By Jacob
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.
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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