Episode Report Card Jacob Clifton: A+ | 1 USERS: A+ YOU GRADE IT So Many Vibes
By Jacob Clifton | Season 6 | Episode 9 | Aired on 10.18.2010
In a hurry? Read the recaplet for a nutshell description! Finished? Click here to close.It's a bittersweet but intriguing act-break as Andy finally convinces Nancy to leave the country. Avi's weird poo sends Nathalie and Randy off to a pediatrician, who diagnoses Nat with a serious case of bad parenting that scares her enough that she nearly turns herself over to the FBI. (This on the tails of a total Amber Alert broadcasting that awful wedding dress everywhere, a final insult.)
Sister Jill Price is the interviewee this week, and she's not doing well: Divorced, raising twins, high on something and making endless ceramic vaginas. We do get some info on the Price Girls, which is always interesting: Dad worked for Ford, Mom was a drunk, they were not well off. So, the pieces continue coming together as slowly as Pangaea drifted apart, but it really seems like it's headed somewhere this time.
Reconsidering Stevie's health and Andy's place in her life, not to mention the fact that she's managed to ignore this son even more completely than the other two, she finally gives in to the pressure -- but only after a final drive-by of her childhood home in Detroit. We'll see if they make it off the continent, between Andy's description of Copenhagen as "cozy," linking it to the childhood home, and Nathalie's dream job of "skydiver." Not to mention the reemergence of the mermaid image, which is never a good sign.
While Doug romances the groupies of a children's TV show band -- a sequence that involves a penguin costume, a hookah named "Medusa" and a threesome with a bunny rabbit -- Silas and Shane sell their hash to bored parents. Silas takes this opportunity to put Shane through his drug-dealing paces, sabotaging him at every turn and eventually making him siphon gas to prove the point that he's a good murderer but a bad drug dealer. It seems really shady but then you think, this is still more active parenting than Nancy has ever exhibited.
Next week: No fucking clue. This season rocks.
Want more? The full recap starts right below!On the run from Trailer America is not really on the run from anything, it's just about being rootless. The second she thought about putting down roots, the roots came with bullshit and angry wives and whatever, so running, and now we're in Colorado. Andy and Silas are doing this crosstalk shell game with another dispensary grower, all about how they're going from state to state selling "gooey baked messages of hope" to sick children and glaucoma patients and the like. People in other states, "less progressively minded than Colorado." When they've wound down the dude is like, "So essentially you're drug dealers? Whatever." And that's the difference between Trailer America and Colorado.
They've been picking up shot glasses from every state they visit, I believe, and Shane plays with them while Nancy tries that whole "home schooling" thing they talked about. With sad, funny results: "Nebraska. Only state with a unicameral legislature. The birthplace of Kool-Aid." She yells at him that he spent six days there and surely must have actually experienced the state in something other than a "read about it on Wikipedia" sense. Shane saw: "A nun driving a pickup truck." That'll have to do. "Better. Keep observing. Let the road be your school. Watch, listen."
Also, smell. What is that smell? That's Stevie, who needs a change. When Nancy sends Shane to take care of it, he's like, "Have you noticed I always do that?" Nancy tries desperately to remember the last time she changed Stevie, can't come up with much, and rolls her eyes, off to be a mom for a second: Does she even know what size diapers he's on these days? "I'll figure it out," she grins.
Doug's arm is all scratched from a fight with a raccoon in a Port-A-Potty ("Punched him out," he says proudly) and then Nancy comes back out mystified by the contents of Stevie's diaper -- "It's, like, radioactive. With gross stringy things in it?" -- but Shane, who is fully driving the GOD IS AWESOME LOVE this whole time, admits he just thought that was normal. Nancy asks if maybe Andy fed the baby hash, and chillingly they wonder if that's somehow a possibility.
Nancy, remembering Botwin diapers of yore, decides she wants to take Stevie to a pediatrician. Andy starts to bitch but she takes the words out of his mouth -- too risky, ride it out, insurance forms, their shitty fake ID's -- and finally tells him to take a look in the diaper for himself. I think it was Trotsky that said you never teach anybody, you just establish an environment wherein the person can teach himself. In this case, that environment is radioactive and stringy. "Okay we need to see a doctor," Andy says, and nearly crosses himself.
Quick stop at the Colorado Amphitheatre for gas money: Shane and Silas will sell some hash, and Doug will stay in a tent and away from humans, while Andy and Nancy take the baby in for maintenance. Nancy tells Silas like eleven times that he's in charge today, sort of as a goodwill gesture but also because Shane's total insanity is now in play and part of all discussions. Luckily, they've happened upon "So Many Vibes" (heh), or what Shane terms the All-You-Can-Smoke Festival: "Phish, Dave Matthews, OAR, a Widespread Panic tribute band called Run Squirrel Run." More like the Hell Is A Place In Colorado Festival. But right then, they change the sign for the day: It's the Zoobie Woobies in concert.
Momentary hiccup, but then you remember that nothing is more horrible than children's entertainment. I mean, everybody loves Yo Gabba Gabba, because it's only incidentally for children, but as somebody who has lived through Wiggles Live I can tell you that it's a lot harder to make it through that shit when they're too far away to have weird sex fantasies about. I'm not trying to be creepy, I'm just saying close your eyes and think about Steve from Blue's Clues and count how long it takes. It's the same principle that says all Fox News anchors have to look like librarian cheerleaders: Your brain needs something, or somebody, to do while your body waits for the four o'clock Gilmore Girls rerun, i.e., I'm still not sure how I feel about Joe Scarborough's (he's on MSNBC, but go with me) politics but I'm pretty sure they're three hours' worth of sexy.
So you got some annoying kid screeching about the annoying bubble machine and the annoying kid's mom is dreading absolutely the entire thing, and she's like, "Gimme that shit?" Silas tells her to enjoy; across the lot, Silas is shaking down a dad and when the dad balks, Shane tells him to fuck off. Silas says this is the third time, so Shane's benched for a second. Shane complains that Silas is only in charge because he's older, and Silas is like, "Well, also because I'm more responsible and have better interpersonal skills." Like for example I don't solve my problems with croquet mallets, be they metaphoric or clunkingly concrete: "You freak people out."
Shane, still high on the whole Nancy-as-Mom/Nancy-as-Peer love-circle overlap, relates to Silas his epiphany that you don't actually have to do everything Nancy says. What he means is, there are no rules and no limits and it has very little to do with Nancy, and that's the unspoken thing he's answering, with the power of pragmatism: Fine, existential whosit, but then where does the gas money actually come from? "I don't care. I want to drink beer and eat stadium food. You're not my boss."
In other words, fuck everything. Which is where Silas used to live, so he knows how this will play out: We got ourselves a situation that won't respond to logic or traditional therapies. Plus, he doesn't care to be anybody's boss anyway -- he just wants everybody to be okay -- so he shrugs and puts Shane in the lead.
Then, of course, Silas steals the plastic cup with all their cash when Shane's not looking. I would say this is about 60% wanting to be the favorite, 30% annoyance with Shane's constant cockblocking and newfound independence from consequences, and 10% attempting to do the right thing by teaching Shane a little lesson about responsibility.