Episode Report Card Jacob Clifton: A+ | Grade It Now! YOU GRADE IT When They Do the Double-Dutch
By Jacob Clifton | Season 5 | Episode 8 | Aired on 07.27.2009
, and by the way, the hospital just called to schedule him for New Daddy classes. "I was confused, so asked if they had the right person. 'Is this Andrew Botwin?,' says she. 'Why yes,' I reply, as I usually do to that particular question..." Nancy grins, because he's being awfully funny, and he finally asks how they got his name.Nancy explains, briefly, that she couldn't write down Esteban's name, and congratulates him on being a babydaddy. He finds this presumptuous, to say the least, and you can tell she didn't put so much thought into the list of defenses for this conversation. Basically, her reasons that he should give into this scheme are that he will be carrying on the Botwin name, and also mazel tov. Neither of which is compelling, really.
More compelling is Andy's trippy poetic pothead point that a birth certificate is our first ID, so her son's first one will be fake. He says he's done playing babydaddy to your kids, which is a wretched lie, and she does that silent-scream thing she always does when people somehow manage to tell her no. "ANDY I DON'T HAVE ANYBODY ELSE," she freaks, and he's like, "Once again, that is your fault."
She leaves him to his bong, but again: someone, usually Andy, says this at least once an episode this season, and it's like, did you think Nancy was so terribly likeable and possessed of such good judgment that we didn't already kind of get that she's an asshole? Because memo received. Sometimes all it takes to turn a casual viewer into a disappointed one is telling them to be disappointed over and over. People like to feel smart, but they also hate ambiguity, so being given permission over and over to hate the lead character eventually just starts feeling like being instructed to do so, at which point there's not a whole lot of reasons left to watch.
But there have been a lot of similar concerns with individual plotpoints this season -- like Celia suddenly deciding to sell drugs last week, and ... suddenly deciding to sell drugs this week -- that make me think it's a showrunner thing, like it came up in the room that Nancy would finally be accountable, so every episode that comes in has something pointing to that, but now they're all just kind of blending together into Dogville. Or maybe it's not just repetition and it's actually building to something we can't see yet. I don't know, it seems like a placeholder concept with the tags still attached instead of being woven into the episodes in a way that doesn't make them stick out like this.
Celia brings her YP contract to Dean -- it is perfumed! -- and immediately starts bitching at him about the prodigious amounts of weed all over his office. He explains that it's a client's, and laughs at her contract, which is signed and countersigned and notarized and airtight. All he can do, he says, is get her high, but you know she was in rehab and she's clean now, so does he have any booze? Oh, Celia. She gulps scotch out of the bottle and breathes, and tries to get him to tell her about this mysterious pot client.
High as a kite, Dean laughs that the privileged people in question rhyme with "Drug" and "Highless," whose "pop club" got "rusted," so he had to get their "schmarijuana" back from the "grolice." Great to have you back, Dean! Celia of course sees this as a personal attack on her by God, that "assholes" have thousands of dollars of weed, while she's got a room full of unsalable You're Pretty. Dean points out that Highless has gotten kind of awesome lately, and she gets in his face: "Are you a closer? Or a loser?" Both, of course: he giggles weirdly that he likes to close desk drawers, for example, and rather than following up on that, thank God, Celia says she wants to sell pot with her makeup, as a free gift with purchase. Dean protests that he can't steal the weed, and she shrugs. "Just tell them you got ripped off by black people!" she says, and then punches the shit out of him to make it seem more real.
This cute psycho picketer is standing outside the Ren Mar Women's Center when Andy arrives, high on life and proud of telling Nancy off, moonshiner merkin gone forever, and gets very affectionate with him: "You're tenacious -- if backward -- so bravo!" He explains further that he's on the SIDE OF STICKING TO ONE'S GUNS, fairly hopping with excitement, and when Alanis comes out in her bulletproof jacket to smoke an American Spirit, he sprints over to her.
She asks about the baby, and the guy is like, "BABY MURDERER!" and she reminds him by name that he needs to stay 25 feet back, like, this is just her life so she can take this with equanimity, because it's just Gale with his like one sign. "You're wearing armor," Andy notes, and she nods: "Can't be too careful." She's also smoking, which is funny when doctors do it, which they always do on TV. Finally he asks her out to dinner. "I shaved!" he says excitedly, and she asks when. "Just now! Right before I came!" This is just charming enough, and she agrees.
She asks how she'll know his car, and he admits that it has a "distinctive horn," and Gale's all, "You are in the crosshairs of the righteous! Ignore the dark warnings at your peril!" Andy totally loves Gale some more, and Audra produces a blister pack of Claritin. "Gale, today's pollen count is off the charts." Again, I can't tell if she's the best character ever created, or it's just the stark difference between her sort of holy goodness and Nancy's unholy nanciness, or it's the magic of Alanis, or what, but I love her so, so much. She wears a bulletproof jacket and still gives the guy allergy pills, you know? That's as anti-Nancy as you can get. Andy happily takes the pills over to Gale, and he reaches bizarrely over the imaginary line to take them, and then informs Andy that he's going to burn in hell for eternity, which makes Andy do a little dance and shrug cutely.
There's something about the jauntiness here, the wonderfulness of both Audra and Gale among the death threats and flak jackets, that makes me feel something, but I don't know what it is. A sort of dread, but thematically I can't figure out why this location and these characters are scary, it's like in the peripheral vision somewhere. Like how last season was all about birth and motherhood and you didn't see it until it was too late. I mean, this is an abortion clinic we're talking about, among other things. I can't see it yet. I'm probably just making it up, because Rudolfo and the machetes and the whole kidnapping were ultimately pointless, and that hot guy in Cleveland National Forest was pointless too, and I really thought those were both going to get nasty. I do know that even just the idea of anybody pretending to hurt Alanis Morissette in a made up TV show still makes me want to punch somebody.
The dog doorbells bark, and Nancy walks slowly over to the door, where Lupita is! I often like Lupita. A lot of times she's an empty stereotype for cheap laughs, but since most of those scenes are with Nancy it's not that egregious. Lupita congratulates Nancy on her timing: "William Morris just merged with Endeavor and Mr. Kaplan out on his ass!" Nancy doesn't know what she means by that, but it's actually kinda funny and not all that dated.
Lupita says their house looks like a dive bar, and asks about her bedroom. Nancy tries to say there's not one, but her ass is halfway out the door when Nancy backtracks and says she'll just be taking the couch, then. By which I assume she means, "Until I manipulate Andy into giving me his bedroom, which will take three seconds." Lupita says she had her last baby when she was 52: "Women in my family bleed forever." Nancy takes this in stride, and asks in a hush how old Lupita actually is. "37. So, one night stand?"
Nancy says the baby situation is a little more complicated than that and Lupita fake-commiserates: "Aw, he'll leave his wife?" More complicated than that. Lupita's like, "Great to see you, Nancy," and they laugh about what a constant shitstorm Nancy's life is, and then she offers her demands: pay in cash, feed her, no working