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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 week, when Judah's ghost is seen roaming the Ren Mar Galleria and three witches show up at Starbucks telling Nancy she's the 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
r the years, sexually speaking. He has sexual experience, I don't know if that's been made clear. We should probably make a few identical jokes that add nothing to the story or the character, just so the sheer repetition becomes in itself hilarious. Nancy, meanwhile, is like, "Awesome. Because from where I'm sitting, I'm sitting in the LGBT clinic to see if my fourteen-year-old has a venereal disease." The way she manages to sneer each noun in a different way is impressive.
They have a whole battle of wills with Shane about how sex isn't dirty, so he shouldn't feel weird about it, but Nancy's point is that it doesn't matter how healthy sex is if you're going to get diseases, so it's better to abstain if you can't keep your shit clean, and Andy says that it's good to get back on the horse, just not bareback. Meanwhile, Shane's like, "I just had a Q-Tip. In my dickhole." He's able to say this word with a very funny, appealing sort of horror, and Andy nods sagely -- "Cotton-Eyed Joe. We've all been there" -- because guess why. He starts telling some retarded story that's not even worth it, and Nancy starts to go off on him about how the Uncle Andy Fractured Fairytales aren't even that interesting anymore because nobody's trying, and how Shane needs a parent, not a buddy. I would start with one friend who's not a creepy skank. Or Celia Hodes.
Before anybody can call Nancy on her inability to even parent, much less be anybody's friend, the doctor comes in, and it's gender dysphoria incarnate Brother Selma saying that Shane's got candida, and says the word "penis," and I don't know what happened after that because Brother Selma talking to me about rubbing my penis is one of those things. Andy and Nancy argue, Shane reminds them he needs neither a parent nor a buddy right now, just a pharmacist, and they separately think about what fuckups they are.
Esteban is drowning his pain in cigars and cognac or blanco or whatever and Pilar comes lurking around the corner about "Love in the modern age" and how it's as inconvenient as babies and whatever, he moons about and feels sorry for himself, and things get meta as she says, "I know what it's like to choose the wrong person," and he grins, and then she tries to set him up with some lady from a magazine who is of their class: educated, moneyed, society. "Take her out! Be happy, instead of drinking in the afternoon." He sullenly slugs a shot, but whatever. He'll go on the date, which is I guess in like five minutes.
What the script isn't doing a very good job of is reminding you why all this is happening: he's been completely whooped by Nancy's fake choice to raise the baby with Andy, so no matter what happens in this episode, he's going to end up back in Ren Mar. He could be watching TV with Cesar, he could be getting a pedicure with the other one, the hottie with the beard, it doesn't matter: something happens, Pilar does something, he goes running back to Nancy, based entirely on the confrontation last week. Same deal with Nancy. This whole episode is about that fight, and the increasingly insane shit they're doing in tandem, playing out the consequences of her calling his bluff and him calling hers. They both have to keep pretending that fight was real, until he comes back to her.
Later, the baby's home with Lupita while Nancy gets her drink on for the first time since that regrettable sushi session and tries to ignore Andy's intense babbling. They are at a truly hellish-looking tiki place where the drinks all have straws. Finally, she rolls her eyes and deigns to permit him to speak, and when he does it's to freak out that Shane has a yeast infection, which seems to Andy like a gross medical miscegenation, like getting hoof-and-mouth disease or Mad Cow. (Except, you know, how ladies are human. But then, stay tuned!)
Nancy agrees that the human body is a complex and mysterious experiment, and Andy corrects her: "It's a sewer!" He's still reeling from his first diaper-changing experience -- "That wasn't human" -- but at least now Stevie is Lupita's problem for a couple hours. He means this to be comforting, for them both, but Nancy moans. "Aww. He's not a problem!" She quietly wigs to herself about having had three songs, and finally goes, "Little bastard saved my life. And he's pretty damn cute. Like sick crazy cute." She goggle-eye mugs about how the drinks are strong, and again the acting is weak, and just as Andy's wishing the baby could talk and she's assuring him he'll learn to read the signs, she massages her breast, burps, and heads off to pump. Yeah, it's pretty hot.
Nancy stares at herself in the mirror, and I started getting really nervous and I didn't know why. I mean, it all fits together if you think about it long enough, but it was that feeling of dread that remained long after the episode, before anything ever happened. This is one of those episodes that takes place almost entirely on Mary Louise Parker's face, and if you're curled up in a ball on the floor it's easy to miss those subtle facial cues.
So the pump works away for about two seconds before dying, and she gets worried and frustrated and eventually throws it against the wall. She gives manual expression a fair shot, telling herself out loud to chill out and relax, but to no avail. Now, drunk and slightly terrified and in opposition to her own revolting body once again, she stares for a second before nodding and picking up her phone, laughing ruefully at the perversity, but psyching herself up for it too. When she summons Andy to the restroom, there's a moment where he balks and she nearly breaks down in tears. But just a moment.
Doug. When I see Doug it's like I just got injected with narcolepsy. So Silas is all upset about the stolen pot, and Doug is all gloom and doom about how "you only get one chance in America," an assertion which barely makes sense but bridges awkwardly to Celia coming through the house triumphantly with cardboard and packing tape, bound for the garage, ready to peace. Silas hatefully congratulates her on getting the fuck out of his house, and Doug is like, "Good for you! Who are you fucking?" Nobody, she just got a second chance thanks to America and You're Pretty cosmetics. I love how only because she's actually a drug dealer can she pretend to have this pride selling Mary Kay. It's like how you feel weird about buying condoms, right up until the day you have to buy, like, dandruff shampoo or whatever, and then condoms are okay.
Back in the bathroom, Nancy yells at the bewildered and tipsy Andy, "I'm engorged! It hurts! Please! I need you to suck it out!" He mutely makes a suggestion -- with a hilarious "wringing out the dishtowel" motion -- that she's already tried, and vaguely points in the direction of the pump, but she's like, "Please be the baby!" Please, stop being a valid choice for the father of my child. Please, stop using Dr. Alanis against me the exact same way I'm using you against Esteban Reyes. Please, stop wearing cardigan sweaters and assembling domestic bliss in front of me. Please, stop standing up for yourself and helping me with my kids and acting like an adult and turning into Judah. Please, just be the baby.
Nothing is quite what it seems, nor is it otherwise. Andy says he's done "crazy weird shit" before, like role-playing, like he was a werewolf once, and she finally goes -- and the visual is important: she's standing up in front of him and he's sitting on the toilet and she's sort of wiggling her breast in his face -- "Shut up and suck!" He almost does, then fakes left for the third time and asks what it's going to taste like. "Rum and milk." He gets nervous, talks to himself -- "here we go, lips to nips" -- and then does it!
After a false start with teeth and a moment to latch, there's a release of oxytocin and a uterine contraction that sends Nancy's eyeballs rocketing to the back of her head, which Andy does not need to know about and frankly nobody but new mommies need
to know about, and he kind of blurgs, and then she's like, "Spit!" But he doesn't. He babbles instead about how it has an interesting flavor and was more like a showerhead and less like a water spout, and gag me, and Nancy screams, "You swallowed!"
And the joke is that he goes, "I didn't wanna be a hypocrite," but the point is the self-satisfied, territorial, grin on her face that he doesn't even see. The best way I can approach describing this face -- which is instantly recognizable and relatable -- is to relate a very crass statement from a very good friend of mine, which was also instantly relatable: basically that it's a lot less satisfying to wipe your dick on somebody's sheets once you're together with that person and they are suddenly your sheets also. It's not mean and it's not aggressive or neurotic, exactly, but that's the face she's making. She had the beginnings of an orgasm, and he swallowed, and it's not sex, and it's not poison.
That night, she goes off on him for masturbating in bed with her, horrified and smiling in horror, and for the first time you can see that he's sort of delighted by the transgressive ickiness of what they did too. Which, it's very interesting, because breastfeeding is the most normal thing in the world, and the way guys are about breasts is about the least natural thing about breasts, and there's this very clear line between sexual use and everyday use, like with lots of your parts, that we don't like crossing, but out of all those, breastfeeding is probably the number one thing. The top of the hell no pyramid, as it were, and I mean, for about thirty obvious reasons. But it's also one of those taboos where nothing bad actually happens or could happen, so you get a lot of playing around with it, especially in stories like this. Poison River was basically 500 pages of this, and that's one of the best novels ever written. So I don't know.
So Nancy tells Andy to take a fucking Ambien, and he tries to explain how, for men, that's just one of the many great things about masturbation, and she's like, "I AM RIGHT HERE." Awesomely, Andy doesn't skip a beat: "Well? I'm engorged. It hurts. I need you to suck it out. Be the baby..." She grins to herself, but turns on the light and sits looking away from him while he lists all the weird shit they've gotten up to -- the bathtub scene, recently watching him fuck her sister, the suck & spit tonight -- and asks how, then, his masturbation in her vicinity is really all that weird.
Um, it's still weird. Don't jack off around other people. There is no amount of weirdness that can accumulate where that's normal. I don't care if it's wartime, or if your leg is chained to Cary Elwes in a dirty underground bathroom. I don't care if they started it.* Don't jack off around other people. It is a private activity.
(*Obviously, in that case, go for it. I am exaggerating to prove a point.) Nancy takes a less commonsensical approach, living as she does in the complete absence of an objective morality, and says the main reason they shouldn't go jacking off in front of each other is because they need to try and stay as normal as possible. That's what she says, but obviously what she means is that babies don't masturbate, and certainly not in bed with her. Andy's like, awesome, so we're just your normal brother and sister (in law) who share a house and a bed and a Mexican (-American) baby. That kind of normal.
Nancy's like, exactly! The kind that masturbate on their own time, instead of together. (Because once you start doing that, what you are doing is having sex with each other. Grow up.) Which private time, Andy points out, is a nonexistent quantity, and then the baby starts up. Nancy tells Andy to masturbate while she's feeding the baby, and he tries to reciprocate by saying she can "rub one out" anytime she wants, but she informs him that masturbation -- between giving birth two weeks ago and her babydaddy's disappearance -- is not high on her list. She takes off to deal with Stevie, handing Andy a burpcloth as she goes, which is somehow the grossest part of all of this.
At today's You're Pretty! seminar, Raylene instructs a scary lady to share her story, because it's a safe place. The story involves how her man says she's can't do anything on her own. I can't say if that's true for everything, but she definitely shouldn't be allowed to put on makeup by herself. She looks like Edward Cullen as a fat drag queen. Her man continues on to say that nobody will hire her, because she's so stupid, and he calls her Dummy and No-Jobby. About whom I find myself giving less than a single shit, because don't stay in abusive relationships. It's not fucking rocket science.
Anyway. Blah blah whine whine and finally Doug -- because who can take an obnoxious moment and make it truly egregious? -- shows up and leans against the doorframe: "Come on, No-Jobby! Finish the story." Raylene tries to intercept him and he immediately explains to her that he wants to make him a bunch of money selling her "face chemicals." She tells him to fuck off, and he starts throwing around the unsayables like how they're all "bored housewives," and she gives him the shadow economy speech I've given like a million times about drug-dealing -- that You're Pretty is for (specifically women) who have been marginalized and disenfranchised and have never been given the opportunity to succeed.
I guess the funniest thing about a Depression is that even educated white men have to hop on over to the shadow economy on occasion. Makes me feel warm in my tummy, anyhow. So Raylene gets hardcore with him after he starts screeching about how he's going to sue for sexual harassment ("You mean discrimination?") if she doesn't let him sell makeup, and she bitches that he's "blowing her gig" so they negotiate how much it's going to take to shut him down, and she chases him out the door after agreeing to let him sell three full orders, and he asks her out, but she's "into snatch" so maybe finally Celia's inner barsexual will finally be unleashed. Either way it's a Doug storyline through and through, and it's too bad. I can remember when Kevin Nealon made me feel positive about life.
Esteban's getting dressed -- Is it for his date? He sure does look nice! -- and he's all, "In a way, Pilar is right because I should be happy. And Cesar, you should smile more." He leaves and Cesar smiles at himself in the mirror, forcedly, and Survey Says? Three big red X's and a Why So Serious. Never ever again should Cesar smile.
See but I think this whole "live love laugh and be happy" thing with Esteban is after his date with the perfect lady, because of the whole parallel structure of this episode, which is just too darned subtle, which is a bummer, because the whole Esteban/Nancy relationship was already sort of complicated before the rape, and you know how people get about the idea of rape. So if you're brain's already turned itself off, then you have them just constantly lying to each other and hoping that they'll see the truth behind the lie, and it's just the same thing as holding guns to each other's heads, only less shocking to actually watch. And since throwing up your hands and saying you don't understand Nancy Botwin and never will is the path of least resistance, and like the only way you can possibly enjoy the show if you're that lazy -- by bitching about how little you enjoy the show, still, three weeks from the finale -- it probably does seem repetitive. I just feel like it's finally going somewhere.
Nancy and Andy crawl into bed that night exhausted and in the morning, Esteban walks in to find their heads together in the bed, like twins, arms crossing over the pillow wall, wearing identical clothes. Nancy snaps the fuck to attention, fingers crossed and overjoyed at her luck -- walking in on us, in bed together -- and sure enough (while Andy's yipping inconsequentially), Esteban holds out a ring and proposes marriage for the like eleventh time. She smiles indulgently, because she knows he means it this time, and clucks. "We've had this discussion before..." Esteban asks for the room to have it again, and Andy thinks he and Nancy are a team, and says no. So Nancy has to ask, which causes Andy to start screaming about how it's his house and his room and his Nancy, so they go downstairs and out into the front door.
Andy pretends to be getting his bitchy beauty rest, but immediately bounces down the stairs and gets Shane ("Fuck am I gonna do with a dollar?") to go spy on them. Their conversation is Nancy playing dumb and laying out every scenario so that he'll eliminate them one by one: this is another fake/secret engagement? No. This is a secret babydaddy arrangement? No. He tells her about his date with the woman he's "supposed to be with," so Nancy obliges and tells him to fuck off, heading for the door, even though that's clearly not the whole deal because he's proposing. He explains that she had the right clothes and said the right things: she was the perfect wife for a candidate. "She turned you down, so you're here?"
Just waiting for the shoe to drop, because if she can't think of the awful thing then the awful thing will fuck her, so she's spinning out every scenario she can think of, and he's like, "No, duh. I'm here because I love you, and you love me, and we have an awesome kid." And then comes the scenario she didn't think of, which is a random guy walks out on the sidewalk in front of her house and starts firing a gun. Esteban shoves her down onto the lawn, and Cesar plugs the guy like a million times, and everybody's okay. Except for Shane, who's sliding down the wall onto the porch.
So what are the options here? The shooter was meant for Esteban or Nancy; or on the outside I guess her family. That means it's either coming from Pilar, to protect him, or from Pilar to eliminate him, but neither of those are legit. If it's some random Mexican drug lord thing that's dumb, because all it does is teach Nancy that she's swimming with sharks, and that's like the one thing in all of reality that she acknowledges. So the bullet was meant for Nancy, who has no enemies but one, a radical and scary confrontation with whom she's been building since, oh... Season Three?
I mean, my psychic powers do not work with this show. One of the reasons I love it so much is that it's constantly surprising. I have no idea what's going to happen, ever. All last year everybody kept saying she was pregnant, and I just thought that was silly and dumb, and it turned out to be not only true but awesome. So there's the intuitive creepiness hangover from the bulletproof jacket scene with Alanis, that still bugs me for some reason. And there's the thing about Guillermo and Nancy pecking crazily at each other through the bars of their respective cages, and then she jokes about him getting raped, and ends up raped. She basically made Andy give her a blowjob tonight, and I mean (brick dance!), can't you see her pulling that shit with Guillermo? "Shut up and suck." Maybe this season will turn out to be all about how Nancy's tools suddenly got minds of their own: Andy, Lupita, and now Guillermo.
And there's an even more nebulous thing that has to do with last season being arrayed around a literal birth canal, and this season being constellated in terms of wombs and jails -- Esteban's house, Celia's garage even -- that underscores that particular parallel. And without U-Turn around, the only person she can really blame for her life is Guillermo. So if he just got her kid shot -- in the arm, by the way, but still -- maybe that plus her pregnancy means some kind of Lacey LaPlante Mama Bear freakout. But like I said, this show is and always has been surprising as hell, and I feel like if this show were a Jeopardy category the one area I really haven't been diligent with over the years is Guillermo. I feel like her relationship with him is just something I never paid enough attention to, and I've been feeling that way for years, so maybe the answer is actually really simple but at this point all I have is this: that little bastard burnt down the world to save her life once, too.