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Judah Botwin was a rollercoaster designer, which should surprise nobody that knows his wife. So, now that Nancy's broken up with her latest husband and going off the grid, the family heads to a carnival in Montana. This is so Nancy can make Shane ride a rollercoaster and maybe talk him out of being crazy, and just generally as a lull now that they're fully engaging with something other than the west coast. A few Tea Party trash run-ins later, the world's only managed to degrade his morals further, but at least we get to see Nancy and Shane having fun.
In stark and explicit contrast to their particular form of scary/crazy, you've got Andy and Silas, the grown-up version of Andy, trying once again to provide for the rest of the family and once again failing miserably. This time, it's a butter-sculpture eating contest (administered by the eerily magnetic John Ross Bowie, with whom I am so obsessed I can tell you without checking he's married to Jamie Denbo who played Raylene last year) for the prize of a luxurious luxury mobile home.
Andy drops out early, Silas wins, a bunch of fat white Midwesterners go home in coffins, and it's awesome. But of course they need a SSN or something, they're not just going to hand it over, so then Silas makes that "I dropped my ice cream" face and they head back off the grid in the car he stole from his vajazzled girlfriend. Elsewhere, that cop is showing people, Cesar for instance, pictures of Nancy in that hideous wedding dress. Which is just mean.
week: Mark-Paul Gosselaar. That's really enough information, frankly.
Want more? The full recap starts right below!Looks like the ambulance came for Cesar after all. The FBI interview is classically taciturn: Did he kill Pilar? "No." Does he know who did? "No." Agent guy holds up that picture of Nancy in her horrible wedding dress: "Pilar Zuazo turns up dead, your boss's wife goes missing. Any idea where she might be?" No answer.
Fast-forward to Nancy driving Cesar's car, heading into Montana, begrudgingly admitting that Seattle was a total bust and now Andy, the Guru of Off-The-Grid, is in charge. I give it five minutes tops. Andy -- sorry, Randy -- gives his apple the usual big-talk shine and makes her "cede the reins" and this sort of thing for awhile, and then quotes Bill Maher:
"New rules. Number one: Keep moving. We need to widen the gap between us and our aggressors. That means at least another 24 hours on the road, no stopping, no exceptions except for gas and potty. Hardcore. [Nothing more hardcore than the word 'potty.'] Rule number two, this one is key: No social interactions. We go way underground, seal ourselves off. I'm talking Bin Laden, the Unabomber, that guy Sly from Sly & The Family Stone."
"Who?" asks Shane, which proves the point. Which proves several points. How does it sound to Nancy? "Great. Movement. Isolation."
Movement and isolation? So essentially your eternal MO? Yeah, that sounds perfect. Doug begs for a "road-trip spirit name," since he's an honorary fugitive thanks to child support, and Nancy offers both "Ted" and "Coward Who Led A Car Of Mexicans To Seattle." In the time that this conversation takes place, Nancy has snuck the reins back out of Andy's hands and decided to stop for lunch. He screams! "Off-the-grid," she says. "Bill Maher," she promises.
At another Hungry Kuntry Buffet, Silas deletes Kimmi's texts one by one. At least he doesn't have to feel bad about the stolen car now that it's really stolen. Shane wants to take the Lewis & Clark Trail, which goes from Washington State to Washington DC. Silas is weirded out by Shane's knowledge, along with all of Shane's other qualities, but he explains: "I'm an autodidact. Also, there's a brochure up front." Andy says no historic trails, because that's obvious, but: Is it, really? Well, Cesar or Ignacio might think of that. It's sort of their style. Doug's confused that Stevie doesn't look Mexican, and Shane's like, "We don't talk about that."
Nancy gets as hot and pretty as she can -- which is lots of both, of course -- in the Kuntry restroom, always fun to watch her gussy, and empties Cesar's wallet out before noticing a poster: The Big Sky State Fair! What better way to remind yourself that normal is terrible? The elders aren't having it -- "Momentum! Seclusion! Andy's Plan!" -- but Nancy's giddy. It's sort of unnerving. Usually she only gets this excited about drugs. So she blathers for a while before dropping the bomb: There's a rollercoaster.
Doug doesn't get it, neither do we, because of the million things we don't get to know about Nancy and her husband is that Judah was a rollercoaster designer, like, for a living. A bit on the nose, Daredevil Girl and Coaster Boy, but also pretty lovely nonetheless. The boys get starry-eyed, even Andy, talking about Judah's pet projects and his designs, and the more they talk the more it starts to look to Nancy like parenting, and the more she thinks about being a parent the more she's not interested in Andy being in charge, so once again she takes the reins. "For old time's sake. Plus, Shane has been kidnapped. It's very traumatic, being kidnapped." Doug whines, it's settled, she zooms right into yelling at the boys about hygiene because apparently today is Be Your Kids' Mom Day. I had no idea.
Andy lectures Nancy about keeping covered up at the fair, going on a sort of paranoiac rant -- "That bearded lady over there? Not a lady at all!" -- before heading into a metaphor that falls apart on him: "You're a squeaky field mouse headed into a bear cave, except the cave is a swarm of people, okay? And the mouse is your own ego. Wait, the cave is..." Nancy gets his point: This is about her ego, and expressing power over Andy as usual: "Willful defiance. Because I laid down rules, but you had to break them."
While Nancy continues to present the case that this isn't about that -- which it is -- but about Shane and how he is losing his childhood moment by moment and killing ladies and autodidacting and pulling guns on Ignacio. Which it also is, vide Shane bragging to Silas about how Ignacio caved like a "coal mine" and a "fucking payaso amateur." Silas begs him to get over himself, and Shane says he's just bitching because he's jealous that Nancy likes him better now.
Which is the best thing of this episode, the running conversation about how Shane has inherited Daredevil Girl's rollercoaster tendencies, and that he's a mirror she can see herself in, as a parent but also as a person. And that all of them, seeing this doubled horribleness or darkness or depravity or whatever you want to call it, are inspired to not be crazy or depraved like Shane and Nancy. So it inspires a sort of belief in right action that, as usual, is cruelly disproved at every point.
I don't know, something about the bald way they all talk about it lends it a certain credence, even likeability, because if you remove the circumstances it's a pretty common thing we've all thought. My mom's bad with money and prone to rage, my dad's extremely emotionally vulnerable: Is it my fault that I am these things also, or is that on me? And then the Silas position, which is: So shouldn't I just automatically try to oppose or at least be better than that, since I know where the trapdoors are located? It's like Buffy or something, the way that the weirdness makes it easier to touch the reality of it. A TV show about normal parents is not half as relatable as a TV show about magically or somehow unnaturally fucked up parents.
Nancy offers to buy Shane a pinwheel or whirligig, offered by quite a case -- "It spins! It whirls! It's a hee-haw, fire-cracking whirligig!" -- but he's into the real thing now. up is the 21st Annual Butter Sculpture Contest, first price of which is a luxury motor home. Movement and isolation, a place to sleep, a rollercoaster, a home that moves, Nancy's perfect solution. They leave Doug outside with the baby and check out just how luxurious it is, and start dreaming, which is when things usually go wrong.
Since it's Parenting Day, Nancy takes Shane and leaves her infant with Doug while Andy and Silas head off to win the contest. Doug tries to boast about his parenting skills, but of course that doesn't go great, and Nancy, well. Here's what Nancy knows about Stevie: "There's a full bottle of formula in the stroller. He likes bird... Sounds. No solid food, obviously. No sharp, pointy objects." Aaaand that's what Nancy knows about Stevie. Doug says he's good with babies -- "They see me as a kindred spirit/taller version of themselves" -- and then has a nice long talk with the baby in the smoking tent, to an old sleeping man. Thinking about Doug as a basically helpless constantly masturbating infant goes a long way toward making him acceptable.
"I'm Ted Wilson now. Very responsible. I could be a carny. Driving from city to city, handing out prizes. I once dressed up like the Muffin Man for Halloween. True story. Handed out muffins to all the neighborhood kids. I don't even like muffins! How do you say muffin in Mexican? Oh right, you can't talk still. How about this, Cheech? How about we ditch this den of creepy sadness, and go have some real fun?" Stevie's WTF look has not changed, throughout.
Nancy and Shane play some kind of ball-tossing game, and talk eventually turns to how much fun it is to shoot people. Eventually Nancy sort of wigs out and yells at him about how shooting isn't cool, violence isn't cool, go to the contemplation corner, and finally he's like, "Are you mad at me?" It takes her awhile of fumbling around in the dark to find the words, but she's not mad. She's scared that he's becoming something, mobile and isolated.
"Like you?" Nancy's skin goes cold, because that's not the point, and the more he tries to tell her it's okay, there the same, she really does get mad for a sec. "Don't try to tell me what I am, all right? I know what I am, I've been what I am a lot longer than you've been what you... Maybe are." And even if Shane is "like" his mom, he's still a boy. He's just a kid, yeah, but he's also privy to whatever weaknesses of his frail sex, which means he can't possibly work the world in any way she can teach him: "Smart -- so smart -- but a little lost." Everywhere you look, Teabagger posters and flags.
Leveling with him, the way she does when she's alone with him, she explains: "Shane, listen. It's my job to make sure you don't turn out to be a psychopath, okay? So if that means dragging you to some amusement park or... Or slapping you on the head every time you say cunt or bitch or... Motherfucking cunt, I'm gonna fucking do it, okay? Because I'm still your mom, and I haven't finished... Trying to be your mom. Okay? Understood?"
He understands. He thinks it's lame, but he understands. At some point you just have to say it like that. She swoops in for a peck, hopes it'll take. A mobile home is like a snail: It's a house that runs as fast as you do. It's also a good way to take all your baggage with you, because you can't ever leave it behind; you can't outrun the bear. But what she wants to be for him, for her children, is beginning to see the light, and it takes form from both. The good parts of both: To be nimble, to be the center of a unified family. To be one less wolf at the door, or bear in the cave, and part of their lives in a way that can't hurt them.
After a lovely conversation with awesome John Ross Bowie that could go on and on forever as far as I'm concerned, "father/son team" Randy and Mike realize that it's not a butter-sculpting contest, which Andy would admittedly rock, but in fact a butter eating contest. Which is just the grossest thing in the entire world, but gets the point across: They're not in Kansas anymore. They're in a bear cave where men are men and boys eat butter in thirty-pound bouts. The sculptures are all of "Montana's sons and daughters": Gary Cooper, Phil Jackson, Evel Kneivel, Jeanette Rankin, Joe Montana. Good thing they are potheads, because that shit is nasty.
Shane thinks maybe they should cut in the rollercoaster line, because it's ridiculously long, but Nancy tries to explain that the Venn diagram of what they just talked about is larger than shooting people and saying "cunt." It's about respect and self-control, two things of which she is a poet laureate. "Outlaws," Shane opines, "Don't wait in line." He wants to go rogue, like a Teabagger; he wants to talk about going rogue even more, like a Teabagger. Real independent thought, not just rerouted Republican hate. "Outlaws also don't refer to themselves as outlaws, just FYI." If ever there were a line that called out for an iced latte straw-suck it's... Yep, there we go.
So they're going to wait. As a little fat kid spills slushie all over her shoes and his yucky dad's on Bluetooth going, "How much fucking government-subsidized corn we can grow on that land? Fact: We don't have to grow it, and they'll pay us!" Go to the Heartland looking for values, and this is what you get. Dad's still bitching about the line as Nancy and Shane agree that they should do more things together. That they miss Judah.
"What are you gonna do, right?" says the widow. The gross family shoves their way to the front of the line, ducking between the metal bars, and Shane starts to get nervous. "No big deal," she says, just like a real person: "We'll all get on eventually." And though it isn't fair, the fact is that those guys are idiots and that everybody else will shoulder the brunt of getting pissed about it -- their people, their rules -- and they'll get shoved back. Right, because the world is an essentially fair place and paternalistic white line-jumpers always get shoved back. It's enough to make you, I don't know, start a shadow economy in an illegal industry with the artificial scarcity provided by prohibition laws.
Nancy's resolve to take the human way out lasts as long as it takes to get to the gate, where the young strange guy counts the last people through and then shuts the line down for the day. Midway closes early on Wednesdays, for maintenance. First Nancy tries the "my dead husband" card, "this young boy's dead father was a rollercoaster designer" card, but the boy is sorry: That wouldn't be fair.
After a slight altercation with Bluedouche that goes nowhere, because he has all the cards -- and an even shorter attempt to get like one of these women to care -- Nancy picks out the beefiest, angriest dad in line and pulls him forward. You go to the Heartland for values and realize that the men are just like men everywhere, but even easier: "You were behind me in line. This guy cut in front of us. You gonna let him do that? You're gonna let him do whatever he wants? And walk all over you?"
The fight that results is brief -- they all know each other; they're all cousins, eating butter together, fucking each other's wives, bagging each other's tea, divorcing in defiance of God's law together -- it works out. The crowd is incited, country-western shirts and purses flying, denim vests all-asparkle, and Nancy and her son sneak past and onto the ride. He is like her. The line won't ever work for him either.
Doug feeds Stevie cotton candy, washes it down with ice cream. He and Celia, I bet their sex was shocking in some ways but really, altogether I think they really had a thing, whatever they had.
Mike and Randy Newman, tokin' up, desperate to get hungry enough to eat thirty pounds of butter. Just typing that makes me want to fucking hurl. Mike added cinnamon to the hash, back in Seattle, for flavor; Randy approves. "Sometimes I think you're the son I never had," Randy tells his son Mike. "I'm serious, I feel a special kinship." Silas almost grins: "Because we're related."
"Spiritual kinship. A shared sensitivity of the spirit, combined with what I like to call untapped potential." Silas admits that he's applying to college, snagged an application before they left town. He makes Andy promise not to tell Nancy, because it would kill her. Or more precisely, because she would find a way to make him stay. Something really gross or scary.
"There's this question on the application: Evaluate a significant experience, achievement, or ethical dilemma you've faced." They laugh, getting buzzier. Ethical dilemmas. He doesn't know what he'll write about, he giggles, and gets sad. "But I do know I don't want to end up like Mom and Shane." Andy tries to put a nice face on it, as Silas gets wicked stoned: They're flawed, just like us, just like anybody. But Silas is nearly crying now: "I'm serious, I feel like a complete asshole for stealing Kimmi's car. I want to earn my own way or whatever... Do things... Do things right." Andy feels for him, remembers that feeling. He feels that way half the time, he knows what it's like. He knows what the other side looks like. They have to call the Newmen to the butter several times before Randy notices.
The contest, we are not fucking talking about. Doug gets nice grouping on a shooting game; Stevie's impressed, in his great big cute safety goggles. Nancy and Shane can't stop smiling as they wait for the coaster. It's not ego, she's not a city mouse, she's not a kuntry mouse. Ego would have blown the guy's head off. This is sensible, this is what life looks like outside the roving snail-shell, and something Shane's going to have to understand. How to squeak without getting squashed.
"Don't smile. You have to try things the right way first. Then, and only then, incite a crowd, whatever." Absolutes are easy. Kids get absolutes. But walking the tightrope, riding the coaster, that's the only thing Daredevil Girl has left to teach. It's not good and evil they should worry about, it's proportion. I don't think being Shane is a terrible way to grow up. "Don't tell Uncle Andy we cut the line," she says, as the coaster starts. He wouldn't understand.
Doug loads himself into the Zipper with Stevie in his lap while Randy barfs. A guy drops with a heart attack, Mike's only competition. John Ross holds his arms up in the air. Nancy's never been so happy. This is what it was like.
"Minor heart attack," John Ross explains. "Not good for the ticker, eating that much butter." Silas is white, Andy looks like a zombie movie. They're proud of themselves, for a second.
"Got some forms to fill out, tax mumbo jumbo. Yeah, state law requires us to submit social security numbers to the county clerk before we hand out any major prizes. Only exceptions are antiques and tropical fish." Silas's face falls, and falls; the butter turns to stone. If no SSN, then a tax ID, and a picture for the paper. As happy as Nancy is right now, which is gloriously brightly happy and free, that's how sad Silas is now. It's incredibly sad to see.
Stevie's bottle is still full, although Doug claims to have made plenty of bird sounds at him throughout the day. She yells for awhile, but can't really get up a head of steam on it. Shane thanks her sweetly, for a wonderful day. But Parenting Day is over, and certain members of the reconstituted team need special privileges. Andy needs to sit in the front seat now, with her, because he's hollowed-out looking and she stole the reins and it came to nothing. The great day Team Nancy & Shane had, well, it wasn't exactly at the expense of Team Randy & Mike, but it doesn't sit too well to it. He's nearly passed out on the hood.
Andy's attempt at the silent treatment lasts about five seconds, but she gets him to admit he had at least a little fun. "Now you're back in charge!" she says, but it sounds like a joke. "Today was something I needed to do," she pleads. For Judah, for Esteban. One last ride and no more Spanish and just a little hope that Shane's going to be okay. As Andy maps out their route and Doug plays with Nancy's tampons, John Ross passes by in a luxury mobile home, staring down at them for disappearing, for being strange, and then he's gone. Silas's heart breaks, Andy stares back. John Ross waves and then he's gone. Mobility and isolation aren't absolutes, they're matters of proportion. The Newmen keep on driving.