Botwin's explaining to her friend the sushi chef. She was getting out of that cage, that uncertainty, one way or the other. It could have been a fall, but it wasn't. It was a leap.
He offers her the shot, and she gives herself a second to think about it before she decides, before she makes the choice I mean, to knock it back. It's easier than you might think. Kanpai! she calls, and they clink and drink. She feels gross, but this is how you do it. This is a leap. This is part of a leap, the preparation for the leap; this is preparation all daredevil girls must do before the leap: sounding the waves, the direction of the wind, making sure your shoes are tied so that you don't do it poorly. Tucking hair behind an ear, so you can see it coming. Leaving no part up to uncertainty or chance, so that you can say it wasn't a fall, there wasn't anything unplanned or fearful about the leap, that it was a choice from the bridge to the water, all the way down. Only if it's executed perfectly is it a leap.
Mexico, drunk, she goes through Esteban's office, finds a gun in a cabinet. It's only a bit before he'll show up; he always shows up. He pretends to be a cage, a tiger; he pretends to be uncertain so that she can never know whether she's falling or leaping, whether she's a daredevil girl or the knocked-up puta whore, who falls.
"What are you doing here?" he asks, when he arrives. Right on time. She presses her face up against the glass between them, making nasty faces. He's horrified: "Are you drunk?" She protests that she's not drunk; she burps. He's honestly confused: is that why she slipped his goon? To get plastered? To endanger his child and give sway to her stupider impulses? "So you do listen to your messages," she says resentfully, vindicated: there is no uncertainty, there was never the chance that they were just playing phone tag. He was ignoring her calls. That's a definite and a definitive, it's something to push against. It's a fact she can use.
Because those girls in the tunnel, they didn't own themselves, their bodies, their wombs. They were all cunt, weren't they? Yeah. And titties. It wasn't up to them, those girls, those little boxes, to say what went in and what didn't. This baby lies in her womb, her womb lies in her body, her body is her country, sovereign, hers to abuse. The baby, by the transitive property, is hers. Not his. And if it doesn't earn her life, then at least it earns her a choice. "Yes. I've been drinking. And smoking. And I had raw fish. Very high in mercury."
He puts his finger in her face. That's good; that means he cares. About something. That's a fact she can use. He's angry; she likes that. "You should be taking better care of my baby," he says, and she pulls another face. "What's the point? I can't live with this level of stress, it's killing my baby anyway. I'm Dead Mom Walking." She laughs. Just tell me a fact, a single definite fact, a definitive thing I can know and fear and walk to the door holding it in my hands and say, "This is a leap."
"When am I going to end up in a landfill," she asks. She begs. For a fact. For some measure of control, of choice. He holds her life in his hand, and it's worse than dying. He gets in her face; he's angry, she likes that: "I haven't decided." He's back on top.
She shakes her head and pulls the gun out of the drawer, muzzle pointed at her abdomen, holding it out to him. Decide, now. Make a choice. Dead Mom Walking or Daredevil Girl. And somewhere in there she's thinking, "White lady's having a time!" She's thinking that sometimes when she acts out like this, when she screams loud enough, when she gets self-destructive and crazy enough, somebody relents. They laugh and say it was all pretend, life isn't really this bad. She's thinking, what does she have to do to scare him badly enough that he'll love her again. She thinks there's a thing she can do. If she didn't, she'd already be dead. Houdini breathes out and the bubbles go up and he's chained down to the floor and nobody could mistake it for a leap.
"Decide. Go ahead. Do it." She's terrified, shaking. She's begging for it to end. She's not a daredevil girl and it's not a leap. She just wants it over, one way or the other, and she's stopped caring which. She made arrangements. "Decide."
Esteban stares her down, and takes the gun, pulling her hair. She nods to herself. This might be love; their love began with a spanking. Maybe she's scared him into loving her again. He forces her to the table, with her hair; she reaches back for a kiss, putting his face to his, and he pulls her away again, forcing her down. "Okay," she says, getting it. Getting it, she thinks. Their love was always rough. This is how it goes. She doesn't mind, she's never minded that. She's always liked it. She's back on top.
He holds her down against the table and fucks her, hard. It's not good, it doesn't feel good, but that was never the point either. To feel something, that was the point. She felt something for him, and he loved her. "Aqui," he says: here. She nods, getting into it. Yeah: There. Right there, like that. On top.
The rest she can't hear or understand. We know what he's saying, because we have the benefit of the subtitles, but for all she knows it's just sex talk -- his dick, her cunt -- just talking about how attractive she is. But that's not what he's saying. "Here," he's saying, "You don't do what you want. Here," he says, "You do what I say." She's into it, as he fucks her way too hard. Show me: show me what I need to see. Her affect goes dead. She thinks she's on top; there's something coming toward the top, though, that tells her something else.
He speaks in English: "You don't dictate the terms of this arrangement. Okay?" Here becomes everywhere, and she realizes, too late, that she should have fought, should have forced him to kill her. He is on top. He was on top and she didn't even know it; she thought it was control and pain and a reconnecting, a re-linking, okay, to something that once made her happy, and powerful, and the safest woman in all of NAFTA, but that wasn't what it was at all. She has been raped. It wasn't a fall, and it wasn't a leap either. It was a robbery, and it was the truth.
And when he looked down, her back didn't have anything tattooed on it, because he didn't need to imagine anything at all. He was on top, and he knew it. And all the facts about men and women, their power and the way it cancels out, the way she's on top or he is, sometimes one then the other, sometimes neither, sometimes both: they stopped mattering. She thought it was a tunnel, if you will: she thought if she could dig down underneath his machismo and his essential heartlessness, if she climbed inside the cage with that tiger and said, "I am a woman, and I am the mother of our son. Your only son, after two daughters. I carry life and I create life, and it is mine to do with as I will. Make the decision, because I am not owned."
But she is. She wasn't white and she wasn't a woman and she wasn't the wife and she wasn't a mother. She was the knocked-up puta whore, and he needed her to understand it. Now she does. She doesn't move as he zips up, she doesn't move as he adjusts his tie, she doesn't move as he slaps her ass. Their love began with a spanking; it ends with one too. He vanishes and Cesar enters; she's still tits down on the table, panties around her knees, legs splayed out awkwardly, too stunned and horrified to move. She breathes, but that's all.
In a second, the screen will go black. And over the credits, maybe covered up by the promo for week, a certain song begins to play. It's by A Camp, which is Nina Persson's band, whom you know from the Cardigans, which you know from their single "Lovefool." And if for some reason you think this is a grey-area, or a date or quasi-marital rape, you might be enlightened by this fact. In a second the screen will go black, and she'll pick up her purse and go with Cesar, and we won't see it. And in that purse, she'll have mascara, and a long drive ahead in which she can apply it. And in the black, they'll play a song, called "Love Has Left The Room," and it goes like this:
Love has left the room
The party is over, but I can't get sober
Obsession is towing me deep down down...
I'll let go if you just let me
I will forget you if you will forget me
I'll slip your mind/ I will slip your mind
Tie me to the mast, cast me in iron
I hear the sirens, they sing of desire/ The fatal kind
This love is my last/ My final possession...
This show has always been, in a way and one increasingly critiqued, about the way White Lady orders her men around: Conrad, Andy, Guillermo, Esteban. Even when it got scary, like with Peter or U-Turn, she kept everybody in line with her magical lady powers. She was all cunt, and titties too, and nine times out she was getting loose like Houdini, shaking 'em in one direction so she could run in the other. Calling on Lacey when she couldn't carry it herself, and Lacey would always make it worse, but she'd get a moment to rest at least.
And in a certain cultural configuration that's hardly in line with our elite and intellectual feminist and humanist ideals, motherhood is about the most amazing thing a lady specifically can do. (The way the threats fly in this show, and maybe this is important or maybe not, but what does it say about us that the most important thing women can do that men can't is give birth, while the thing that men are threatening to do that women can't is rape them? I can't remember a tense situation on this show that didn't involve either guns -- an ambisexual threat -- or rape as a component.)
Then last season was a treatise on the power of motherhood, and the pitfalls. The maternity store, Quinn's last-minute takedown and Isabelle's maternal role, Sanjay's baby, Silas's MILF and Shane's proclivities. What could have been a crowning and ever-so-fertile moment of empowerment: Nancy's pregnant with your baby! You are powerless! Has become, in two episodes no less, a concept around which the most demeaning, horrific, scary occasions have accumulated.
There's never been a point at which this wasn't loudly and fabulously a feminist show. The original log line is a masterpiece of Marxist feminist critique: the suburban housewife's skills are systematically devalued both economically and culturally, so White Lady has to jump to a shadow economy -- run, in the beginning, by a black woman and her single pregnant daughter -- because the white man's burden is never having to say you're sorry. She spends two seasons hoping to come back to the fold -- for her cover business to become her actual business, to do the housewife version of economic success, to have a little bakery and coffee shop -- and it only takes a season after that dream dies before the suburb itself is consumed in the flames.
"My professional life has been a constant record of disillusion, and many things that seem wonderful to most men are the every-day commonplaces of my business." -- Harry Houdini
Which brings us here: a second (and third, if you count the cheese shoppe) attempt at legitimacy is undermined by agents of the white man's economy: the maternity shop is shut down, because the shadow economy also purveys guns and drugs. Not women, not the reason she personally brought it down: guns and drugs. Which impinge on the white man's economy, if you see what I'm saying. She ignores the etiquette, and is repaid in kind. Last year she was a figurehead, this year she's less. "Knocked-up Puta Whore" is not a great job description, but it's -- allowing for the misogyny of the appellation -- also not that far off the beam. She is cornered by this, saddled with unfair expectations and the sure threat of death, and a complete lack of respect from those who opinions matter, men, or interest in her internal life. Which frankly, and outstandingly horrible assault notwithstanding, is where she started. It wasn't a leap, it was a fall.
It was also one which she survived.
"Time to go," Cesar says, and Nancy quirks an eyebrow at the camera: Tried that. Didn't help.