Episode Report Card Jacob Clifton: A+ | Grade It Now! YOU GRADE IT Wide Stances and Sneaky Glances
By Jacob Clifton | Season 5 | Episode 9 | Aired on 08.03.2009
In a hurry? Read the recaplet for a nutshell description! Finished? Click here to close.Nancy pretends to train Andy to take care of the baby while actually using him to keep from dealing with the baby. Later, he takes her out for baroque tiki hut drinks that would impress Dr. Alanis not a whit. After a pump failure in the bathroom, Nancy suffers some kind of psychotic break and calls Andy in for the titular duty.
Or should I say "eponymous"? Either way, it's maybe the most disturbing thing that has ever happened on the TV. And yes, I do include Shane whacking it to photos of his mother when I say that.
Speaking of the little freak, Shane gets a yeast infection from those gross girls he's always hanging out with, leading to a hilarious scene in the free clinic where Andy and Nancy throw some kind of Bad Parenting Bee, in the presence of Mac's Mom.
Silas wears well-tailored clothing, and does little else. Speaking of clothing, Nancy and Andy are now wearing identical clothing, which -- even when they're not sucking on each other's literal nipples, or masturbating in extremely close proximity -- doesn't help that they're now even worse siblings than they are co-parents.
Doug decides that he also wants to sell You're Pretty! cosmetics after Celia shoves her ill-gotten successes in his face, pulling the old reverse-discrimination motif that has been putting teen male sitcom leads in beauty-pageant drag since Mike Seaver was a tiny little Christian nutcase.
Pilar tries to set Esteban up with some society lady, which brush with the concept of "appropriate" leaves him cold. So he's still in love with Nancy, so he asks her to marry him for the eleventh time. This causes Andy to flip out, and he sends Shane to spy on them in the yard, which is why he's out there when a random shows up to gun down Esteban -- or is it Nancy? -- and ends up hitting Shane instead. Which, given how epically twisted things continue to get, is par for the course. Stay tuned for next week, when Judah's ghost is seen roaming the Ren Mar Galleria and three witches show up at Starbucks telling Nancy she's the next Mayor of Tijuana.
Want more? The full recap starts right below!Between the episode title and the opening image -- a woman lactating through her t-shirt -- I had sort of a bad feeling. That bad feeling intensified, and continued to intensify, until I thought I was going to pass out. I got over it. You will too.
Also having a bad feeling is Cesar, who is watching Esteban having a freakout in Nancy's ex-closet and screaming about how Little Stevie Ray is a big old Jew now. He points out the absurdity, considering that Nancy's not even Jewish, but he's no closer to seeing how the web of Nancy's bullshit is pulling tight around him. "Why don't women listen?" he screams, and "What is this?" It's a pashmina, Cesar explains... Leaving out how that reference would be even more apropos like ten years ago.
I don't understand the pop references on this show at all sometimes. It makes Entourage look positively hip sometimes, like with this, and then you got this whole Bernie Madoff thing with Celia that's actually relevant... It's like you took every People magazine published since Kerry/Gore and put them in a blender and you never know what's going to fly at your face. Esteban tries to rip the garment in question -- a sheer, quelle Arquette hoodie/shawl thing -- and runs off. Cesar thinks that probably this is all for the best. He has no way of knowing that this is just Phase II of Nancy's ultimate plan to use her sons' penises to control Esteban Reyes.
Couch-bound Nancy tries to sleep among the scary neon bleeping blooping toys of Andy's last gasp of adolescence, and finally climbs up the stairs with her body pillow and the baby monitor, and tries to climb in bed with Andy. He resists being displaced, and then slightly resists sharing the bed with her. His conditions are that there is no spooning, he needs three pillows at all times (including "a hugger," aww) and that she must be prepared for night farts, now that he's been dieting. Finally she just screams at him, flesh peeling away from her on-fire facial skeleton skull face of rage, that the whole point is less talking and noise and bullshit, not more.
After a bit of talk about how Nancy managed to chase off Esteban with the Jew thing, the baby starts crying, and -- it being Lupita's night off -- Nancy sends him in to deal with it, dangling adulthood in his face enough that he finally gives in. "This is just so you can have the bed!" he whines, and she's like, "Duh."
MLP's acting, I hate to say it, is notably off in some scenes, because of the sitcommy dialogue in the episode. Usually she tries to make these cheesier lines work, but this week she's willing to just do the mug-and-trail. Like, she tells him to sing "Me and Mrs. Jones" to the baby, because they've got a thing going ozzzzzzz, and says the last words into her pillow. That's some Two And A Half Men shit right there, and it looks from here like it's just that she honestly doesn't know what to do with the shit. I mean, the more emotionally complicated things, the bathroom scene, she gives you her usual twice what the writers do, so I guess it evens out. But it's still irritating to watch, because she's usually perfect, and because it's irritating in its own right.
So a few hours later Nancy starts hitting Andy again, and he's like, "But I fed him!" So she explains that now he has pooped: "That's how babies work." Andy explains that optimally, she would be the one dealing with poop, while he would contribute things like funny faces, and she's like, "Make funny faces while you wipe his ass, I need to pump." A few hours after that, she basically punches Andy again to go feed him, and Andy says that probably he wants his mommy. What Andy means is, "He wants his mommy," but what Nancy hears is, "He wants you to breastfeed him," so she says she's empty. Nobody's going to disagree there, babe.
Andy whines that she's trying to break him, and she tries to explain the very realities of the Way Of The Baby: "Shit and food, shit, and food. Mostly shit: wiping shit, keeping him away from shit, minimizing the external shit." Parenting, therefore, is shit. Andy asks about love, and she's like, "Oh, it's there. It's just buried under all the shit." He says he feels used, and she reminds him she's got to clamp a person onto her breast every three hours, and that's the cue for Andy's Sexual Adventures Part 1,532: These Nipple Clamps One Time, which sounds about as boring as anything, so she shoves him out to deal with it.
Dean heads over to Super Lucky Happy Cannabis Club to finally tell Silas and Doug the fake story about the reclaimed pot getting jacked, so they don't realize he gave it to Celia. There's a sad little hand-Sharpied sign that says Currently Out Of Stock, and Silas's sad little pout, and Doug's horrible face being shitty, and Dean's funniest line in the lie is about how he was finally felled by guys "selling stuffed tigers at the mini-mart," and have you ever stopped to go to those guys? Nobody I know ever has, but you see those giant black blankets with tigers or wolves sometimes covering the windows of your finer drug-dealer apartment complexes, so I know somebody does. One day I will. Anyway, Dean whines and still has the bruises from Celia's beating and is generally so sucky that Silas honestly has no choice but to punch him in the face.
Shane's practicing guitar in the living room when those skanks he hangs out and has threesomes with come in, without knocking, and immediately start jabbering at him. He's like, "Hi?" The mean one beats around the bush, and finally the dumb one goes, "It hurts when we pee." Cut to him standing there holding a flashlight while they investigate his penis and say things like, "Nothing on the underside!" until Andy opens the door. His first response is to back out of there with a quickness and feel gawky and tell them to have fun, but his second more mature response is to come back and be responsible.
Shane says they might have something -- "Not tonsillitis," Andy guesses -- and when one of the skanks says Chlamydia, Andy tells them to go home immediately and discuss it with their parents like in She's Too Young, and not have any sexual encounters on the way home. Heh. Shane protests, once alone with Uncle Andy, that it's nothing, and Andy's like, "Oh, it's something. Until we make sure it's nothing." Then, Andy's Sexual Adventures Part 1,647: Boy Have I Had Some Sexually Transmitted Diseases In My Time, which is what you call a character tic.
Celia: "Take a deep breath... Hold that breath... And let it out." Get it? Like a yoga instructor, but for pot! The simultaneous exhalations of her mall-working pot club cause the smoke alarm to go off, so Danielle -- the pink-on-pink chick who hit on Isabel before -- knocks it down with a well-tossed shoe or something, because she's on the softball team, because of course she is, because she's a lesbian. Get it? Again? That scary Edie Britt Orange You Thirsty lady that wouldn't quit it last week is back, asking too many questions so that Celia can give us the whole setup: they buy the "beauty products" on their credit cards, and since the pot club closed down they sell more "beauty products" to their friends, also on credit cards.
So it's a Ponzi scheme? No, it's a pyramid scheme, because she's still using the multilevel approach? Either way, the Madoff parallel is obvious, because of the emphasis on plastic and the fact that whoever is at the bottom of the pyramid is not going to have any money either. So it's like both. Subprimes. And the interesting thing is that this model is not in any way different from the actual You're Pretty model, or from dealing drugs. It just takes the best parts of both and leverages the whole thing on credit. I hope it really comes down on top of everybody, that would be amazing.
Andy's excited to be at the clinic dealing with a "good old-fashioned STD scare," which lacks both screams and poop, and is in his wheelhouse, because I don't know if I mentioned this but he's had quite a ride ove