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So good!
After acquiring a closeted preacher's trailer from his ex-wife -- chock full of sex stuff and Israeli gay porn -- the Newmen pull into this bizarre Thunderdome trailer park that used to be a Western movie set, and start making hash while the FBI guy interviews Dean Hodes (looking great but sweating something awful). While Silas reads the Bible and Huckleberry Finn, Doug and Andy amuse themselves with the porn (though only Nancy-Pants actually jerks off to it). It sounds really seedy? But given the context, it's all rather sweet.
A few weird run-ins and new friends later, the boys have created a Traveling Salvation Show, starring Pastor Andy handing out nuggets of wisdom like how we should all be like gentle puppies, "Frolickin', softly tumblin' against each other." They baptize a tiny, awesome meth-head by the name of Keith, and Shane's got six other appointments lined up by the time Hurricane Nancy hits.
Because Hurricane Nancy always hits. Freaked out by their new and incredibly trashy American lifestyle -- and don't think we're not digging the total liberal-elite turn this season has taken, because it's fantastic -- this Nat runs to the nearest bar, where she has some very hot sex with some very hot Mark-Paul Gosselaar.
It's not exactly gentle puppy sex -- more like an angry rapey slap fight -- but you know how Nance rolls by now. Plus, Mark-Paul Gosselaar. morning, convinced she can make a life here now that she's got new brains to inject her devil-eggs into, Nathalie wakes to the guy's wife and his three kids knocking on the door. She uses Shane as a human shield, awesome Keith runs out of his trailer screaming "I'm not saved! I did meth today! I'm so high! I feel awful! It's great!" and the revolting shantytown revolts against them like some sort of poorly dressed zombie movie.
On the run again, Nathalie tries to feel bad about adding adultery to the list, but mostly just feels awesome about it, which, I don't know if I mentioned this, but she rawdogged fucking Mark-Paul Gosselaar. Girlfriend deserves a medal.
Want more? The full recap starts right below!A fully ambulatory Dean Hodes's testimony: He drew up Nancy's will. He was her personal lawyer, for personal matters and personal matters only. Well, except for the bakery, which unfortunately later burned to the ground. And with the insurance company, after her house also unfortunately burned to the ground. But that's it. Oh, also when the DEA called her in for questioning about the tunnel that started in Mexico and ended in her baby store. (Or maybe, he ponders, it was gang affiliation that time?) No receipts, because she paid him in cash. Um, only once. At this point his profuse sweating comes up and he starts talking about Jews eating Thai food and the whole thing goes down in flames. I miss Isabelle. I miss Celia, of course, but damn do I miss Isabelle.
The Newmen acquire a motorhome at a low price, the reasoning for which is slowly revealed in a really gorgeous way: The lady's husband, Pastor Jim, had it all kitted out, from TV to storage -- namely, a closet full of a serious amount of sex stuff -- and running well, so he wouldn't get stranded on one of his "missions." And there's a ceiling mirror, and a sex sling. Lady's like, "Just get it out of my yard." Doug can identify, but only because he also eventually went down for embezzlement. Not the weird sex stuff.
Getting everything situated, Nancy considers spray-painting the van -- GOD IS AWESOME LOVE!, it screams, with the Love part a little wonky obviously -- flat black, which I'm told is called "murdering" it, as in, it would be a "murdered-out van." I approve, so does Andy, it's probably a real bad idea. Shane asks if he can have Cesar's car, since he's a licensed driver now, and Nancy A) reminds him that his license is fake and B) she's still deciding whether or not she wants to set it on fire. You can tell she delights in the idea. But Shane has her number: "Can I drive it at least once before you set it on fire? Please? I got kidnapped!"
Will they sleep in it tonight? Nancy: "Tonight, and the rest of our lives on the lam." She's all about finding more washing machines -- Pastor Jim already has one in there -- and then she lets Shane drive Cesar's car, in a convoy. Shane's right back on her about testing out of high school, like Silas (wanted to or actually did, I can't remember). At first she's resistant, but then the whole Nancy/Shane thing starts up again and she's like, "You know? Tell you the truth, high school blows. It's overrated, and you're not really suited to it, anyway. You're right. We need an alternative plan, one that's more suited to your path." But not homeschooling, since that's what she's been doing since Agrestic and it hasn't worked out great.
Vide: The entire family's joyous obsession with Pastor Jim's intense collection of gay Israeli porn. The Backdoors Of Israel, Nail Me In The Kibbutz, Gaza Boy Strippers, Tel Aviv I'm Gonna Bang Him. Andy tests his looks and dong against the cover stars of a few, and it's really adorable. I mean, I guess it makes sense that you'd be like, "Middle America pastor being pervy or gay, that's old news. But get into the whole love/hate thing conservatives have going on with Israel and Jewishness, and you've said something new." Mostly I just think Israeli porn sounds awesome. After this episode, porn may well become irrelevant altogether, so smoke 'em if you got 'em.
A cop pulls the van over like immediately -- of course Shane and Nancy keep driving -- and there's a lot of rushing around and freaking out and general Andy high-strungness until they realize that the van contains: No drugs, no Shane, and no Nancy. All of their problems are not in the van. Not even Stevie is in the van. So Andy, Doug and Silas can all just chill with this cop and not even be worried. Their cover business may as well be their real business.
And up there in the car, Shane's thinking the same thing. Nancy wants to pull over a respectful not-with-themmish distance away and wait, but Shane's all, "Fuck that, this is our shot. We have everything we need. The baby, and the hash stuff in the trunk, a full tank of gas." A pride of three. It's endearing and wrong and sort of... Shane has always been the point of this show, in certain ways, but here's where it becomes obvious that this season is all about Shane, which we should have known from last year's finale: "Come on! They're holding us back and you know it." The whole time Nancy's ignoring his pleas -- "They don't have the balls for this; besides, we're just making their lives miserable... Cut 'em loose, let them go home!" -- until finally Nancy threatens to grab the wheel/his hair, but "ten points for chutzpah."
Don't even think of turning that last sentence into Israeli gay porn. You will waste the same ten minutes I just did. The cop enters the van and it's pretty tense for a while, helped not at all by Andy's characteristic energizer rabbitting at the cop: "It's the Praise Wagon! God Is Awesome Love! Exclamation point!" But when the sweet cop doesn't immediately jump on him, that gift of gab turns delightful: "The Lord has blessed us with the gift of itinerancy. We are ramblers, followin' the trail of his work..."
Aggressively, Palinesquely folksy Pastor Randall Newman, Asst. Pastor Ted, and Silas: "Billy. Picked him up hustling the streets of Seattle. Shattered husk of a boy, but he's coming back, aren't you, Billy?" It's nice when the truth is part of the lie, although the "shattered husk" part came more from the GTA and losing his college dreams and less from the whole male prostitute thing, which was only like one time and no touching.
Pastor Randy apologizes for speeding -- "Writin' a sermon in my head about the hard times we're fallin' on in this country. Folks goin' bankrupt, people livin' in a bad spiritual state, givin' up hope" -- and the cop asks, in indeterminate tone, if he can ask a question: "What's it mean about turn the other cheek?" Everybody in the van instantly thinks about Israeli porn. At this point it may well be impossible, and that was like three scenes ago.
"Well? Our God is a forgiving God. To engage in retaliation is not to live in his image. We should live as gentle puppies. Frolickin'. Softly tumblin' against each other." Like hash, made of puppies. That might be my favorite thing Randy ever said. He blesses the cop lots of various ways and they are off once again. That scene was very good. This episode is pretty great.
They find their way to a strange, legendary off-the-grid trailer park on an old set of western movie sets, thanks to Guru Andy ("Deep outlaw shit"). That always makes me think of Charlie Manson, which makes me think letting Andy start a cult would probably turn out poorly. Although with sermons like "puppies softly tumblin'" maybe not. A crazy old trailer lady who looks like she is made of the road comes up and welcomes them -- named Sodapop, skin like leather, face like leather, pink and yellow tennis outfit like something out of Raising Hope -- and sends them down to an empty space. Silas doesn't speak a lot but this time he's making it count: "Sugarpop is some deep outlaw shit." She invites them to "social hour," at the fake dry goods and feed store.
Nancy gets fed up with the boys all sitting around and reading gay porn and starts yelling about how it's their home and it needs organizing, etc., and it turns out that they don't have any water. Not for showers, not for the toilet -- noted too late to avoid a Doug Surprise, predictably -- not for the washer, not for (per Shane, of course) the baby formula.
Nancy just starts hitting them all about the face and hands, due to her whole drug dealer career being based in not living somewhere like here. This season has been hard on her definition of Quality of Life but that doesn't mean she can't get pissed about it. She's not being a lion, right now, she's playing at it; there's something missing: Once they're gone she sneaks some gay porn in back and gets started on calming down.
While Shane and Doug think about how to steal Sugarpop's water for themselves -- Doug taking Shane's disregard for human life into consideration -- Silas and Andy track down another washing machine. One short banjo solo later, Andy's rousing Nancy from her masturbation and yelling at her to get it together. They wheel the washing machine in, and there's a moment where the junkpile owner and his kid Simon try to negotiate a drug deal based on the smell of weed all over the van. Doug, right when things are getting friendly, immediately mistakes Simon -- a large black man -- for first Marvin and then U-Turn, and it's totally awkward. Luckily, Silas and Simon already like each other.
One second later -- right before Doug actually says aloud in his own defense what he would say at this point -- and Nancy asks where the water came from, somebody starts bashing on the side of the van with a bat. And who is this somebody? A wee little wonder named Keith, who in all of the jacked-up people into whom the Newmen have been running in America is still a gem. Just an absolutely wonderful little guy, thirty pounds of energy in a five-pound Skittles box. He is adorable, and he shakes all over like a Jack Russell terrier that's convinced he can take your ass.
Pissed at drama and America and these boys of hers that keep doing her bidding and making more troubles, Nancy jumps at the little guy and offers him ten bucks, then twenty, and then he starts screaming random numbers at her, shaking like a pissed-off little leaf, and Pastor Randy appears in full regalia. "God hates me. My grandma says I'm going to hell for everything that I did, so if you think I'm gonna listen?" He brandishes his weapon and whatever, and finally Nancy is like, "I've just reached my limit of deep outlaw shit." And she just walks right out of there, because: Seriously.
Sugarpop is of the opinion that her grandson should have been baptized long ago, and that she has already regretted it. She hands over a bunch of money and Doug jumps in with his whole routine -- "Would you like to add on our special mobile-home blessing? $99 day-of-baptism special, new clients only?" -- but Randy shuts him down.
You can actually smell the smell of Mark-Paul Gosselaar a good ten minutes before he arrives, all pugnacious jutting chin and petulant brow. The only thing he's missing twenty years later is the Ferris Bueller 'tude and the toolish hairdo that empowered it, which would barely be missed and certainly not when he's replaced them with muscles everywhere a person can have muscles. What a rock star he has turned out to be. However, for this scene we can only enjoy the possibility and not the actuality of MPG, because Nancy is yelling out her actions as she performs them to an empty room: "Customer! Customer taking a beer! Customer looking for bottle opener in... Weird empty dismal podunk bar..." Finally he arrives -- toting Shiner, for some reason, which they don't have there or in California where presumably this was filmed -- and it is awesome.
There's a sign hanging over the register that says, "No ladies at the bar. Table service starts at 6 PM." Nancy decides to push it, because the dude is hot and standing right there staring at her, and she can smell him too. The sign was his dad's, who is dead now, but he doesn't feel like taking it down. "You want to buy a Lincoln Towncar?" They both agree that this is not his style. He drives, Nancy deciphers correctly, a pickup truck, ten to fifteen years old, still has a cassette player with a tape stuck in it." Huge smile, but he doesn't see it.
(Who wrote this episode? This is great! Victoria Morrow, whose sparkling dialogue was also of note in "Felling & Swamping," "Machetes Up Top," and "Love Circle Overlap," the one with the ayahuasca. Ms. Morrow, we salute you.)
Now fully invested in fucking the taciturn stranger with the off-putting lackadaisical gender politics, Nancy calls another pocket: "Customer excusing complete lack of service and pouring herself a shot." She does so, she pours one for him too. He won't quite look her in the eye, he keeps wiping glasses and feeling himself being seduced, but he won't drink the shot either. She pulls down the NO LADIES sign, and finally gets his attention when she sets it on the floor, and then does a little dance on it. He can't look away, now: She dances on it like a cockroach.
Doug eats some hash even though Shane tells him not to, but as usual Randy's more into the role than whatever is supposed to be actually going on. His cover business is always his real business. There is no difference. He runs around screaming, and getting everything ready for the big show/baptism. Outside, Simon and Silas continue to bond about what it's like to be drifting and sort of owned by your parents in a way you can't quite escape: "Nobody is here who has anyplace better they can be. It's pretty much the end of the road." Simon's dad shot somebody and the guy didn't die. All Silas can say is that they weren't so lucky.
The ceremony itself is exactly what Nancy was running away from: Dramatic, nonsensical, loud, confusing, Jesusy, Andy working the crowd, the toothless scary yucky crowd, and call Keith a child of the Lord and a "flower of the field." He really is. He's just a sweet little old meth-addicted flower of the field. I love him like I love certain rare American Idol contestants. I cannot help it. Normally all this "I'm saved, Granny! I'm saved!" stuff would trip some kind of trigger in me and I would be quietly offended but no. It's Keith. I would buy a baby pool and put it in my yard just in the hopes that the Keiths would stop there on their annual flight to Capistrano. I could blissfully watch them -- for an hour, maybe a day -- frolickin' and tumblin' gently.
MPG doesn't want Nancy smoking in there, but she points out they've only been joined by one other customer, who doesn't mind. Having had enough, MPG finally shuts down the bar for the night and sends old Thomas home so they can get down to having that weird rough sex that Nancy so enjoys. He takes away her cigarette and notices that, as a rule, Daredevil Girl doesn't listen. Like, maybe she needs somebody to make her listen. I'd say it's like he got the rulebook to Nancy, except she's been painstakingly writing it down for him since she walked in there and got a look at him.
So yeah, it's hot, but nobody's things come from nowhere and that's always interesting. The surprise parties people will invite you to. In this case it's violent, two-sided, there's a locked door and him standing behind her, but she's already smiling. He pulls her hair and she melts, and before you know it he's spanking her with his belt, and then there's fucking. Some clawing, at each other's faces, some biting. They are not, as they say, tumblin' gently against each other. They're not puppies, they're lions.
But it gets sweeter as it goes on. Once they're done, and it takes a while, she does the cutest thing: She takes the watch off his wrist and slides it up onto her bicep, to check the time. He likes it too; he kisses her shoulder again. His cousin might buy Cesar's car. She might want to stay here.
Doug, high, sees the face of Jesus in one of the cabinet doors. Andy, high, thinks maybe the Holy Spirit was actually movin' through him: "Those words that I said, I don't know where they came from. Maybe I am Him. Capital H. Who's to say? Jesus was a Jew." Shane yells at him to keep his pastor costume clean, because of course he's lined up three more fake ceremonies for the morning. Silas, though, has once again been unable to lose that nagging human feeling, loves Simon, doesn't want to grift the people. Andy calls him "Antsy-Pants," which is too close if you're not going for the Nancy-Pants parallel, and we're not going for that here.
We are now preying on people for the simple reason that we don't consider them people. And yes, the reason they don't come off as people is that they have no respect for themselves -- and this show is spending its middle third saying exactly the kind of nasty elitist shit they can and I can't say about people, just now it's turned outward, to the people who deserve it maybe a little less -- but in this context turning the other cheek is about respecting people regardless, because that is respecting yourself. Not being gentle puppies, necessarily, but not being lions either. And the only person who gets that there's no pride in this is Silas, who would seem to have completed the homeschooling course that Nancy's still working on. That Weeds is still working on. It's like Silas went through Nancy and came out the other side.
Nancy refuses to give Jack her name when she gets out of his truck, and slinks away feeling normal for like one second; she climbs onto Andy in the RV's bed and giggles at him until he realizes she got laid. "I want to stay here for a while," she says, and they have a whole conversation without talking. I bet a lot of Judah's conversations went that way too. She likes boys you don't have to talk to, like Jack. The bear. He grumps, because they're always on the run, and he finally grunts and hides his face beneath the blanket
Nancy giggles and goes to sleep, finally okay. She'll plant her eggs, they'll grow up big and strong, and when Esteban comes calling she'll introduce him to Jack. She won't love him less, because she knows that she could love him, when this happens. But it's what's going to happen. She knows that too.
A second later it's morning and MPG's wife is pulling a full-on Cally Tyrol, dragging her kids to the GOD IS AWESOME LOVE van so she can yell the word whore like a million times. When Nancy figures it out, it's kind of sad. It's sad for Jack too, and he actually apologizes to her for his wife's behavior. Which on any other show would obscurely, I think, make us hate Nancy more. But for some reason this show is so upside down that it kind of seems like the wife is being more of a freak than Nancy. Less of a latte-sucking mama lion and more of a beat your ass kind of mama lion.
Of course, Nancy's not the homewrecker -- that would be Jack, who wasn't wearing a ring and who fucked a lady not his wife -- so instead of meaning anything it just means that A) This is a guy we probably could have stayed with for awhile, and looked at the whole time and had lots of sex with the whole time and B) That at least, as Nancy admits later, he got the job done.
At this point, many things happen. Everybody shows up for the baptism to hear Jack's wife losing her shit, and then Pastor Randy comes out to calm everybody down, but then Keith, wonderful Keith, tighty-whitey Keith comes out of his trailer screaming, "I'm not saved! I did meth today! I'm so high! I feel awful! It's great!" Sugarpop comes after them in her housecoat, and everybody is screaming, and finally the Newmen -- I mean it turns into a real riot scene, with everybody calling them fakers and liars and stuff -- just pile into the van and scream off into the morning light.
I can't remember the last time Nancy having sex was a direct result of her deciding to have sex. I mean, she's had lots of sex -- most of funny, some of it rapey -- but the only time the storyline was "Nancy needs to fuck somebody or she risks dying on the vine" was that awfully touching S1 episode with the vibrator and the sex tape where you cry at the end. So probably if Nancy really needs to have sex, she should go ahead and do it -- get the job done -- because that stuff tends to squeeze out other parts of the toothpaste tube if you're not careful, and vice versa of course.
But to go from hating the trailer ranch so much that she ran, to having this crazy intense hot sex with this guy and being okay with it, to the face she's making now -- beaming, in her big black bug glasses, yelling and empowered about all the hash they're going to make -- you have to wonder if she didn't enjoy the morning after just as much. That sexy dirty hangover feeling, as they drive away. The fact that Jack will survive her. The sick little smile that slowly fades with the song on the radio ("Did you tell her what we did?") and she comes back home to her little van: To movement, and isolation. To the feeling of flight.