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Audra gives the FBI their bit of evidence regarding the Botwins desaparecidos, and cries. But then speaking of guests stars we miss, Ignacio! Oh, I have missed Ignacio. Yeah, you can count on Cesar to be humorlessly humorous and shit-spookin' scary, but for sheer adorable sociopathy only Ignacio will do. Murderous lil' teddy bear. Unfortunately, he shows up only at the end of the episode, the part that also includes Doug. Maybe they'll never find the Newmans, and you'll just have a nice little separate show inside your show, where Ignacio and Cesar do demeaning abusive things to Doug. I would watch the shit out of that show.
As for the Newmans, their status quo heading into the first act break seems to follow thusly: Scabbing for picketing hotel staff, because they are slime, the Newmen find themselves in a variety of shameful jobs. I.e., those jobs regular/white people would never do. Nathalie's in hotel housekeeping, her elder son Mike is a bellhop while younger son Shawn is now in childcare, and patriarch(ish) Randy is a dishwasher under the iron fist of six-foot-three-inch Chef Peter Ingvar Rolf Storm (Stormare for the uninitiated).
Of course, there's a multitude of twists that immediately make it clear nobody's dealing with their best strengths: Maid Nathalie is invisible to men, Gabby Randy is silenced by his Chef, and latte-slurping (!) Shawn gets fed up with being little Avi's mommy after half a day and steals a high-end stroller for the sake of his teen back.
And Mike? Well, speaking of TV shows they should invent, the former Silas Botwin is puttin' that smoking, legal-aged body to work as a mostly naked reader of Choose Your Own Adventure novels to a particularly specific sort of lonely old guy. It's not as creepy as it sounds, because -- as Uncle Randy truthfully explains, it's not gay if they pay you/it happens underwater -- but mostly because he gets to keep his little bellhop hat on. Which makes the whole thing more of a lark, really.
Everybody deals with their responsibilities, of course, except for Nathalie, of course. Although it's worth noting that Nathalie is able to tell some random dude at the bar more shit about Nancy Price-Botwin than we learned about her in six years, which is a sign of something or another. But one moment being treated like an actual maid -- a job she describes as being "no better than the whore that pees on people," which in context is actually a pretty understandable complaint -- and she's right back looking to score some pot and start selling again.
No go on the weed, even after a meeting with [Serena van der Woodsen's grandmother/William the Bloody's mother] a shoe-happy Dr. Feelgood, but Nathalie does turn to making and selling hash once she meets Linda Hamilton and her adorable girlfriend Fiona: Running a perfectly fine personal-use business out of their home; demonstrating how Nancy could have done this [motherhood/drug dealing/dealing with life] passably well to begin with; and best of all, being double the one thing not even Nathalie has yet learned to defeat: Women.
Want more? The full recap starts right below!"It was aboot four months ago and... Andy was there for the birth. Of course. And Esteban arrived later... Pissed off Andy like you wouldn't believe." Audra rolls her eyes on the FBI tape, as they fast-forward looking for clues. "But I guess he's happy now... He took off after her like she was made of shit and he was King of the Flies..." Or in this case a cockroach, wasp eggs humming in its zombified brain...
And she didn't find this bizarre? She didn't think to call anybody or do anything about it? "I had just been held hostage, and my fiancé was leaving me. I wasn't asking too many questions about Nancy's travel plans. Far away, I hope..." (How about a fuck you, bitch?) "In my minivan... In my minivan..." These FBI guys really know what they're doing. That right there is what you call a lead. She sucks on the bitter mint of Newman entitlement, and then begins to cry.
You know, when I'm sad I hurl myself into my work. Not always deadline work, but something. A little idea about something that might turn into a thing. It brings me comfort; it's like coming home. I don't know what I would do if my work escape involved doing some comforting abortions. Probably I would take up exercise as my stress relief in that case. Or, knowing me better than that, I would end up dating the crossbow-wielding Jesus freak just so I'd have something more WTF to think about than Nancy in my minivan. After Ryan Reynolds, dating probably just becomes this thing you do.
The Newmen take a good look around Seattle and see a picket line, noting that their desires are, in a certain way, parallel to those of the strikers. They want money! They want it now! Randy at least pretends to have an issue with this -- one of the more positive aftereffects of Zooey Deschanel -- but Nathalie? She wants money. She wants it now. What is the question.
Although crossing picket lines stands against everything Andy Botwin's ever stood for, older son Mike wonders what, then, would be "broke-ass Randy Newman's take." If you cross the picket line and toss out even your tiny little moral set, turn to page 54. If you take the unimaginably revolutionary option of actually working for your living, turn the channel to some other show because that is not how we roll.
Randy is with Nathalie, so they head on across the picket line and into the hotel. They are scabs! They are becoming scabs! Which, after you've sold out everybody you know to everybody else you know at least once, and personally gotten numerous DEA agents shot to death or with their faces sanded off with a belt sander, and managed to traffic in child prostitutes completely by accident, is probably not as big a deal to you or I, who have hopefully done none of these things. You know Celia would relish just the act itself.
The guy with the eyebrows from Mad Men, whose wife Don was so very inappropriate with that time, the Hotel Manager, is not happy to be hiring scabs. In fact, he makes it devastatingly clear right in the middle of Nathalie's blasé attempt to side with Management against Labor, he's on the side of the picketers. It's just that he is supporting his youngest son's ice dancing habit.
"Russia, 2014. Noel Kruszewski. Remember that name." They look at the young man and his gay ice dancing outfit, and before they can remark on the total gayness of this entire thing, he's like, "He's not gay. Well, he might be gay." Either way they are cool with Noel Kruszewski's ice-dancing ass, because they want jobs and I guess only his dad's eyebrows can provide them with jobs.
Nathalie, see, she's a "great problem solver." Which is true. Especially if you leave out "And an even better problem causer." Additionally, Nathalie "manages" people really well. Which is, again, true. She pops her waspy stinger in there and waits for God to take care of the rest, zinging little heart attacks and random Armenians at anybody who dares to disobey. Randy's got "extensive culinary training," and Mike is great behind the bar: "Quick with the bottle, short with the pour." Eyebrows tells them how impressive they are and then points at Randy, Mike and Nathalie in turn: "Dishwasher. Bellhop. Maid."
Not jobs for white people, which silently irks them in a place they can't quite identify, but as Nathalie says, this is merely a "seedling, from which we will branch out and flourish." Mike is entirely unsure that even this Newman life is sustainable, given that they are a family of crazies, but Nathalie has hope. "This is who we are now. This is us." But as Michelle once said to Romy, "But okay, if those things were so easy to get, wouldn't we already have them?"
"What if you'd have gotten a real job after Dad died, and we could have skipped all this shit?" Nathalie explains that she would have had to sell the house, they'd have gone to a different zip code -- the horror! -- and the boys would have gone to even lousier public schools. The way she says it, you can hear the way Nancy's been telling herself this, every second, for the last six years. If you can accept the lot of a million other widows just like yourself, turn back to page one. If you're a Daredevil Girl looking for your hit, turn to page 420. She nearly sounds bored, she's heard this speech so much:
"You probably still would have knocked up a girl. Maybe this one would have been blind instead of deaf, or missing a limb. You would have struggled with your grades, smoked weed, dropped out, gotten your GED. Your brother... Still would have had rage issues. He would have lost his virginity to a skanky girl. Or a skanky-girl duo. He would have grown increasingly alienated, ended up stabbing the mailman or my manager at the Gap. We would have been in the exact same spot we're in right now."
Mike calls his brother Shane. "Shane. If Mom woulda worked at the Gap instead of selling drugs, you think you still would have killed somebody?" Shawn thinks about it, and then nods. It seems more than likely. The crazier Shawn gets the less crazy he gets; that's something he got from Mommy too. Maybe Nancy wasn't the worst mother in the world, maybe she was just his U-Turn and we're seeing the best possible Shawn. It's a theory. When you're raised by broken people you tend to see things more positively because your other option is to start screaming and never stop.
But Mike's asking the wrong questions, he didn't go back far enough; he's missing the bear. It's not about Nancy selling weed, it's about Judah dying. Nancy would have gone crazy either way, become Lacey, become Nathalie, just like she did when her parents got sick and she ran off to Paris. Maybe it would have gone even worse. Maybe she'd have had a normal white-lady breakdown and turned into Celia Hodes. I cannot say for certain that she would have ended up in this horrific junkie whore wig. The wig might actually be due to drug dealing.
Randy ties on a big red kerchief for his first day of dishwashing, and Mike appears in a fairly adorable bellman's outfit. Nathalie's been gone for a while, "awakening the hookers." They're leaving Shawn with Baby Avi, which seems like a very sensible idea to me personally, and Randy gives him all the parenting info he can. "Hopefully he should sleep soon, there's four bottles in the fridge, changing stuff is on the dresser, remember to cream his butt so he doesn't get a rash, and you gotta burp him every time you feed him."
Did Randy actually say "cream his butt"? Of course he did. And he further reminds Shawn of Nathalie's orders not to leave the room. Mike's not sure about leaving Kid Krazy with the baby, but it's a leap of faith. So add "childcare" to the nonwhite jobs the Newmans are doing. The baby's still just a baby, but then, he wasn't white to begin with. Shawn kids around with Mike, so Mike takes the TV remote as he's leaving. Of course it's all of five seconds alone before Shawn looks down at the baby. "Fuck this place. Let's roll." Avi conti
nues to be the cutest baby ever, with more grown-man expressions per second than Doug has ever managed.
Nathalie is terrible at housekeeping, but giving it a shot. That'll last. Down in the kitchens, Randy tries to get cute with the other dishwashers and staff, all Ayn Rand-y jokes and slithery charm, but they're not having it. The reason is Chef Wagner -- played by Peter Stormare, who's tied with Željko Ivanek for Most "Either You're Counterintuitively Sexy Or I Need Group Therapy" Actor Of All Time -- who inspects everybody at eleven, past which it now is. Randy tries to smarm Chef Wagner, but he is unsmarmable. And on a side note, apparently Randy Newman is a Libra and not the Sagittarius butthole that Andy Botwin so clearly was.
While Chef Wagner is subjecting Randy to the thousand torments, and Randy's love interest -- you can't say he doesn't have a type, I'm beginning to identify them on sight because they all look the same, which is to say they all look eerily like Nancy Botwin, even the ex-Israeli military ones -- chuckles to herself at all the usual hapless Andy/Randy boy-man things, and Nancy wears herself out working like an actual person to the point where she drinks a beer on a toilet, Mike's upstairs being a sexy bellhop for a supersketch dude name of Duvane, whom I coulda sworn was the dad on Small Wonder but I'm having a hard time tracking down right now.
Less flirty, more just awkward and babbly, and Paul finally orders Mike -- after a heavy tip, part one -- to have a seat on a chair, on which he finally places a grip of bills. This show has so thoroughly broken me that I was like, Yikes! But on the other hand, seeing Silas Botwin get a blowjob was always on my bucket list, so let's just get this over with and hopefully he won't be murdered until afterwards.
That's honestly the thought process that happened.
In fact, though, Mr. Duvane -- "Call me Paul" -- just wants Mike to read aloud to him, from that chair, while he no doubt sits on the bed behaving himself like a good citizen. Mike wants to run, run, run, but there's so much money at stake and Paul is so clearly tangled up in blue that it's not like he's an actual risk and he hasn't mentioned restraints or anything, so let's see what's going on. "I just sit here and read to you?" More or less, says Paul, with a sort of horny/cherubic smile that honestly seems pretty harmless. Okay, so what's the more? Paul suggests that Mike, for now, concentrate on the "less."
Said it before, say it again: Old horny guys are old and horny. It's right there on the package. And if you didn't spend at least part of your twenties in a Dennis Cooper novel, you'll have no stories to tell when you are yourself old and horny. There are way stupider ways to make a buck. Know where the exits are, carry a gun, and see what happens, because the world is your oyster and they're not getting any younger. Or less creepy. Frankly I would have turned Silas-Mike's ass out the second he turned 18 because let's be honest, he is a full-on resource. As long as you're running guns you could at least float the idea.
Shawn's stroller immediately breaks down, and he heads into a high-end baby shoppe like the one his mum ran in another life. Turns out that they carry exclusively the Yippity! line at this place. "We got the Yippity! Sport, the Yippity! Deluxe... And our best-seller, the Yippity! Dragon." As a person who has done this dance of death many a time and can now visualize how many buttons you have to push just looking at it from twenty paces, the Dragon is clearly worth the $800. It should be called the Yippity! Sex Machine.
Yeah, you can get one of those umbrella-looking foldy things for about twenty bucks, but you're going to hate not having handlebars or anywhere to put your iced latte. And if you don't mind your kid's fingers getting chopped off and littering the streets and gutters of Williamsburg. And forget about somewhere to stash that Kindle, unless you don't mind the smell of baby barf, or have one of those rare babies whose crap treats gravity like a law and not just a suggestion to rebel against.
For $100, Shawn can get the Yippity! Sippity, which is the iced latte-holder with which one can customize his or her Yippity! device. Shawn tries to fight the power, but since he's not yet old enough to work the fellas like the rest of his family, it's a losing battle. So he Shawns out and makes fun of the guy's job instead. The guy unleashes just a barrage of topical Weeds-type soccer mom jokes about our timely times and the housing market and online Scrabble and lap-band surgeries and like the World of Warcraft, and takes off. Even for this show, it is a heady gumbo of suburban wink-wink.
Nathalie comes into a room where a heavyset careerman is cuffed, facedown, in what soon becomes clear is a quickly drying puddle of urine. Apparently the hooker was late for her day job, and had to take off, the guy says, clearly not yet hep to her real game. Nathalie is floored by this, and intrigued by the grossness, and in some ways lit up by the whole "little boxes on the hillside" part where this guy is rich and white and has so few problems that he needs to occasionally get tied up and peed on.
"Let me get this straight. So, you invite a hooker up here, have her cuff you to the bed, drink a $20 bottle of Evian, and then pee on you. Did you at any point happen to think who might have to clean it up?" The irony, it escapes Nathalie more often than Nancy escapes fate. God forbid somebody have to clean up your mess, good sir. But lest we think that this is about sisterhood or the underclass or the fact that drug dealing arises naturally from the need for shadow economies when women and minorities are denied entrée into exactly the realm this guy is the master of, Nathalie just lets him twist.
"You're not exactly in the power position, so I suggest you be a little more respectful to me, the fucking maid." Not maids in general, no, just this one pretty white lady one, who broke a picket line to get here. She sits down and considers him awhile, and he promises her "a nice tip." How much? Twenty bucks. She gives him this hilariously complicit sort of pout like they're actually negotiating something real, with a soft hurt "hey" behind it, and he relents. She grabs his wallet, and of course it's empty, and then pointedly reads off his name and address. This cuteness thing -- in addition to the good-acting, can't take your eyes off her thing, which never went anywhere -- I mean, I just love Nathalie. It's not going away. She is just a delight this season. They fixed so many things.
"Oh, please. I'm cold, you know? At first, I was warm..." Aaaaand that's enough of that, so she cuts him a deal. "You want your freedom, I want mine. I'll leave some sheets for you, right here. How about today you be your own maid? Sound good? Don't worry about the tip." There is something so Nancy about this, like, the thing she can't handle is touching this prostitute's pee. Of all the things she regularly does, like running from the cops and the entirety of Mexico, the one thing she just can't bring herself to do is change the sheets.
Meanwhile, Randy is having trouble with a similar dilemma: Apparently the fact that he's cute as a button and aggressively charming doesn't work on everybody. Particularly Chef Wagner, who has no interest in Randy's untrained culinary bullshit, and who himself apparently went to L'Ecole Your Mother's Vagina for his own training. He beats up on Randy some more, and silences him henceforth. No! That's like his one power!
Nancy takes off her nasty wig and lets her pretty Nancy hair out to play, sitting at the bar with a glass of white wine and staring into the middle distance and thinking about hooker pee. Dude appears, and hits on her with a sour little joke that he's in the FBI: "FBI. Federal Bureau of ... Interested in you." She's a little bit charmed, because the Normal Newmans from Normaltown are the new them and maybe this is what normal is like. He chuckles self-deprecatingly and sits down, with no idea why she just froze up like that.
"What do I do? Excellent question," Nathalie stalls, going dark for just a second. "I own my own business. A dance studio. Modern dance. I studied in Paris and..." They discuss Paris in some easy-reader Français and before she knows it, Nathalie starts telling the truth. It's about a dead woman, and in some ways a lie, but it's still true. Her eyes light up. "9th Arrondissement. It was great. It was so great. Um... But then New York beckoned..." And then Seattle. Little bit of a lacuna, then Seattle.
"I get restless. And this opportunity came along... My own business. No one looking over my shoulder. You know?" She doesn't have kids, dancer Nathalie. Does she have a husband or a boyfriend? She has both. She has neither. She has "a history of killing anything that could conceivably work out." He likes that answer; not everything is meant to have a long shelf life. She thinks about going upstairs. In only to get revenge, in some obscure way, on the guy who called her the fucking maid.
Immediately Don Kruszewski, Hotel Manager, appears, yanking her away and yelling in front of the guy and taking away her wine and calling her beautiful hair a wig. (Something there, I'm not sure I see it yet exactly, but I like the idea that her wig is more real to this fellow than her real hair. Maybe it's just that Nathalie is easier to believe than Nancy, and so now when Nancy goes walking it's like she's in costume. That's very Nancy, very Lacey, very Nathalie. I'm not sure I see the whole thing yet. I just know I hate the wig, and I'm pretty sure I'm supposed to. The wig is the enemy. The Wigemy.)
"No staff at the bar. I don't care if you're off the clock... Look at me. Go and drink down the street. Okay? Second, guess what. You're not off the clock yet. Okay? Because one of our valued regulars, Mr. Lounsberry, he just called Housekeeping to say that his sheets had not been changed, and his bed had not been made. Get up to 612 immediately and do your job, huh? While you still have it." Nathalie smiles regretfully at Vince and he's embarrassed for her and it's all very real for like one second. Nathalie, for a second, was a terrific idea. She just got lost in the narrative.
The note upstairs says: Dear Maid: You know I love paying women for dirty jobs. Thanks! She pulls on rubber gloves and strips the bed and shrieks quietly the entire time and like, I get that it's a hooker's piss and there was clearly a pong, maybe she ate asparagus on her way to work that day, but woman, you got three kids. You have dealt with urine. In abundance.
Unless, I mean, unless this is a callback to the Price Girls thing, stripping adult-stained sheets reminds her of why she went to Paris, but I doubt it because A) I'm still not back to giving this show that much credit and B) Maybe you noticed but I tend to bring up her childhood in like every scene, and I know exactly why: It's because I'm so hungry to know anything about Nancy, after all this time. She's laid her zombie eggs in my cockroach brain and I probably won't ever like her, but that doesn't make me love her less.
Yes, it's weird, but not that weird: Mike will be reading in his underwear. And socks, and a little bellhop hat. Pretty specific, altogether, but we can't say we're immune to the overall effect. Randy is all over it -- fifty bucks a page, I don't see the dilemma -- and gives Mike some very good advice. "Take off your pants, go read to this old weirdo. Wear boxers. Preferably ones that don't gape. Read fast, and skip paragraphs." If you're secure enough in your identity that you know you can't catch gay, turn to page 48.
This is the smartest thing Randy Newman ever said: "[It's not gay] if he pays you. Or if it's underwater." Words to live by, folks. And the whole What Happened To Andy In Alaska concept just keeps getting more interesting. Besides, Randy says, maybe it'll be such a great book he'll "get lost in the narrative." Randy complains more about Chef Wagner and Mike dicks with him and Randy goes, "Back off, Reading Rainbow." Which is layered, which is appreciated, especially at the end of a long work day.
Nathalie's outside smoking in some agreed-upon employee bitching location and Randy asks how her day went and she goes, "I'm no better than the whore who pees on people." Randy of course immediately tosses that one to Mike -- "Silas, I think Mommy has a story, too!" -- which makes him 3 for 3, and then goes looking for a joint. The piano bar piano man who played over Nathalie's flirtation with Vince comes out and, crestfallen, explains that their usual weed guy, Nigel the valet, went on strike and won't sell to scabs. Meaning there's not a single source in the hotel.
If you know already without looking the exact look that just crossed Nathalie's face, pat yourself on the back. If you honestly thought she meant any of this normal life shit for one second, go back to the beginning because you are lost in her narrative.
Randy goes running right at her face, begging her to turn off the lights in her eyes and the wiggling of her crooked lovely hands, but no. The deal is struck. You could hear it go off like a bell. (Plus, Seattle : Portland :: Ren Mar : Tijuana.) "I'm not thinking anything. I'm not. I'm a maid. I love my job. I leave things clean and in order. We're the Newmans. It's a whole new life!"
...Cut smash jerk fly to the scene, in which Nathalie attempts to score a scrip for medicinal marijuana so that she can sell it enough times to score a profit high enough to approach a serious supplier and start the whole motherfucker over again. But it's not like she didn't tell them this, back in the motel on the first day of Seattle:
If Nancy hadn't turned to drug dealing, things would have been pathetic and horrible, right? And her kids would still be total messes. And people would still be dying and her cover business would never have turned into her real business and Celia Hodes would still be a monster with syringes coming out the face and there would be no Andy and no Conrad and no Guillermo and no Esteban and no Avi. She would have had to sell the house and do Normal Things that depressing Normal People Do. You gotta turn to page 603, because she tried it their way, the Normal Newman way, and it was worse than she ever could have imagined.
They're doing poor people jobs! There was pee!
So, off to lie about having cancer to this lady who is played by the female equal of the Tim Gunn/Ivanek/Stormare Hot Old triumvirate, Caroline Lagerfelt. I have always wanted to see her gams, from Buffy to Gossip Girl. I just have this feeling she's rocking the Helen Mirren bikini bod. (Oh, and the mom from Freaks & Geeks. I don't know why, but that lady nails it every time. And that concludes this week's list of Hot Olds, for all time, because it has now been exhausted. Stay tuned for some other gross thing I had no intention of admitting to anyone, ever.) Best interchange in this interview:
Lady: Well. I must say, you look pretty good for having cancer.
Nathalie: Well, they haven't started the chemo yet, so mostly I'm just kind of... Blah...
Which just goes to prove that once you've dealt with cancer, cancer jokes have no way of becoming any less funny in accumulation, if done right. And Nathalie Newman doing her most disaffected impression of a hangover to demonstrate untreated cancer is among them. Long story short, Lagerfelt's place is just a patient network that connects you with "a caregiver -- grower -- and then you make your own arrangements for the medicine -- marijuana."
Her pert clarifications are pertly intoxicating. I wish there was a show where Caroline Lagerfelt played a wonderful wizard lady, like half Auntie Mame half Bedknobs & Broomsticks, and she would just wink inappropriately at the young men and wear outrageous outfits and throw lavish witch parties and never, ever give a damn.
Nathalie wants to network, but of course cannot produce her doctor's note -- "He's not, in the strictest sense of the word, a doctor?" -- and in the lengthy awkward silence gets up to leave, but my dear Lagerfelt is not done. "...There it is!" she points, and there they are, in Nathalie's shoes, which look like Lagerfelt's size. Even for Nathalie, whose Nancy luck never ever runs out, this is a bit ridic, but she goes with it. And flip-flopping on her way, finds herself at the door of a most impressive home.
One of those delightful actresses in the Shawnee Smith/Pamela Adlon nexus answers the door to welcome Nathalie, and who is sitting on the couch being her usual muscled eerie self but Original Sarah Connor herself, Linda Hamilton, onetime soulmate to Sewer Mutants both Real (James Cameron) and Lion-Faced Imaginary. I like that she's back. I like nothing quite so much as when they come back to us. Like who knew Margot Kidder and Anne Heche would come zooming home from Crazytown, so perfectly lovely and unscathed? And now Linda Hamilton is having her moment -- still so gorgeous and intense and never really that crazy in the first place -- and Anne Heche looks better than she's ever looked, which is just so important.
It gives me hope that one day, after becoming super famous and undergoing the massive public breakdown we all knew was coming, I too shall have another shot at the bigtime. "It was the pills that got small," I'll say, and whatever Hunter Parrish-type kid I'm paying to read aloud to me will nod, having heard it all before, and return to whatever Iron Man or Tropic Thunder sort of script my people have chosen for my return, for my debut. Perhaps I'll be a wrestler this time, Elle Fanning for my estranged daughter; or perhaps I'll co-star with Martin Lawrence in a buddy-cop piece for the ages.
"I remember when all it took in this town was a handful of bennies and Kanye West's phone number, Silas. They'd give you the fuckin' moon!" And he'll grunt Stop callin' me Silas, my name's not Silas and I'll say, "Brad Goreski dined here once, in this very house. Out by the pool. I'll point out to you the lounge chair he used. Remind me, you petulant ungrateful boy" and then probably something about how somebody touched or stole my knickknacks, and then I'll take a wee nap. And I'll dream of Linda Hamilton, back in 2010. Back on the show, things suddenly flare back up into that long-ago brilliance that used to define it. Every second is glorious after this point.
"Fiona! The seitan is burning! And save the oil! Fuels our van." (Trans. We are actual liberals, and gays, and ladies! Three things Nancy Botwin cannot handle but Nathalie Newman will try and schmooze anyway! She knows not of hubris!) Which is exactly what happens. She tries -- after a painful exchange regarding "Gaia" -- to get more than the paltry amount she's bought on consignment, offering "one sister to another" to become their biggest customer, although not strictly adhering to the "personal use" clause.
"Except you're not my sister, and we're not wholesalers," says Linda, with her crazy Holly Hunter braids, remembering how they used to do it down in the Tunnels. It was scrap and fight for everything, back in the day. No second chances, no bullshit. Just the force of your will, your lion-faced sewer mutant lover, and anything you could hold onto that they didn't just take from you. It was a hard knocks life but one she values still. That and Gaia.
Nathalie notices that the Providers don't keep the trimmings from their plants -- a couple other, less Caucasian ladies sit at a table stuffing them into garbage bags -- and gorgeous lover Fiona explains that you can't compost them because they are bad for the beetroot as well as anybody who eats the beetroot. I don't know what beetroot is but I'm sure it tastes all kinds of vegan. Their adorable five-year-old comes running through the room with golden locks flowing and Nathalie manages to call him "her" and "she" about sixty times before Linda rears up on the couch: "We need to cut his hair. You're gonna make him a fag!"
Fiona shows a bit of mommy steel, hissing, "Hey. He's good" before grabbing the boy -- "Kish" -- and needling him about how the improvised Barbie gun he's created "better be shooting peace rays!" And I mean, for a show that doesn't always do gay that well, you have nailed it. Well fucking played. For being such cartoons these are the least cartoonish gay ladies I've ever seen on TV. I mean, I looooved the makeup lady last year, but if you want a little peek at my life, check these ladies out. I live in Austin, for Christ's sake, just trust me. In fact, I seem to remember painting a perfect portrait of them at some point in the past... Yeah, here it is.
First of all, little boys do this. Everything is a gun. A bitten bite out of a slice of bread makes it into a gun made of bread. ("Any tool is a weapon if you hold it right," said Sister Ani. She was talking about IQ, but then lesbian vegetarian mommies wield that weapon better than anybody.) It's not about violence, it's about penises, which explains why even super gay little kids will still improvise guns, and why even super cool moms will never figure that one out. So the fact that he's doin
g this with a Barbie doll in the house of a thousand mommies is just a brilliant, tiny little detail that's metonymic for the whole thing.
But it also reinforces the idea that even if Nancy had been the perfect mother -- which the only thing better than one mother is two mommies and science will back me up on this -- there would still be violence, because it's also about violence. Case in point: Kish fully rips the head off the Barbie/gun just as they're clarifying his gender. Fiona sends Kish to the Contemplation Corner, which is more-lesbian-than-lesbian for Time Out, and he goes cheerfully and sweetly.
But Nathalie goes off into a contemplative little corner of her own mind, about halfway through this sentence: "Boys can be really violent. It's all kill, kill... Kill..." Because sometimes, it's really about kill. And boys have violence in them, and it's different from the violence in women. Or maybe it's not. Maybe Nancy's mantra that Shane would've killed is just a big dumb lie, which it obviously is, but if that's a lie then what else is a lie? How far back does it go? What was her first mistake? Was it having sons? She's said that before. She lived in a house full of men and blamed them for everything. But this is a house full of women, even the boys are women, and you still have violence and you still have kill and you still are to blame for everything your children do. Kill, kill, kill. Kish. Kill.
She needs out. Nathalie needs out of this house, where even a masculinity-free environment can't give her what she needs, and refuses to give her the leverage she wants. Because every time she goes up against a woman -- Heylia, Celia, Peter's ex, Pilar Zuazo, her sister -- she comes out the loser. And if she can't even work a couple of lesbians (look at her, are they nuts?) then she isn't safe here. But if she can't work them, at least she can work the system. Either way it's time to go.
Fiona tells her they're throwing away the trimmings until the Health Dept okays them for edibles, and Nathalie shakes her head. "Health Department. Notorious feet-draggers, could take years. I'll take them." She offers them a hundred dollars, the price of a Yippity! Sippy, and just at that moment her son Shawn -- yippity-sipping on an iced latte of his own -- notices a Yippity! Dragon, unattended I believe outside a Mommy & Me group, and gives a quiet Yippity-yip.
"Yippity-ki-yay, motherfucker," Shawn says, in his floppy cardigan. Maybe Judah let him stay up late and watch Bruce Willis movies; maybe Bruce Willis made him feel like Judah never left. Anything could be a weapon, if you hold it right: A golf club, a croquet mallet. Anybody's a father if you know what you're doing: Ignacio, Bruce Willis.
Shawn Newman.
Once Doug walks into the house in Ren Mar, which has been tossed like a salad, he'll assume that there was a great big party. "Andy? Silas? Creepy Downer? Hello?" he'll ask. Cesar and Ignacio will appear, gun to his head, and he'll shake his head. "Guess you guys weren't invited either, huh?"
We'll already have traveled up Mike Newman's nervous calves and shapely thighs, as he reads; while Nathalie tosses her trimmings and ice into the washing machines with an internet printout recipe in hand; while mentor-seeking Randy offers Wagner a beautiful fruit-topped cake and it's tossed in the garbage with a cigarette butt crushed into it; while Shawn pushes Avi down the sidewalk, in a cardigan like Judah's, sucking down an iced latte like Mom's.
Tired Mike and tired Randy will meet Nathalie down in the laundry rooms, where she's just produced her first batch of hash. It's a change, a Newman change: A new life, same as the old one. They'll shake their heads at the light in her eyes, the ugly freedom there, but she'll just nod: "This is our normal." But upstairs, just before, this is normal:
If you want to see the inside of the spaceship, go to page 64. If you decide to stay in the forest, go to Page 114. Paul's voice is hushed and delighted, feet swinging off the foot of the bed. "Go inside, go inside!" Daredevil Paul urges Mike, delighted. "Your move has paid off. They welcome you in for a meal," Mike says. And softer, almost too soft to hear, incredulous after all these risky chances and ugly choices and constant urging, on and on, after all this he still can't believe this luck:
"...You never die."
Discuss this episode in our forums, then see what vlogger Sean Crespo thinks of Weeds when he has No Prior Knowledge!
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