Episode Report Card Jacob Clifton: A+ | 1 USERS: A+ YOU GRADE IT Love Of Your Life
By Jacob Clifton | Season 6 | Episode 2 | Aired on 08.23.2010
Silas, still in the Bargaining phase of mourning for essentially everything, starts pulling out every excuse, and between the two of them Nancy and Shane shoot them down: No witnesses, but there was a security camera, and so forth. Finally Nancy goes into that teacher voice she so rarely uses: "We can't go back, okay? ...My days were numbered anyway. As were yours, because you all have the bad fortune of being related to me. So we can't go back. We... Can't." She snaps the radio on, and Silas...
Man, this is really his episode. He is a fucking heartbreaker the entire time. It's worth watching this episode just to watch him go, he's that good. This good at being wonderful. I'm not sure where Shane ends up but Silas is the man he's going to be. She burnt him strong. So he yells and turns the radio off again and refuses to contribute to the cash stash. "No! I'm not ruining my life because of him. He made the mistake. No one's looking for me." Silas loves his life. His mother can't imagine it. Nancy gets full-on pissed this time, and pulls off.
"You're right, Silas. No one's looking for you. They will be looking for you, if they can't find me." It's not the words, it's the tone; Andy takes a warning tone and tries to calm her down, but it's too late. And the more she talks the more ashamed she gets.
"No. He's old enough to decide for himself. I'm not gonna drag you along with me. Just know, if you get out now, it's not like you're gonna be able to live a normal life. You're still gonna have to run for... I don't know how long. You might have a better shot going solo. So you decide. You're gonna be a lone wolf, or you're gonna go with the pack."
Shane howls. Somehow his mother does not bash him in his fruitpunch mouth.
"I will ask you as your mother, who wants you to live, that you never go back to Ren Mar. Or anywhere, really, in the San Diego area. Or Mexico. Probably not Los Angeles..." She can't even look him in the eye. He refuses to start crying, and when he takes off his seat belt she can't even take it. And when he slams the door closed again, and Stevie starts to cry, he produces a huge wad of cash Lupita gave him. "Oh," Nancy's impressed. "Wow, Lupita. That was nice." Silas closes his eyes and cries and doesn't know how to feel and hates the fact that he's not leaving just as much as he would have hated leaving.
Another point for Nancy. Little wasp-eggs in your head. Not free enough to run away and not trapped enough to break out, just like Guillermo or Conrad or anybody else. It's the way she feels, all the time. Caught between the love of his life, loving it just as it was getting started, and the love of all of them.
At the superstore Andy's so excited -- "Total roaming, gypsy-style shenanigans, mad play from the ladies in strange new towns, strange new beds" -- that Silas can barely stand him. They put on hats to hide from the cameras, and Silas finally asks the only real question you should ever ask, when it's Nancy: "Who, exactly, is after us?"
The bear. Just like every time.
Andy doesn't know, can't know what it really entails, isn't really in this for the truth anyway, so he's just like, "Your Mom has a better handle on that," and fills up the carts: Phones, batteries, giftcards of all kinds to burn through the credit cards faster. It's just like Nova Scotia in '89, he says: "I'll be frank... This is my wheelhouse. I'm the king of off-grid living." There's a creepy goth girl with vamp bites in her neck and a bunch of Hot Topic bling working the register; she can't give them more than $80 cash back but because Silas is beautiful she closes the line and rings up everything separately. Silas asks her about the bites in her neck, and she's horrible some more and flirts with Silas and hisses hilariously at Andy, who finds her and her interest in Silas quite entertaining indeed, and they're done.
Driving away from the big-box Shane says some unnecessary thing that's not even that snotty, but it's the last straw for old Nancy, so she pulls over yet again and drags him out to a rest stop to, I guess, attempt to parent for the first time. Andy and Silas watch from the car, hands on chins. "Well, he bludgeoned a woman to death with a mallet. He should be chastised."
Since Shane doesn't seem to understand the actual moral issue here, Nancy tries to explain in a more pragmatic way why murder is not okay; like this one, for e.g., it was in fact dangerous and foolish, and now the whole family is paying for it. Shane finds this ungrateful: "I saved your ass. I saved all our asses." Nancy slaps him upside the head, and the peanut gallery quietly goes ooooh shit.
Nancy realizes that perhaps she shares some of the blame: "Do you even hear yourself? You're a kid. You're supposed to be out playing baseball, not clubbing people to death. I'm the mother, I decide who gets clubbed. I do the clubbing, not you." When he's 18, or better yet 21, he can take whatever sporting good he desires, club whomever he likes, go to prison for the rest of his life. But for now it's kid stuff: "Video games, broken curfews, Peeps in the microwave." She wants him to love his life; he's been sad for so long and hasn't even started yet. He needs to learn it, before it's gone.
On final analysis, Pilar Zuazo was her problem, not Shane's or anybody else's. She played the game and lost. She counted on Guillermo and it almost ended up costing her Shane and Silas. "Am I grounded?" Shane snarks, and she smacks him again before making him empty his pockets: It's all candy. She takes it all away, parenting by hops, and eats some of it herself. If she can't get him to mourn the loss of his own childhood, then what is really the problem? Silas spent the first four seasons fighting her on this one, and eventually -- the night she drove to Mexico -- she realized he was right.
He niggles her down, little by little: "I'm glad it was done. Not by you." He nearly smiles at that, and she swats his behind, telling him to never murder again. They've reached as much of an agreement as they possibly can, and he's always been precocious. And anyway, what to do about it now? He knows what he did. The Feelings will come. Meanwhile, Nancy could have figured it out, as scary as it got, but Shane beat her to the solution. And what a solution it was! She got to leave everything behind, start her fifth -- by my count -- brand new life, built just to her specifications. Her boys.
Time for Uncle Andy's Guide To Living Off The Grid, Step I: Kill your old identity. The Botwins, Andy explains, are dead. No contacting friends, no contacting family. Silas points out that they have neither, but Shane is still fond of Isabel. Nancy says no way can he call Isabel, for obvious reasons, and she's more than willing to promise the same of Celia. I miss Celia in theory, because she is awesome, but I do think this is the most respectfully toxic way to say goodbye to her: With fear, and a little hate. With love for her toxicity. I'm sure Doug will find a way back onto the show, irritatingly, so I guess there's still a chance for Isabel to come back. Anyway, Step II: New identities.
But first, where are we going? Shane immediately starts plotting their route to Pittsburgh, of course, but Nancy vetoes that one yet again. Canada. Everybody hates that idea, and Nancy's like, "We killed someone very important, and we don't have Esteban to help us!" Silas points out that "we" did nothing, and that anyway they still don't know who's following them. Shane reminds everybody that Esteban will be looking for his namesake, his son, and Nancy reminds them that Stevie's also her son, not to mention their brother, and when Silas corrects her -- "half" -- she reminds him how petty that distinction is. I swear it's like the second she gets that latte straw in her mouth she becomes hilarious again. No wonder her pregnancy was such a bummer! She didn't have the Power Of The Straw.
Why Canada? Literally the farthest you can get from Pilar's body. Shane votes for Alaska or Argentina, two great pla