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It was Pilar who sent the gunman that nailed Shane. Nancy goes gangster on Pilar's buddy Cesar, shooting him in the arm as recompense and learning that Cesar now fully believes that Esteban's happiness is contingent on Nancy and Stevie's survival. Esteban's name has been taken off the gubernatorial ballot, which puts them out of danger, but of course Nancy convinces him to run as an independent so they will all be in danger some more.
She tries to ship Silas off to Europe to get him out of harm's way, but he points out that somebody needs to be there to take care of Shane, who's becoming some kind of drunk self-cutter and heading into serious Daredevil Boy territory. What were once red flags have now become entire brass bands walking down Main Street, to the point that Nancy's serious denial about her fourteen-year-old carbon copy of a son has become both hilarious and terrifying.
Celia revisits her old dealer Ignacio to set up a new connection for her makeup/drug dealing, and freezes Dean out of the operation once he's served his purpose. Meanwhile, Doug is down five grand, not selling any You're Pretty, and getting into fights with Girl Scouts until he realizes the secret of Celia's success. He agrees to a team-up with Dean to take her down -- right after he dips his nuts in a cup of hot coffee. Once again, the boba purveyors door are subjected to the strange sounds of genital torture. Maybe they're just wondering what an episode of this show would be like where somebody's dick wasn't shoved somewhere terrible/terrible things weren't being shoved in people's dicks.
After a very touching goodbye to Andy, who signs Stevie over to Esteban once and for all in order to start his new life as somebody who deserves Dr. Alanis, Nancy and Esteban finally get married. Cesar and adorable Ignacio are both in attendance; Shane is drunk more, and Nancy is wearing the most fucked-up piece of clothing ever created, not unlike something Big Bird would wear to a Gay Pride parade. Then Nancy takes a piece of cake to the crazy hotness of Guillermo... Along with a request to have Pilar totally fucking murdered, probably for making that ugly outfit.
Want more? The full recap starts right below!We start immediately with Cesar treating Shane in the back of Esteban's car while the driver takes them away from the scene. Nancy's pretty much completely useless, which is paradoxically really comforting to see after so much flaking out, even though what she's doing is flaking out, but it's like authentic flaking out as opposed to going crazy. Interestingly, the credits are displayed on a lucha mask, with a second mask beneath it. Keep digging. Shane's as dissociated as his mom has been this year -- "Look at all my blood, mom!" -- and the fact that, as he reports, he can't even feel it just means she finally can. Cesar deals with everything efficiently, and Esteban's freaking out -- "shoot at my family, you shoot at me," et cetera -- but we, and I think Nancy maybe, already knows the truth.
Shane compares it to a slap: "He slapped me, with a bullet. Mom, isn't that weird?" She agrees: it's weird, and fucked up, and scary. She starts screaming, screaming like she hasn't screamed since we met her, for the hospital, and Cesar reminds her that gunshots are automatically reported to the police. She doesn't care, she screams, distracting even Esteban from his usual cool. Cesar asks for the towncar's vodka bottle and she asks him if he's a doctor. "A nurse. In the Army." Like Hot Lips Houlihan, she grins, and Shane giggles ("Caliente Lips") before Cesar pours it on. "AHH! Fuck you! Fuck your mom! In the ass! With a screwdriver!" Even Esteban's impressed as Shane follows this by taking the bottle from Cesar's hand, and downing a healthy slug. Nancy follows soon after. I hope she pumped.
Actually, no I don't. I don't anything having to do with Nancy's lactation. I don't ever want to think about breastfeeding again, either in the general or the practical. I have had enough and refuse to associate further with Nancy's breasts in any capacity. Yes, it'll mean I don't get to watch those amazing/creepy bedtime story videos she did for Esquire, but that is a small price to pay. Not to mention disturbing in their own right.
Doug's selling You're Pretty outside the ridiculously named Girth Gym, or at least attempting to. He's got signs and banners and a long table, and he's squinting, which is basically a recipe for success right there. "I found a high-volume area, followed the script... What am I doing wrong?" Because what woman wouldn't want to talk to Doug Wilson, the skeeviest motherfucker in the universe, outside something called the "Girth Gym," about her skin imperfections? He practically has NO FAT CHICKS tattooed on his face as it is, just by the Retarded White Male look on his face. Not that the awesome girls at the table selling Girl Scout cookies have any better reason for having chosen this venue, although come to think of it, a little self-hatred and reward/punish probably is good for business.
The tall girl to his left tells him to get lost and he threatens to flick the "God-nipple" on her forehead, which she explains is a bindi, and he spits, "Everyone knows it's bindi," which is so nonsensical and random it shows his real level of frustration. The Association was my favorite band for awhile when I was a kid. "Cherish" and "Along Comes Mary" and of course "Never My Love." I never liked "Windy" too much; turns out I actually do have a twee threshold. Who knew? I liked the ballads, but there was something about "Mary" that I still find sort of Zen to contemplate. Very Nancy: "When we met I was sure out to lunch/ Now my empty cup is as sweet as the punch./ Sweet! As the punch!" Now, what does that even mean? I don't know, but I love it. I bet Alanis knows.
Some perfectly fine-looking soccer referee lady comes up gushing about You're Pretty and asks if he knows Celia. He's like, "I love that woman! This is the same stuff!" Which he doesn't know is code for drugs, so she sort of winks at him about how she already bought two eye shadows and needs two more now. He sticks his tongue out at the girl, who flips him off, and the woman says more quietly that her husband would kill her if he knew how much she was spending on weed. Doug's eyes cross until the little girl explains the situation: "She thinks you're selling pot like your friend, you fucking idiot." See, if Shane and Isabelle would hang out with this little girl instead of those two skanks, they'd probably be okay.
But Shane is not. Okay, I mean. There's a fun scene in which he's the unmoving point at the center of the whirl, and the whole cast comes to visit him. Audra fixes his arm up, explaining that "if you're going to get shot it's good to get shot the way you shot," straight through the meat without hitting bone, and Andy worries about Nancy finding out he sent Shane into the yard before going off about how great Audra is. She gives Shane a big bottle of Percocet and tells him to take it easy on them, they're not Mentos, and then back to Andy, who giggles over the amount before downing three of them and passing out in the back of the remaining tableaux.
Ignacio brings him that DVD player he loves so much ("You take this! You watch movies! You feel better! About your arm, life, everything!") and Nancy puts down a plate of food before skittering off again. Silas explains that every time he thinks shit can't get more fucked up, shit gets way more fucked up, and Nancy reappears with ice cream, standing there totally fucked up, and runs away crying. It's fun in a writerly way, but also as a basically successful experiment in showing Shane's subjective experience.
I've broken bones lots of times, and one time in particular it was exactly like this: people appearing and disappearing, time curving in strange ways. Shane's continuing dissociation becomes centered on his injury -- his pain -- and everything else revolves around that. Which is pretty much straight from the Book of Nancy, insofar as she treats this as the same coping strategy as he's learning to, but usually by shooting herself in the arm instead of having it done to her. It's a sly diagnosis, anyway, that means never having to enter the actual scary braincase of scary Nancy to explain, once again, why she is this way.
"I'm going to go float in Lake Esteban," Andy finally says vaguely: "That pool's got a tide, and ... Me... Floating in it like... A leaf to a filter. Or a bug..." Then Cesar's staring down at Shane, begging him not to tell anybody he was an army nurse. Esteban sits in the chair opposite, promising in his taciturn way that nobody will get inside the house, nobody will get near him. The terms defined several weeks ago about Esteban's house v. Bubbeh's house, safety v. no safety, have to become the working definition now. At a loss, Esteban offers Shane his watch. Cesar tells Shane to say only that he was a medic, or else the others will tease him. Shane stares at all of this equally, unwilling to take part.
"I'm sorry," Nancy says, sitting in the chair and staring at him, ashamed and scared. When he asks why, she reminds him that he got shot. "It was bound to happen sooner or later," he says, but she rebuts this one. In fact, she explains, assuming that at some point your child will get shot with a gun is not something you do when you're pretending to be the tooth fairy. But what he's saying is that life is what you deal with, and what has kept Nancy alive for five years is thinking there's a better life, on hold, that she can reach after this latest thing is done. That same grief/addict stuff all over again: that what he sees correctly as the state of things is for her only a temporary bump in the road.
Not that there's a statutory limit on that stuff, but that every day you look at the shape of your life and see it as part of the whole: you read the topography and see the choices you've made. Addicts are incapable of doing that, because their lives are heading toward something better, the whole time, so they divide it up into pieces of now. Right now I need a fix. Tomorrow I can go into rehab or quit cold turkey or get my kids back, but
first I need a fix. Or to step this dissociation from consequence back to a manageable level: If you go off your diet or stop exercising or whatever it is, if you fall off the wagon, well, January first is at most 364 days away, at any given time.
"It was this thing that happened today," he explains. "Other things have happened other days, things will happen tomorrow." This is what she's taught him. It's scary but it's at least a little healthier, this part of his breakdown. A little closer to the bear. She promises he won't get hurt again, and he barely hears her, and she demands he look her in the eye and promises again. It means nothing. "You should worry about Stevie," he says almost angrily. "He's just a baby." She breaks into tears, unable to explain that's what Shane is too. He asks for the sandwich she's got balanced on her knees, and she weakly hands it over.
Celia kicks in the door to a lucha libre locker room, causing one unmasked gentleman to run off shrieking that he's been seen. Celia's used to that; it's been every day of her life. She crosses the room to Ignacio, who is wearing a revealing black unitard and stretching seductively. She stares at his crotch until he explains he's wearing a cup, and then she demands "a hookup." He considers, and asks to see her culo, and she tells him to kiss her culo, she's talking about drogas. I really like the idea that Celia, being hollow the way Nancy only pretends to be, is actually better at this than Nancy could ever be. Nancy was so angry when she said she never asked to be treated like a big boy, remember? And that's fucking all Celia ever wants.
Celia gives her new associate a whole talk about how she wants a steady supply of weed across the border, and his continued groin stretches -- in a variety of directions and thrusts, with accompanying groans and grunts -- seem as disconcerting and fascinating for Celia as they might be for Sanjay. "You can be my heavy: sniff out the assholes in my life, and bury them in the yard." They agree on a 20% cut, and he puts on his Doberman mask, picking up a big soft bone and growling in her face, jumping around, before bouncing off every surface and out into the arena. She's like, "What the fuck?" but secretly she loves it because it's Ignacio, and he rules unavoidably on all levels.
Cesar's cleaning his gun on the edge of the fountain when Nancy comes out and asks him straight up to confirm that the bullet was meant for her. He doesn't meet her eyes, just tells her to get her family out of there. She chokes on it, but tells him to spill who it was. It was somebody, he says, who won't stop until she gets what she wants. Nancy picks up the gun, smiling, and he warns her not to even try to kill Pilar. "How about the person reporting to her?" Lacey asks, turning the gun on him and asks what Esteban will think about Cesar setting her up.
"Think it through," Cesar says firmly, and she does. So why would he shoot the gunman in the end, if he was implicit in the plot? Cesar finally realized that Nancy's death would be the end of Esteban, whose happiness is Cesar's own. This is lovely, but also, as Lacey points out, pretty gay. She tells "Nurse Cesar" that she's willing to forget his lapse in loyalty since he spared her life, but the fact that her kid got hurt means she owes him. "Count to three. Are you right-handed?" He is; he gets to two before she nails him in the arm. "Three," Lacey says softly, and basically vanishes in a scary fog, leaving only phosphene tracers in the air from the U-Turn tattoo glowing under her dress.
Andy surprises Audra in the poolhouse, stealing medical supplies from the Rosemary's Baby room. He calls "stealing from a druglord" both "bold" and "hot," which it admittedly is, and though she protests that while her clinic is fighting for every cotton swab Esteban has this whole imaginary medical theatre sitting around, but he pretends he's not convinced to keep quiet. "What's my silence worth?" She suggests maybe patching his fourteen-year-old nephew's bullet wound without reporting it to the cops, and Andy says that additionally she has to go with him to see jazz. Which he thinks is code for "grownup" and not "more terrifically boring than you can ever imagine," because he thinks those things always go hand-in-hand.
The only jazz musician he can name is Dr. Teeth, which he defends because that is a jazz Muppet, and she gives it a pass. He is incensed and feels jerked around because she was mean to him "over chips and salsa," but then flirted again at "Little Stevie's weenie roast," so now they have to be sophisticated at least once. She admits being too harsh on the date, and giving him a second look as her punishment. "And you looked good! But I looked closer, and that's when I saw it." What is the it, he wonders: a cancerous mole? Basically. "You're hung up on Nancy," she notifies him, and he goes into a flurry of how that's so not true.
(...But to his reasons I can't really pay attention, because he's spent the entire episode in a t-shirt that now comes into play in the most gorgeous way, so we're going to talk about that. It's grey, and there's a huge white חי in the middle of it, with the word "achiever" underneath, and on the back it translates it -- "life" -- which is what I win at because chai + achiever means "high achiever" when you say it out loud (which is nice especially because it's on this show Weeds, and being high is all he's ever achieved, plus cutesy t-shirts), but also in terms of this conversation he's having now it means also what it says as written, life + achiever, which is what he's trying to be: He's trying to achieve a life.
It took Nancy and Audra -- and Mags and Judah, and Esteban -- to get him here, but now he wants it. Audra will be the proof, and the absence of Nancy -- which is why it will fail, because lives and the having of them aren't contingent, especially on our lovers, I guess unless our lovers happen to be Mexican drug lords -- but it's still gorgeously constructed. Anyway, I love that so much. Let's rejoin him mid-whine.)
"I'm trying to man up! Sure, I'm tangled in Nancy drama, but it's a fledgling effort!" He asks Audra if shitting on his effort is "an occupational hazard, aborting everything," and I get that scared feeling again now for both of them. Man, if Andy dies I will just pitch a fucking fit. I know I was wrong about Guillermo and Pilar last week, but the dread remains. "It's not a life yet, Andy!" Audra gleams, which takes the triple score of the t-shirt thing and returns the serve by relating it back to her job, doing an end-run around his attack on it by using the words against him. This is the most amazing scene I've ever seen on this show, my God.
Andy tells Audra this is precisely why she's single, which predictably causes her smile to fall: "You're a hot doctor, but you're alone." He offers that this is because she's always making excuses instead of taking risks -- which is boy smarts, insofar as it positions him as the alternative to any insecurities she has about whatever it is that makes her life imperfect -- and she points out that in this case his love for his sister and general lameness are a pretty valid fucking excuse. He flirts a bit more, and she's on her way out the door when Cesar shows up, bleeding. Audra's legendary cool is even like, "Jesus, for real?" But then she has to get contrite, not only because these are the people she's chosen to associate with, but also because Cesar's spotted the bag of doctor stuff she's stealing.
Shane's holding his pills, sitting blankly in a chair, when Silas comes to check on him. He offers to set up a movie, look around for porn even, and waits for the smile. It doesn't come. "I get it," he says, trying again. "If I got shot in my jerkoff arm I'd be mad too." Shane explains spacily that he's not mad, and smiles in a somewhat chilling fashion. Silas asks how many pills he's taken, and Shane shakes his head: none. "Well, that's dumb," Silas says in a jolly way, an
d offers to open the bottle and get him some water. Shane's not interested; Silas sits on the arm of a chair to look more closely at him, closing his eyes briefly. I wonder what it was like for Silas the week his father died. I bet it was like this.
"I like the way it feels," Shane tries to explain. "Like a knife popping the same balloon, over and over. Only you don't have to blow up a new one. I could make the pain go away any time, with a pill, but I don't want to?" Silas stares. This is straight out of the Daredevil Handbook, this shit. Cutters and anorexics too. When you don't have control over anything, you will always have control over your body. "I don't have to think about anything else. It's great." Silas breathes and pastes on a smile; fearing he's going to cry he heads off to the kitchen, to watch Shane from a place he can't see.
Celia's drinking a cosmo while Dean moves her entire life into the gorgeous condo on the thirteenth floor, having neglected to tell him about the elevator. He mentions URBANIAK when she asks where those idiots got the pot from in the first place, and notices her door: four deadbolts, reinforced steel and a coded entry system. "Plus," she giggles, there's a security guard downstairs, and the TV's channel 3 is a cc on the front gate. He is impressed -- "You are scary good at this!" -- and she invites him to think up his own "secret knock" so that he will always be able to get in, and of course locks the door behind him and calls security immediately: "There's a sweaty Jew in my hallway?"
Nancy has decided it's time for Silas to go abroad, being eighteen and restless, and offers to settle him with a lot of cash anywhere in Europe he likes. Preferably western Europe, because the food's better. She's bored by his automatic response -- "even Amsterdam?" -- but agrees to it: "Sure! I'll get you a Europass, you can stay in hostels, go to museums, seduce traveling Australians..." (Does that sound like utter hell to anybody else? As the great philosopher Summer Roberts once said, "You haven't seen hostile 'til you put me up in one!" And don't get me started on Australians.)
He asks what the catch is and she assures him there isn't one. When people are young, they travel Europe in the company of a backpack. That's what normal people do. And somebody has to be normal in the family -- just ask Jill Price-Gray! -- so that's him. Esteban appears in the doorway with the news that he's been replaced as a candidate for governor, and they share a quiet moment of disappointment (and a tiny bit of fear) before she turns back to Silas with a faux-excited smile: "You leave tomorrow."
Having put the pieces together, Doug visits Dean's law offices -- which I guess he's going to have to leave now -- to find out how Celia enticed him into her plan to sell the Super Lucky weed. Dean notes that in fact she promised him nothing at all, because she is scary and he is a schlub. "Betrayer! Cock breaker!" Doug shouts, whining about how he's lost five grand to the face chemicals and how his "splooge" now "doesn't want to come out" and is "stuck in a pocket between [his] balls." Not with a lifetime of diagrams would that make sense to me, and I actually own those parts, but Doug's junk is like Nancy's breasts: I refuse to be a part of it from now on.
Dean and Doug sort of agree to team up against Celia, but first Doug wants Dean to dip his nuts in a steaming hot cup of coffee -- "flaccid in the acid," he warns after spotting Dean trying to get hard, and like... These guys and their dicks, seriously -- and the Great Balls Of Boba people once again hear the screaming of Dean and Doug and their dick obsession with each other.
Nancy hangs out on the counter while Esteban showers, asking why -- since he has the votes -- he doesn't just keep fighting. He might have the votes, he says, but Pilar has "an army." She tells him to just use the people like a blunt instrument -- something she knows a bit about -- and wag the dog, as we say in America. "In my country," he responds, "Dogs travel in packs." So essentially, Nancy grits, Pilar wins. Yes, but on the upside, now they can get married and eat Entenmann's and have fun, and he won't feel like he's endangering her family anymore.
Nancy puts it together: Esteban would run for governor on his own, if it weren't for their family. He protests, but she knows she's right. "You would win," she says, and he proudly agrees. "Then do it." They are adorable together, and she is proud: this is a woman she could be, and not feel like she was giving anything up. Take those six months without danger and put them on a national stage, and you have the perfect set up for both Nancy and Lacey to work together and achieve a life with him, and never let him go.
They're cuddling by the pool when Silas comes out and "respectfully" declines her offer of asylum. Esteban assures him it's not up for discussion, and Nancy explains that Esteban (meaning "we") has decided to run as an Independent. Silas offers to wear the campaign shirt, and Nancy refuses: one less son to worry about. "They're kids! You can take care of yourself," Me-Mom says, and Esteban assures him the boys will be fine just as Shane floats by in the pool, drunk and belching. Nancy's token attempt at parenting, today, is to yell for him to say "Excuse me," and he awesomely shouts back, "NO!"
Fine. So they tell Silas to leave before he announces his candidacy week, and Silas starts to get mad. He thanks Nancy for being proactive for the first time in her entire life, but before he can finish that sentence she whines, "How is it that I have to beg an eighteen-year-old to travel around Europe with a wad of cash and my blessing?" Silas pulls up a chair and asks an even more apposite question, which is how it is that anyone could reasonably expect him to believe his brothers will be "fine."
"No one is fine around you!" he says, fulfilling this episode's quota, and he explains that, since he's not going to Europe, he'll move into Esteban's house with the rest of them -- which, you remember, Esteban offered months ago, even including Andy in the deal -- to make sure the boys don't get lost in the shuffle. He's really done a good job turning into himself. Achieving a life, as it were.
"This beer's warm! Someone get me another!" Shane shouts from the pool, relapsing into Season One Lupita abuse: "Where's the fucking staff? I have thirst!" Nancy tells him he's cut off, and Silas demands that Esteban promise to protect them all, quite seriously. He's impressed; Silas less so. "So. I'll move my shit in, the two of you can stop dicking around and get married, and on we'll go: one big happy." Nancy smiles, because her idea of happiness is so approximate and cargo-cultish that this actually sounds like a nice idea. "Get in the pool, fags!" screams Shane from the pool, floating by blissed out, and Esteban laughs against her shoulder. He always wanted boys.
Nancy is putting on her lipstick, but has not yet donned The Shrug That Lives, when Andy arrives with his wedding gift: Stevie's paternity paperwork, transferring fatherhood to Esteban. Nancy tells him she registered at Williams-Sonoma ("we could use a new tortilla warmer"), and he almost smiles. She asks if he's sure, and whether he has a plan. He does. A good one: Go back to the house, spread out his life like a map, deliberate on the topography, chart his path. "Maybe call a girl who calls me on my shit," he says, making Nancy smile. She is proud, and scared.
Not only of his absence, but also of his plan itself: this is the day he becomes a man, he's saying. No more addiction, chopping up days into moments and relapses. Actually finding the map, the road, and walking down it. This pendejo who sticks around, maybe he just outgrew her. Maybe time she leaps he won't catch her, and she can't hedge her bets with Esteban anymore. Maybe she's really getting married after all.
"You love him," Andy says. "You're going down a road." She nods. This much is true. He kisses her cheek. It's more of a blessing than the Shema was. "I think I'm happy for you," she says tearfully, and he reciprocates. It's the only way their goodbye could have gone. "See you downstairs?" she asks, but she already knows the answer. He's gone, with a smile and a firm shake of the head. She smiles at herself in the mirror, shuddering with one sad breath before she moves past it.
And they are married, with Entenmann's cake, and the worst article of clothing ever worn: a strange shrug over her camisole, with these acidic, radioactive hot pink plastic-looking blossoms all over it. They're like polyps, spreading to her hair. Cesar is there, and Ignacio in an ornately hilarious blue tuxedo, and Silas looking uncomfortable in a well-tailored hoodie, and Shane sitting near the cake with a bottle of champagne, and Ignacio weeping with joy while Cesar looks on jealously, crushing a bag of rice to his chest. Trying desperately to let Esteban's happiness be his.
Nancy points at the CONJUGAL VISITS 15 MINUTES sign, joking that she and Guillermo are man and wife for the moment. Long enough to get privacy, anyway. He asks if she wants to fuck, pulling out all his sexy Guillermo tricks, and she likens sex with her post partum self to "throwing a hotdog down a hallway," which is maybe a brilliant play on last year's birth canal metaphor or this year's attempt to take over the entire world using only her cervix and a smile, or maybe it's just gross.
Either way, he laughs and tells her to work on her Kegels. He remembers a cousin of his who practiced "putting pressure" on a cucumber but had to stop when it got stuck, and then three months later a pickle fell out, which is misogynist on some level, but probably also ties into that thing I just don't get about Guillermo or his purpose in Nancy's life. He offers to fuck her in the ass instead, and while she calls this "tempting," she points out that she's not there to socialize: she's there to order a hit on Pilar.
And to offer him a piece of the wedding cake. Three episodes left, and I'm given to understand that this one is a doozy.