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So Adelita is a junkie, to the point where she doesn't mind her hand going numb every now and then, but balks a little when she loses control of half her body. She enlists Silas to help, so of course he immediately calls Alanis, who is in the middle of getting proposed to by Andy. So now you've got Audra and Andy in Esteban's house, and Audra's wearing Nancy's engagement ring, and finally Nancy takes great pains to be the one to notify Esteban that his kids aren't perfect after all.
Which is just one of the many scores Nancy has decided to settle. Esteban explains that Pilar is blackmailing him into being her pet gubernatorial candidate, which means that all her restrictions on Nancy -- transforming her into the perfect trophy wife, forcing her into getting a massage from the most beautiful woman I've ever seen, et cetera -- have to be obeyed. Nancy waits for the ticking clock on Pilar's life to run out while feeling once again trapped in a marriage to a man whose power level is as variable as her own.
That feeling of dread surrounding Andy and Audra goes numb as Adelita's right-hand side when they're surprised by a crossbow-wielding DON'T ABORTION guy at her apartment, and Andy predictably peaces the fuck out. This is a nice counterpoint to Nancy finally figuring out that men are weak, so weak in fact they can't even send their junkie daughters to rehab, and stepping up to the plate for like the first time in a long time.
In her new hideout -- a 10x10 unit at "Neverending Storage" -- ex-gay Celia ties Doug up after figuring out the whole Dean/Doug/Isabel plan. They banter for awhile and say "pussy" like a million times, and then decide to team up, because Celia's determined to follow Nancy's career trajectory to the letter. Mirroring the final scene of Season One, we're introduced to Scary Godmother's new team: Ignacio, his alter ego Perro Insano, the unending one-note faggotry of Sanjay, Doug and Dumber, and poor old wonderful Isabel.
In the end, Nancy's ready to take her leave at a big awesome Mexico politico party, as instructed, but Pilar takes her aside to explain that 1) It was dumb hiring Guillermo for the hit because he works for Pilar and hates Nancy, and 2) She is going to have Silas and Shane killed. All of which sounds very interesting, but not as interesting as the very thing that happens, which is: Shane killing the shit out of Pilar with a croquet mallet to the head.
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Want more? The full recap starts right below!("As I stand before you today on the brink of junior high, here is what I have to say.")
Nancy's back staring at herself in the upstairs mirror when an incredibly lovely woman shows up to give her a massage: she is a gift. She tells Nancy to get undressed, and explains that she can't leave until she does her job. Nancy asks her again to leave, but the woman points out that she clearly is in need of her services. Well, you'll never go wrong telling Nancy she should take it a little easier on herself, so a short moment later -- after the woman threatens to sit on her -- she's on the bed with a mask on.
Nancy apologizes to her for being so stiff, but the woman tells her not to be sorry: just limp. She asks if the woman knows her husband's running for governor, and that he is a puppet. "You be my puppet," says the woman. "Let me pull the strings." Turns out you can want that real bad and it still doesn't work, and why? "Men are weak," Nancy says after a moment, pulling off her mask. The masseuse admits that some men are weak, and puts the mask back on, moving to her shoulders with strong hands. "Women are strong," Nancy tells her. "Until they fall apart." The woman assures her she's not going to: "You're a warrior. Like the boss, very similar. Locked up in all the same places. Armored and ready for battle." In tight muscle and Teflon.
Nancy thinks she means Esteban, their marriage of true minds, but we know better: "You'd be surprised, how much you have in common with Pilar." Nancy sits up all surprised, and freaks out. "She wanted you feeling relaxed and well. Did we do the job?" Nancy makes a very angry face and asks herself the same question, about Guillermo.
Over at a ten-by in the whimsically named Neverending Storage, Celia's making the saddest (and Celia-est) screwdrivers imaginable: Take a gorgeous fat-bellied dinner pitcher, dump in a semi-frozen package of orange juice from concentrate, toxic Sandra Lee-style, and then pour some vodka in. Swirl listlessly, drink, repeat. In a cinderblock storage locker, like some kind of post-apocalyptic Crate & Barrel Hiro Protagonist. Kind of fabulous as an idea, but appalling in real life. Just like Celia.
Doug's douchey sandals appear, and he hauls up the door, so she has to shield her eyes. He calls her a "feral bitch." She's accomplished a bit more of her Nancyward transformation, and has a lovely purple scarf in her deep brown hair. This reminds Doug of a gypsy, so he suggests that she lick his crystal balls. Twice. She finally says she wants out of the business, and is willing to part with her stash "fire sale cheap," and he's like, first of all, since when is she a drug dealer, and secondly he's broke. Celia's disheartened for a sec, then tells him to take it on credit and pay her back in a timely manner, on pain of Perro Insano breaking his legs.
Doug smiles, because he knows Celia's not really backed against the wall like she thinks, thanks to his cluelessly racist pal her ex-husband, but the smile drops when he inspects the merchandise, and he accidentally squeals that it's the wrong stuff. Celia, of course, immediately figures out that Dean spilled about the fake jacking of the dispensary pot, but doesn't connect the dots quite yet. She's pissed, and he yells about his "pot store pot" for a bit, and then he realizes he should just take her pot and not pay her for it, since she stole it from him in the first place, but she yells that she's only looking to unload it now because "the heat is on," and Doug again tips his hand by saying he'll call "that black cop" on her. So now she knows the whole plan, because Doug sucks, and rather than haggle or try to snatch it away from him, she clubs him with the screwdriver pitcher and then gulps down what's left.
Shane watches Nancy reading the can of formula, and recalls the entire fucking WWIII hissyfit about the breastfeeding, but Nancy admits she had a little too much to drink last night, after they got home from Mexico and saw Esteban on TV. Which means that Nancy's been on a bender for two days at this point, which is just sad, but not as sad as the fact that Shane's probably had the same amount. He doesn't say much, but she feels there is an accusing tone, and she spits, "I know, failing yet another one of my children." Shane protests that he said nothing of the sort, and she sadly notes that he doesn't really ever say anything to her at all anymore, and he asks honestly what he's supposed to say to her at this point. Which stops her in her tracks, because neither does she. She laughs sadly. "So. There we are."
Shane tells her to go feed the baby, and she stresses some more about him, and when Silas comes in, and she whines about how she's just gonna go "feed the baby," he... agrees. So now both her sons don't need her and want her to go feed the baby, so she rolls her eyes. "I fed both of you. Breast-fed both of you. I did." Silas thanks her quirky ass for that, and she leaves. The title of this episode comes from a movie about a woman whose son Esteban dies, so she goes to see his father, Esteban, and in the course of their adventures adopts a new son, Esteban. When men become women and women become men, when actresses play actresses, when Estebans abound, all that matters is the glue and the families you decide on.
The boys agree that she is totally weird. Which is rough, because what she's talking about is how they don't actually consider her as anything other than a hindrance and occasional disaster, and have completely outgrown the idea of her as a mom, to the point that they don't understand why she's being dramatic about just that. They're content to live in the margins of her life because that puts her in theirs, which she knows is unhealthy but only really bothers her -- besides the fact that she's Nancy and should be centered in the middle of every page -- because they're not doing anything she didn't do to them first, so every time they leave her out of their decisions or thoughts is an indictment of all the times she's done the same.
Silas's phone rings: It's Adelita, asking for his company. But the call is coming from inside the house! He smiles goofily, thinking maybe he'll get a reward for chasing off those trustie rapists yesterday, and Shane tells him to wear a condom. "Learned that lesson, huh?" says Silas darkly, because Shane's life is terrifying. "Or don't," Shane thinks out loud. "See what'll happen. Maybe she slept with someone who slept with someone who slept with someone who slept with someone famous." You could get Gwyneth Paltrow's herpes, or Lady Gaga's genital warts. "I hear everyone's dying for John Mayer's syphilis," he snorts, and admits that he makes up most of what he says. This troubles Silas slightly less than it delights him, for the first time all season.
("We have become alienated, desensitized, angry, and frightened.")
Upstairs, Adelita looks like hell. Which is hard to accomplish, so whatever it is, it's bad. She asks Silas to look something up on her laptop, realizes that's too weird, and asks him to place it on the bed near her hand, and then leave. He tells her to fuck right off, and she calls him back again, explaining that half her body's gone numb. Worried, he asks if she's seriously thinking about googling something serious like why your body's gone numb, pointing out that she could be having a stroke. She irritatedly admits that it's happened before: her hand went numb after she slammed her wrist and hit a nerve. "Slammed?" he asks, and I admit I thought she was talking about a ski injury, too: "Injected? Heroin?"
First of all, don't shoot up. Second of all, don't shoot up so often that you're willing to put up with things like parts of your body going dead for a couple days, because that means you have passed a certain point into becoming a junkie, and you are fucked. Little by little is how you become an addict, and little by little you start missing signs like this, or overlooking them. The things that horrified you when you were a person stop being the scariest thing you can think of.
And Silas gets that, so he's like, "You are a junkie!" She hisses that she's a "recreational user," like this blasé lack of accountability is what heroin is known for. Silas asks a few more of the obvious questions you would ask, and soon learns that after smoking enough smack to get herself raped, she pulled it together enough to shoot up some more. What an asshole. Drugs are so gross. Silas is like, "Perfect! Well, I'm calling your Dad this second." She yells at him that she thought he was cool, which is awesome because he gets to point out that that was never true, and whatever. She yells at him to get out, and then calls him back again to ask politely if he'll shoot her up. What with her body being out of commission and shit. She interrupts herself begging long enough to barf all over, and Silas's eyes go big as the moon, because drug addicts are fucking scary -- like that game Simon, only instead of primary colors and beeping, it's bodily fluids and ugly emotions and manipulation tactics.
The "sexy" thing Andy would like to show Audra in his garage is, of course, a minivan, registered under a fake name. The sexiest thing about that is that he sold off the General Lee and most of the toys except for Ms. Pac-Man ("I love you, but I've known her longer," Andy says). They climb around in the backseat and he talks about naming the thing Greased Lightning or Melvin, and she compares the backseat to a "living room," and it's your basic consumer orgy where they enumerate the features to each other and show how shallow they are, but Andy's whole point is getting her into the front seat, where he's hung Judah's engagement ring from the mirror.
At some point between now and the end of this part, Audra notices the ring and pretends not to, and I would guess that that point is located at the point that would demonstrate on a graph how much you love Alanis Morissette. Like, I'm pretty sure she knew it was there before she even saw the minivan, as any normal person probably would, because Andy only sucks in like three or four different flavors. So he's all, "Get in the front, try it out!" and she's all, "So many TV screens in here, in case children fuck everything up by existing!" And he's like, "Hey look, a steering wheel!"
So she plays with the lumbar support while he's doing a ticsome dance toward the rearview, with his hands and his face and his neck and his eyebrows jerking towards it over and over, and finally he yells, "GODDAMMIT LOOK IN THE REARVIEW MIRROR." At which point she goes, "Why? Is there something behind us?" And he goes of course, "Everything is in front of us!" And turns her face to point directly at it. So she tells him that he better not leave his giant diamond ring hanging there because it could momentarily blind him, and he offers to take it down, just to be safe, and he asks her finally to marry him, just to be safe. Which is all it is. Then the phone rings, and somehow it's bluetoothed already to Audra's phone, because it's Silas calling -- much to Andy's pants-shitting childish outrage -- to distract her with yet more weird trouble. "Did someone else get shot?" she asks excitedly, because everybody in the entire world sucks, while Andy stares into space like a cartoon dog without a cheeseburger.
Nancy comes out onto the porch, where her husband is smoking a cigar with Pilar. A Pilar cigar. She welcomes Nancy out, hoping her masseuse was magical as usual, and Nancy admits that she was, but not as magical as Esteban: "Disappears, reappears..." Pilar says they can't stay mad at each other for too long, they're just this awesome team that can't be divided, and Nancy names the things: "So I'm guessing death and/or blackmail and/or imprisonment is the glue that holds you together?" Works for Nancy, after all.
Nancy congratulates them on their new understanding, and Pilar says apologetically that yes, she did think Nancy was bad for Esteban, but the pollsters have proven otherwise, and she can admit when she's made a mistake. She tells Nancy that he could even win married to her, but that still she'd be best off staying in the background. "Don't mind me," Nancy says, and without pausing: "Could you leave my house now?" Esteban shivers warningly, and Pilar says she needs to go anyway. There's a big fundraiser tonight at Pilar's house, where Nancy is invited to stay for exactly 30 minutes before begging off with a headache. "I promise to deliver him back before dawn," Pilar says, and kisses his cheek goodbye.
I think the problem with this season is the same as with Battlestar Galactica, or The Deathly Hallows: that story-fatigue thing that happens in late seasons or chapters where the story becomes a stilted self-abnegating Cliff's Notes version of itself. Moment to moment it's interesting, but you're still only getting the outline of the actual story: Not what happened, but what was going to happen if anybody bothered to actually write it. It's a collection of neat ideas, a skeleton: What if Nancy did this, what if her sister showed up, what if Shane actually finally went crazy, what if there was a baby and Nancy married a man she thought was her equal, what if Nancy finally realized that relying on a man has only gotten her fucked up and trailing a line of broken and dead men from her shoe. Great ideas that exist only in the interstices of the references to them, that never actually come to light of their own accord.
And so in the finale, of all places, we're finally being told outright what we could have been watching all this time: Pilar is the U-Turn that Nancy couldn't overlook, because she is a woman. She uses all the tools Nancy has and lots of tools Nancy doesn't have, and has been creeping unseen into every aspect of Nancy's life until she's not sure who the Boss really is. Because in a way, Nancy's been trying to become Pilar as fast as Celia's been trying to become Nancy, and they're both doomed to failure because they don't know what the fuck they're doing or what it costs. Pilar exists as a powerful woman, then, to deconstruct and transcend the Nancy/Men and Men/Boys binaries that Nancy's been operating on (in Jungian terms, she's the tertium non datur, the irrational symbol that transcends the signified opposites, allowing Nancy to bring the possibility of a new path up into consciousness). And that would have been a great story, and it's the story we're being told we got, but it's not actually the story we got.
"So, you had some day yesterday," Nancy says, staring at Esteban. "Went looking for you." She goes on in this vein for awhile before he sadly explains the key to the whole situation: that Pilar has everything, every indiscretion and activity, documented, and is blackmailing him in a whole new way. Play the game, be the puppet, or else go to jail. "What would you have me do?" Nancy's sad, and shakes her head, because normally once she finds out somebody isn't useful as a tool anymore, they stop existing. But she loves him, and for once being more powerful than a person isn't enough to erase them from relevance: That's the glue. In spite of everything, he persists in existing.
Esteban kneels and kisses her shoulder, and for a moment she lets him be the baby, but then he jerks back. "Are you wearing my deodorant?" She smiles, confused, and he gets a very intense look. "It's for men." Because one woman has him by the balls, and the other by the heart, and he doesn't know what life is when you're under the thumb of a woman, he can't smell himself on her. "So... Don't put your nose in my armpit?" Nancy says, still wary. "No. Do you hear me? I don't like you wearing it." She protests now, because she likes the smell, and the feeling, but he puts his little foot down: "You smell like a man. You will not wear it again. Is that clear." And Nancy remembers: Men are weak. So weak, in fact, that you can't ever let them find out. It's an ocean you can swim, but you'll never reach the end of it.
("You have failed us all. Everything is not okay.")
"Yeah," she says, looking far away over her shoulder, at the lives she could have had. "I got it. You're the man." She says it indulgently; he doesn't even mind. She leaves him on his knees, and goes to call Guillermo. Because now Pilar really has taken away her husband, if she's got him so tied up he thinks power plays like this are going to fix him. And she can't walk out, because of the glue, so she's got to get his balls back for him.
"I was just thinking about you," Guillermo says passively, in Mexico: he was at a dogfight last night, and saw two pitbull bitches ripping the shit out of each other, and one of them had a really nice ass. "Thanks, Blanca. Nice to be free." She's surprised at how quickly he got out, once he was transferred, and he admits she did good by him. "I want it done today," she demands, and he grins to himself. "I'm your boy, right?" She hangs up on him, a pointless little power play of her own. Maybe that's when he decides.
Doug wakes, all tied up in the storage unit with Celia chomping on a salad and explaining that he's benefitting from her own experience. "When Quinn tied me up, I chafed. You should be comfortable." The knots and rope are bizarre, like a hanging macramé planter from a 1983 Pier One. He asks what happens now, and she says she's going back to drug dealing. He explains that, as usual, he was asking about himself. She admits she hasn't thought about it; maybe she'll sell his organs. He reminds her she's already had his best one, and she briefly claims -- to his friendly, surprisingly non-creepy interest -- that she's jumped ship and is now into ladies. "When we kiss, it's soft, and our breasts press against each other, and... Who am I kidding? I need dick."
Doug figures out that Celia's talking about Raylene, and they talk about how he was also planning on hooking up with her, and they talk more generally about how they are both stupid and greedy, and it hasn't done either of them any good: Celia's got the "stench of pussy on her lips," which: nice, and he's got a drawer-dented dick. So clearly they need to change something about their lives. Celia claims she's fine, but Doug is astounded at how easily she folded under the fake-cop thing, and suggests that she's maybe not cut out for drug dealing. I love how even Doug thinks that Nancy is a success.
Celia throws a fit about that, because if Nancy can do it she can do it, and he points out that she had a team. So then Celia's dream becomes having a team under her, like she's going to run through all five seasons this week and we're fast-forwarding to the first finale. "I need a team. People I can trust." It sounds wrong; Celia shakes her head. "I don't trust anybody..." But still, she wants a team. Doug offers her a team-up, and after some back-and-forth she agrees, as long as he remembers who's on the bottom and who's on the top. "You're tied up: Bottom." She points to herself: "Top." If only Sanjay were here to explain it, perhaps with diagrams or a lazily clichéd anecdote or two.
Nancy runs into Andy and Audra randomly outside Adelita's room, and Audra immediately starts (or is still) fidgeting with the ring, which has made its way onto her finger. Of course, Nancy assumes that somebody else has gotten shot, and Andy protests that he's there to see the boys, but right then Silas comes barging out of the room to get them, and yells at Andy for snitching. "She's roamin' the halls, I dunno!" is Andy's perfectly valid excuse. Nancy asks what the fuck is going on, and Silas admits that she seems to have OD'd, or something. On what? Why, on heroin. "She's a junkie," he says, and just when Nancy's about to wig out about that, she notices the ring on Audra's finger, so Audra scoots her ass into Adelita's room and promises to give them an update soon. Of course, Andy cares nothing about any of this, just in playing both Nancy and his life off Audra, so he calls out some gross "I love you" with a million pet names, and of course Nancy is disgusted and keeps on going down the hall.
Downstairs, Nancy's back in Andy/Nancy mode, which is the best mode for anybody to be in, and she's like, "You... did it." He's giddy, it's sad: "She's a doctor, I'm marrying a doctor," he says, as though his dead grandmother were alive and he were female. It's a nice little nod to the way in which Nancy's always played typical female/male gender stuff to her advantage, while Andy's disinterest in/confusion by these things -- up to having things in his bum that time, which, try to convince Esteban to go near that zip code -- has given him (and the boys) so much more benefit, not to mention sexual prowess, as a man. Down there, you want a Jew. On the other hand, he's still a little boy, so who knows what kind of misogynist he'll be when he grows up, but right now he's as comfortable being Audra's wife as he was being Judah.
Nancy asks if Audra's actually said yes, and he's sure she will: "She's hooked." I'm inclined to believe him, because the one thing Nancy and Andy are both adept at is seeing people's weak spots and how to make them love you. As if to point out his fallacious aging process, Nancy offers him a Ding-Dong and he immediately scarfs it. She sits down, pretending it's innocent musing: "Adelita's a junkie." Andy points out that it should be pronounced yunkie, and she nods. Boarding school, three languages -- all the thing that make her better than Silas -- "but a neglected child is still a neglected child."
Which could be breezy hypocrisy, but is in fact a willing self-indictment: her children are such a foregone conclusion she's saying she's got to be satisfied by the fact that his kids came down to the level of hers. That when he said she kept hers close and he sent his away, it wasn't the whole story. She did neither, she did both. Neglect isn't about distance, it's about realizing too late that you have children you've never met. It doesn't matter if your kids are with you or not, when the plane is full of snakes: A neglected child is only ever the accessory to a neglected life.
When Andy points out that she's gloating, Nancy grins and protests lightly, as though they're talking about something inconsequential. Which they are. "You're a little glad Esteban's daughter is a drug addict. More than a little." She reminds him that Esteban will be heartbroken, which is obviously just more gloating. She admits it, then retracts her admission, making him smile: "He did put down my children," she admits, and Andy wonders if the bloom is off the rose. He doesn't even know about the War Of Deodorant that's powering this bullshit. He asks if she's sorry for pledging "eternal love and devotion," but she's not. She's got that much of the glue figured out this time.
And if anything I would say that this episode, and season, represent a major epiphany for Nancy Botwin, which is that judging men on a scale of rapeyness to usefulness is really unhelpful, not to mention unhealthy. It cuts out all the normal people who could have supported her instead of carrying her, for one thing; it turned one son into a gibbering freak and pushed the other into an unnatural maturity, for another. It kept her weak and it kept her immature, locked in grief and searching out her high, and everybody's still following that lead. Esteban's the first person she's met since Judah died, and she honestly seems to have figured that out now.
But even though I'm proud of her, it doesn't mean she won't pay for having learned too late: There's her kids going nuts, and there's Guillermo calling himself "her boy," and all the ways she still has to pay. But for now, it's a nice moment. It's the same day she figures out that she doesn't know her sons anymore, and finds out that she does. It's the same day she realizes Pilar is the answer to all her questions about men, and how with a strong hand at the strings she doesn't have to be a puppet anymore. It's about jumping into the deep end and learning that the deeps never stop: they just get deeper.
"I can't rely on men. It doesn't mean I don't love them, it doesn't mean I walk out, it just means... I adjusted my expectations. Men are weak." Andy, still hoping, says with much conviction that he is "fucking steel," and she giggles indulgently, slipping into Men Are Weak mode without even noticing. "Yes, you are! And you're getting married..." He tries to compare them to an O Henry story, like they're on these crossbones graphs where they keep missing each other, but she smiles intimately, having finally realized: "No. We're our own fucked-up little story." They don't fill each other's holes and they don't miss each other's spaces, they're not square pegs or round holes, or anything else. She gives him the gift of intimacy, and tells him what she's just learned: that's the glue. Not just an approximation, not a fantasy made flesh, but the actual goal.
Esteban enters, still feeling unmanned, and immediately asks why Andy's always there. And where before yesterday -- before Andy took her apart in the jailhouse, before she realized just how much power Pilar has over her life -- she would have rolled her eyes or jumped to hateful sarcasm, now she just smiles: "I like him." It's possible to just like guys, to have friends, brothers; to let their love and their hate be theirs, and simply exist alongside them. That's the glue. I think most of us are still on the way to really getting that one down. Men and women are an O Henry story but only for as long as it takes you to remember it's not a story: It's your life. Dive in, and you can do whatever you want.
Andy congratulates Esteban on his new run, and Nancy pulls him down to sit beside her. "Andy proposed to Audra this morning," she says grimly, running her hands along his back and arms. Esteban describes marriage as "a complicated and delicate dance," and Nancy grins wildly: "Yeah! It is!" She's through cautioning Andy, because that puts power into play, and there's no winning that one. So she can just laugh and point, and be there when it falls apart, because she no longer has a dog in that fight; she knows she never really did. Just dependence.
Esteban asks, then, where the fiancée is, and Nancy cautions Andy with a sudden line in her lips, but it's too late: Audra's here, too. And Esteban's first question? "Who else got shot?" Nobody, she says carefully: Adelita just wasn't feeling well. He jumps about; Andy looks down, unwilling to see this play out. Nancy shushes her husband, assuring him that Audra will be down soon, and Andy stares: is she really going to pull this shit? There's fire in her eyes back at him, that says of course she is. Things are out of control. He needs to learn, just a little bit. She likes the smell of that deodorant. It's not a symbol, it's not a signal: just a smell she likes. A woman should have that, regardless of how weak her man is. A whole garden, if she wants, free of bugs and slugs and bunny rabbits.
"What is the matter with my daughter," he asks directly, and Nancy stares, aware that she's going down another tunnel with this. "She's pregnant, isn't she?" He bitches and moans about how stupid Adelita must be, and Andy points out that she speaks three languages. Even when he wasn't feeling powerless and emasculated, Andy would be asking for it. I spent this scene thinking he was going to get the shit kicked out of him. "She's not pregnant," Nancy says softly. "She has a heroin problem." His face falls, and she begins to feel sorry for playing this game. This is his daughter. Hers now, too.
Esteban can't believe it: Not sophisticated, elegant, beautiful Adelita. It's impossible. She's a daughter he never met. Andy offers a list of the best rehabs, fruit of his total addiction to Intervention, and it's now a sign of how badly thrown Esteban is that he doesn't start beating on Andy. He melts, he crumbles. He falls apart like a glacier into the ocean. It's awful. He points at a nonexistent advisor and mouths nonexistent instructions. He smiles, preparing to sell the drama; he opens his mouth and closes it again, preparing to threaten the doctors at her clinic. He runs through every option. He nods. He tries everything. There is nothing. He is trapped, in a bowl of stones and bones. A drug kingpin, catching his first glimpse of that bright blue butterfly. "I can't," he whispers to himself, and runs away.
"He can't," says Andy, befuddled. A new Nancy eases down into her chair. "Well, then I will." You don't walk out, you adjust your expectations. Nothing is exactly as it appears to be; nor is it otherwise. Men are weak. It's her daughter, too.
Celia's makeup has gone from nutty to ultracrazy, and she's sporting that leather jacket again. Her Nancy impression is only getting better. She apologizes to the group she's assembled in her condo, apologizing for the short notice but pointing out that they are all unemployed, and have nothing else to do. "I'm Celia Hodes, team leader." She's wearing a million necklaces. She nudges Doug with an angry voice, and he speaks up. "Doug Wilson, Finance. And co-team leader." And Dean Hodes, Legal, and fucking Sanjay Patel, Sales, and Ignacio Something Jr., Supply, and -- putting on his mask -- Perro Insano, Muscle. He growls and moans, and Isabel rolls her eyes. "Down, boy."
Ignacio sadly takes off the mask, and at her mother's insistence -- "You wanna play or not?" -- Isabel introduces herself to these people she already knows: "Isabel Hodes. Brains." Which, better than nothing, but Celia just said it herself: this is a game. She is all the way into the Matrix now. "I have a team!" she shouts, raising her glass high, and Sanjay hits on Ignacio, of course, and Ignacio is repulsed, basically, and above them all, picture it: Celia Hodes, brunette and wearing leather, holding her arms out like Eva Peron over them all. She thinks it's a kiddie pool and doesn't see the sharks, or the way the ground drops off forever. The only mother worse than Nancy Botwin in the whole world, now Queen of the Misfit Toys. Terrifying.
Audra's giggling over her ring when they arrive back at her place in the minivan, thinking about how she'll have to take it off for surgeries. "You'll have to take it off if you don't say yes, already!" he yells. The madness in his voice, the urgency: She asks what he talked to Nancy about. But it's not really about Nancy anymore, as much as it ever was, which means Audra thought the problem was Nancy, which means Audra deserves what she gets after this point. He says he doesn't remember -- "Too busy thinking about you," he says barfably -- but that she owes him an I Love You, "from when I said it in the hallway outside the junkie's room." She admits that she does love him, as they enter her living room. "I love you more," says Gayle, who's sitting there holding a crossbow and has a huge pile of guns to him. "Have a seat, sinners." Andy disappears so fast there are little cartoon lines where he was standing, and then it's just Audra, staring at Gayle with a crossbow to her head.
At Pilar's fundraiser, Nancy looks so fucking incredible. When you're already the prettiest woman in existence it's hard to really make it pop, but sometimes she looks so good it makes me want to cry. She sits all alone in a corner with the women, watching Esteban and Pilar work the crowd. It's what he was born to do.
Silas informs us/Shane that Nancy's already got Adelita booked on a flight to a rehab in Arizona. "It was weird seeing Esteban cry," he says, and I agree. Shane gives a resounding "fucking idiots" to the situation, or the world at large, and downs more champagne. When Silas tells him to slow down, he says just because he "enjoys the bubbles" doesn't mean he's going to become an IV drug user. "No," says Silas, "You 'like pain' too much." Shane just laughs.
When Shane asks why Silas ended up staying in America, Silas is honest: "Because it looked like you were going to go off the deep end, and I wanted to be around to jump in." Shane assures him that he'll be fine, and he should still go, but Silas scoffs. After all, there's also Nancy to worry about. "The Teflon warrior?" Shane laughs, but Silas knows: "One day her luck's gonna run out." Shane heads off for more champagne, but they both know it's true.
Cesar glumly approaches Nancy and they talk about appetizers for a bit before he tells her to get used to this. "The role you're playing. Pilar, and her ways." Pilar smiles over at Nancy, condescendingly, and Nancy grits her teeth. "I'm not prepared to get used to Pilar and her ways. I'm prepared in other ways." Cesar doesn't show quite the interest he should, as though he already knows something Nancy doesn't, and then runs off in the direction of sliders. (Mexicans eating white people food is hilarious! I wonder if Heylia's still making those panini of hers, wherever she might be.) Nancy approaches Esteban, ready to leave, and he pulls her to him in defiance of Pilar. "I'm sorry, Nancy. I'm sorry about everything," he whispers into her neck. She hugs him back, because it's going to be okay.
"That's life. Shane told me: Something happened today, something else will happen tomorrow." Esteban seems to understand, and offers her his jacket as she's leaving. "I'm not going anywhere, you know." She kisses him goodbye. "Tell the boys I'll meet them at the car?" He can't believe she's trusting him with her kids, but she just smiles sadly. "We're all broken."
("If we picture Agrestic as an airplane, a grand soaring jet carrying us through the sky, I think you all need to understand: There are motherfucking snakes on this motherfucking plane.")
Pilar fairly takes Nancy's arm as she's headed out, redirecting her to the pool out back. "You look nice," she says, and Nancy returns the compliment. Things are awkward. I love how Pilar didn't play the sexual aggression game with Esteban until she just actually had to. Nancy could learn so much from this one. "So, Guillermo. Interesting choice." Nancy's heart speeds up. "Guillermo?" She turns her face cold and dead; she flips into Lacey. Pilar admires her cojones, but suggests that time she hire somebody who doesn't already work for Pilar, or at least somebody who's not still pissed at her for ratting him out in the first place. Her boy.
"I'll keep that in mind," Nancy says firmly. "time. Now if you'll excuse me, some bitch told me I had to leave early." She's doing pretty well; when Pilar hauls her back poolside she even has enough in her to go, "Oh, your Lee Press-On nails are digging into my arm." (We'll leave off how that stopped being a worthwhile insult back in fourth grade, or in Pilar's case about a billion dollars/generations of industry ago.) Pilar asks if she honestly thinks this shit is a joke, and Nancy explains her reasoning: "You took a fucking shot at me, and you hit my kid. And you cut my husband's balls off. That's three you owe me. Four if you count the balls separately."
Pilar gets to the point: "Let's make it six." Still thinking this is a game she's played before, Nancy snots about including Pilar's balls, too. (Which would be Doug-fresh if it weren't for the whole man/woman/Pilar/deodorant thing this whole episode and season have turned out to be. Now it just means that a woman with power is not above reproach, even if the only reproach we can come up with is "You smell like a man," because get your nose out of her armpit, Nancy, and stop pretending man or woman could ever be an insult on their own.) Pilar explains: "Esteban needs you and the baby for photos. But Silas and Shane? They are... What's the word... Extraneous."
("You're not safe. You moved here so that you'd feel safe, but your children are not safe.")
"We don't need them to complete our pretty pictures," Pilar continues, and Nancy informs her that another attempt on her kids means she'll kill Pilar herself. She means it. She finally, finally means it. "You look stunning in black. The people will be very sympathetic to the grieving mother who has just lost her beautiful children in a tragic... Car accident? Or perhaps a plane crash. Or perhaps..."
We'll never know what comes . Out of the mise-en-scène comes a croquet mallet, into Pilar's head and thence to the water, hefted by the increasingly bad-ass/terrifying Strange Botwin, terror of the soccer field, biter of karate feet, ghost whisperer, apprentice thug, drug dealer, bird-shooter, fruit punch-mouthed, threesome-haver, junior alcoholic, celebrity disease enthusiast, profane rap artist, valedictory detournist, budding masochist, beheading video terrorist.
"I couldn't find a golf club," he explains to his mystified mother, and they watch Pilar's blood fill the water from the shallows all the way to the deep end.
Check out the online Weeds webisode series University of Andy starring Justin Kirk.
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