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Dearborn holds few delights and many obstructions for the Botwins. Why is Nancy's hometown their last stop before Copenhagen? Not even the script is sure. But it doesn't really matter, because everything so far is looking pretty effed up with likely more to come. Establishing a base of operations for hash sales and passport-getting means tracking down, per Shane's suggestion, the math teacher that took Nancy's virginity, Mr. Schiff. He's played by Richard Dreyfuss, works for and steals from the postal service, and while he's no longer quite the in-patient young Nancy made of him -- the first cockroach to get her zombie eggs in the brain -- but truth be told, he does have a scary secret room in his house. Overall Schiff is just sort of sweet and old and bonkers.
Nancy and Andy invent a new liquid drug using their hash and Schiff's meds, test it out on Doug, and sell it to a bar. This might be their worst plan ever, as in ever on this show, but the blitheness with which they jump into it makes me think there's a smartness to it I'm not getting: The main reason I've never done a George's Marvelous Medicine with all the drugs I could find -- which, come on, sounds great -- is because I've always just kinda assumed you would go running straight through the nearest plate glass window or shit your eyeballs.
Andy goes looking for passports and has some very fun scenes there, but lots of dead ends. We meet a family of Michael Moore's pasty sad Michigan poor people and trade them for the Jesus Is Awesome Love RV, the better to sell drugs to, and buy passports from, various ethnics.
Silas and Shane, off a tip from Mr. Holland's Opus over here, check out Nancy's high school boyfriend Lars, who also works for the PO and bears a marked resemblance to Silas. I guess. Like a craggy blockhead Lego version of Silas with muscles like a day-laborer. And anyway, no way. Judah forever.
And what's Nancy doing this whole time, besides tossing casual hipster racism around like it ain't no thing and literally inventing new ways of putting the whole family in jeopardy? Oh, she takes her half-Mexican baby to the graveyard to gloat at her horrible parents' tombstones about "You thought it was bullshit when I married a Jew? Meet Stevie." It's a pretty good scene, but not that heavy -- frankly, it doesn't really seem like MLP is that into it -- until the end:
A Klostermanesque basement-dork that Nancy doesn't even remember from high school approaches her (and even if it isn't a setup, doesn't he still represent a huge dangling loose thread, since you're on your way out of town?) in a way that is obviously a setup, she turns him down for a coffee date, and he reports the sighting to whomever he's working with. So... probably she will eat the brain out of his head week.
Want more? The full recap starts right below!Silas wants to use the bathroom, but Doug. I don't really need to say more than that, do I? Silas wants to use the bathroom, but Doug is in there smoking hash. I guess because they don't want him using up their product, but more so that he can make gross cheap jokes and invent imaginative metaphors for feces. Out at the front of the RV, Shane wonders if it's really that smart to go back to your hometown, when you're en route to another country with the FBI and El Cosa Nuestra on your ass.
Because this actually doesn't make any sense, it seems like an odd choice to point that out, but whatever. We're into the third act and Dearborn is where it will take place. And we're learning about Nancy at the same rate her children are learning about her, so it does make a bit of sense. It would make more thematic sense if this show hung together better, but this season has at least been fun to watch. Nancy and Andy's troubling explanation is that "Dearborn is crawling with Arabs," and since they sell hash and need fake passports, clearly that's enough of an explanation.
And, you know, wonderful-wonderful aside, leaving the country means leaving behind everything that caused Nancy to become what she is in the first place. Which is a handy little theme to have always going on with this show -- work for a living/kill yourself working et cetera -- because she's always scrambling to keep what she's got and then finding herself in places where what she had -- what she was trying to keep such a tight hold on -- somehow became totally irrelevant along the way. This is what life is actually like.
So in the context of saying goodbye to the Americas, it makes sense to touch base with the mermaid mailbox of Dearborn, and her parents' graves, before flying into the arms of the even-sadder mermaids of Copenhagen. Silas points out what a cheap, easy, racist joke it is, to assume that all Arabs have access to fake passports, not to mention sort of base and pointless, but because this episode is not that well-written, just cartoonish and kinda nasty for no reason, Nancy's answer is: "It's also racist to assume all Asians are bad drivers... But they are." Which, I get the concept there, and it could be funny, but whatever. This is going to be the shortest recap ever. Nancy assigns Andy to get the passports, at which he balks due to "radical Muslims" vs. "Jew face."
Nancy is all excited because her friend Lainie's house is coming up, and it's where she hid every time she ran away from home, as a kid. Only now, instead of a house it's a strip club. "Oooh," says Doug happily, "I'll put my sweatpants on!" Then there's more lazy writing about "trolling around Little Beirut in the Jesus Wagon might bring unwanted attention" and how they need a Detroitmobile, which is a much funnier joke and also the exact same joke: "We need a nice crappy American car around here, so we blend."
Shane suggests that they all bed down at Mr. Schiff's house, reminding everybody of how he molested Nancy in high school and how funny it was and how she drove him to commit suicide but that eventually he got out of the mental institution. There's literally no reason for Shane, of all people, to suggest this, or everybody in the van to immediately get onboard with that idea, or for Mr. Schiff the mentally ill postal worker to still be living in that same house, but whatever. Apparently Nancy remembers the guy's address, apparently proving that he fucked children and that one of them was Nancy. Isn't this hilarious?
Though Nancy assures herself and them that Schiff won't remember her, of course he does, and he gets all slobbery and sexy all over her, and the boys are totally fucking grossed out about it because it's fucking gross, and apparently being good at playing a pathetic child molester is a skill you can have, so my hat is off to Mr. Holland Krippendorf for that. He Humberts around about his sciatica and schlepping and plantar fasciitis and finally Nancy's like, "Hey, can my whole family -- plus a large stinking masturbating fart machine who has no real reason to be on this show -- can we all come live with you? This is my Mexican baby." And of course Schiff is like, "Marvelous!"
Schiff gets everybody's name wrong because he's decrepit, and nobody cares because he is irrelevant and clearly exposure to rads of Nancy, in her early days when probably her zombie venom was much stronger, has caused irreparable damage to his brain. The only rules are: Don't touch the giant telescope, and don't go in the mysterious room at the end of the hall, which is locked. Also, he sleeps on a massage table with his face in a little hole, for his cervical nerves. Also, he loves everything from Skymall and gets everything from Skymall. Doug gives this whole speech about Skymall that is marginally funny only because of Kevin Nealon but is sort of like if Jerry Seinfeld were holding auditions to be the him and then he fell asleep in the middle of your audition. Jokes about Skymall. 2010, jokes about Skymall, this is the situation.
Finally they tell Doug to shut the fuck up, but still let him be on the show some more. Somewhere Celia's like, "Listen: When that show is rockin' nobody can keep up. But when that show is shitty, damn is it shitty. So you tell me." Schiff wonders about the SS Awesome Love and Andy assures him that they "lost [their] faith a long time ago," in a weirdly dark tone as though it's meaningful and not just some more passably dark humor. Schiff makes another joke about how he raped Nancy as a child, possibly causing her to be into spankings and hair-pulling and all this, the occasional rape over a table, and it's "hilarious" some more! Schiff asks if they are as sketchy as they seem to be, and Nancy's like, "No, we are on the up and up, but if anybody asks, I'm Nathalie, Shane is Shawn, Andy's Randy, Doug is Ted, Silas is Mike, and the baby's Avi. Clear?"
Hooman is the name of the hot bartender Nancy is meeting with, and he explains to her that she is racist for coming to Dearborn to sell hash to the Arabs, but mostly a dipshit because that is some leftover assumption she's served herself. Nancy swears that hash is the new hash and that these things are cyclical and that hash is retro and retro is cool and I dunno, viral and search-optimized, and finally he puts her out of her misery, because please don't tell Bobby Bottleservice what the kids are into these days, Old White Lady: "Look, I promote three of the hottest nights a week out of this space, and trust me, no kid comes here to smoke hash and get mellow. They all want to get cranked up, fuck like dogs. So, unless you're packing E or blow, you're shit out of luck, Mommy. I need up. Not down. Hash? Belongs in a fucking museum!" Nancy, feelings hurt, ageism run amok, leaves with a like "okay okay" tone in her voice, grabbing her giant purse on the way. We have not seen the last of that one, thank God.
Andy disrupts a Muslim service, and it's gross and stupid. There's envelope-pushing, and then there's the white trash Teabagger guy, Kid Rock or Axl Rose, going "How come only black people get to use the N word?" Like he's the first person to think about that. Like he's not just using this entire process of "inquiry" and "deep thought" so he can give himself permission to use the N word. If there's no other level to it, you can't imagine one out of thin air no matter how hard you try. A smart asshole is still an asshole, and this show treads on that side of the fence more than is okay. This episode is for shitty unhappy people.
Shane plays with one of those brainwave things where your telekinesis moves a ball around a maze thing using EEGs, which are not only super fun but also something Shane is probably amazing at. While he's doing that, they discuss what Nancy was like in high school. Besides enthusiastically getting sexually assaulted by their host, of course. She was an A student in math, a great gymnast, a wonderful dancer, star of the talent show. She made her own costume and stole the show, but since this ep
isode is pretty useless, he describes a different costume than the Sammy Davis Jr. one that obviously he should be describing. But since it's Silas who, gorge rising, asks to see pictures of her, I guess we're just dropping that whole thing altogether. Schiff's been carrying a picture of Nancy around in his wallet for the last twenty years, of course, and lies about it, of course, and then he runs off to fetch yearbooks so they can really get down in the dirt with this bullshit.
While he's gone, Silas teases Shane about his inability to focus and play the mind game -- "Maybe it only works on positive energy," he says, which: total burn -- and they discuss how probably the locked room contains an entire Nancy shrine. Then we finally get to the point of this whole storyline, location, moment: All the pictures of Nancy with her boyfriend, Lars Guinard (quel guignon!), have his face scratched out. What does he look like, Lars Guinard? With a name like that, I'm guessing something like the hot dumb ex-husband Bobby on Cougar Town, which by the way contains no cougars, only a small amount of towns, and much better jokes than this episode of a show. Schiff admits to scratching out the boy's face: "The loser, asshole, do-nothing boyfriend of your mother's from the middle of junior high all the way through high school." As if we are retarded, he adds: "I deliver his mail." And just as Shane gets the ball to float, Schiff describes Lars to Silas: "Blonde-haired, lean, chisel-faced. He looked like you."
Which makes the whole bang the drum thing about that this season a little less irritating, but also a little moreso. And then we've got the big graveyard scene, which was unfortunately in this episode and thus written poorly, even though the last two seasons have sort of made it a major pivot of the entire show. Luckily, Nancy is played by Mary Louise Parker, the best actress of all time and the hottest, so whatever the script can't manage to do, she will take care of. And I mean, I don't want to keep harping on this, but I can't imagine it's merely my personal aversion to the kind of merciless antisocial tone of this episode, which is a huge thing but also not quite as huge as these jokes I can see my grandfather making. Well, not my grandfather, but somebody's grandfather. Yours.
And lame jokes aside, the intent and tone and vector of every scene is the same problem. It's like... U-Turn, it feels like U-Turn when the whole world was sick and ugly and gross. Not depressing, or mournful, but just... Diseased, and I don't know why that's happening this time. Or maybe it's the kid rape jokes. (week is way better, in both respects.) But U-Turn world was so aversive and nasty that I nearly stopped watching the show -- in fact, took this gig so I'd have an excuse to maintain my interest in the show -- and I looked at the past scripts by this writer and yeah, pretty much nasty and hateful right down the line. And maybe he's a great guy in person, loves dogs and hugs, maybe he's really strong in the room, I don't know, it's not my business, but: The banality of human weakness is not inherently interesting, that's what makes it banal, and that's really all we get this week.
Nancy says hello to her dead parents (Arlene Price 1933-1998, Sherwood Price 1931-1997), makes subtle fun of Jennifer Jason Leigh for getting the cheapest possible stones, and then introduces them to Stevie. (Wait, so if the Mom's born in 1933, she's 36 when Nancy is born and dies at 65, when Nancy's 29. Nancy is born in 1969, repeatedly raped by the hilarious, good-natured Mr. Schiff starting at 14, attends high school 1984-87 and goes off to Paris 1987-? Around 22 she marries Judah and Silas is born; she's 25 when Shane is born, an orphan at 28 and a widow -- for the first time -- around 38, I think. Check my math but I'm pretty sure about this. I mean, usually I would say it doesn't matter, stop being a nerd, but this show has been on for half a decade of our lives and we still know nothing about its protagonist, which makes it more interesting and less OCD.)
Mary Louise, how you do impress. "Sorry you never got a chance to meet Silas and Shane. In retrospect, probably a mistake. But you started it. You think my marrying a Jew was bad, you should meet this little guy's father. Long story, didn't work out so well, won't bore you with the details." She thanks them for their new, silent, nonjudgmental attitude and says she'd visit more often if she weren't fleeing the country. She sweetly leaves a box of Anderson's Butterscotches on her father's grave, and can't quite look her mother square on, for her parting shot: "Mom, sorry. I didn't get a chance to stop by a liquor store."
Yeah, Nancy had an alliance with her dad against her mother. Color me shocked. Yeah, Nancy's mother was an abusive addict. Shocked again. Yeah, Nancy full-on murdered Judah's grandmother to get possession of the master bedroom. Unless you've had a truly terrible mother you probably think it's cartoonish and nasty, but let me tell you: This is the one interaction this episode got 100% correct. Nancy and Stevie say goodbye to the Prices and take off but are approached by some kind of douchebag beardy Klosterman with rumpled jacket and Ben Franklin hair that looks like he smells like mildew and sandwich shop. I don't know what the TV has against Radzinsky's natural hotness but inevitably they collude to make him look like a pisher just begging for a punch. Life's hard for the character actor specializing in nebbish.
Dude asks Nancypants for assistance locating the main office, or a map, because he's visiting his parents too. He stammers and acts all weird and finally admits that he, Ellis Tate, was a freshman when Nancy was a senior, and that he had a huge crush on her, she didn't even know he was alive, etc. She thinks about how this could possibly be of advantage to her, realizes that not only can it be of no use, but also it's a fucking problem because now he's seen her and recognized her and is obsessed with her, and I presume wants to punch him in the fucking face just for looking like he looks. I certainly do.
Nancy makes gentle fun of his stupid bald head and hates the entire situation, and he's painful and sweaty-palmed and self-aware and awful: "Do you want to get a coffee or something? Relive the old horrors and humiliations of high school?" Sounds great, Daria. Nancy has learned the value of honesty in these situations: "Well, that sounds like no fun." Word! Maybe it's just the self-obsessive anomie of the Cobain Generation that is so off-putting about this episode. Misanthropy has been masquerading as cleverness, unexamined, for a good long time now, it's become part of the noise. But if you hear it once and pay attention, you really can't go back to ignoring it again. Slacker bullshit is like Whoopi Goldberg's missing eyebrows in that way.
Nancy tries to take the hell off so Ellis Tate starts soliloquizing about parents, how they fuck you up -- "fill you with the faults they had, and add some extra just for you" -- and because he is an adult who thinks this is the extra mile and that sitting around klosterfucking about your sad Gen X life and blaming your parents and complaining about the Twitter is what everybody like really wants to do, he tries to nail her down for the date to which she literally just said no, again, so she gets awesome on him: "That's very sweet, Ellis, but... You're a freshman, I'm a senior. It'd never work out." And as she makes her way across the cemetery, in fringed boots and denim hotpants and wearing a babybjorn across her front, she whispers to herself, "...Dork!"
More racist adventures with Andy, and some guy finally grabs him and steers him down the street to have a private conversation about passports. For $100 guy sends him to Michigan Avenue, and to ask for "Sam," who is the guy's uncle. Andy heads for the Jesusmobile, repeating the address over and over to himself, and of course Doug derails his train of thought and Andy gets all pissed at himself, like hitting himself in the head, but then Doug memorized the address while he was interrupting, because of his accountant's gift with numbers, so it's okay. Of course, Michigan Ave. is the passport office in Dearborn, and the guy's uncle Sam is yours too.
Doug and Andy rail on A-rabs for awhile and then back up into a car where Michael Moore lives, and his entire family of three-toed mutants tha
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t looks just like him, and he makes a documentary about getting backed into by a Jesus RV, and somehow the documentary and associated press ends up being more about him than about the unfairness he's exposing, and then it all just turns into frothing whining grandstanding that fools itself into thinking that it's speaking truth to power and not to the choir, and that it's a call to arms and not just the same dubious thing any college freshman is already angry about, and they give the RV to Michael Moore so that he will go away, but then Penn Jillette makes a lady-masturbating hot tub and admits to being into polyamory and it's so gross and immature and silly -- and Michael is so far up into his own anus -- that he drops dead, so they ditch Jesus and take his car and drive over to Morgan Spurlock's house, because yeah it's the same exact bullshit but Morgan Spurlock is hot as hell, and so anyway now they have a car.
Ellis Tate is not in the yearbook that Schiff left on the counter; the yearbook contains no pictures of Ellis Tate; the ambiguously gendered Ellis Tate is unpictured and absent on that day. The mystique! Nancy puts some formula in a bottle and asks Stevie to brainstorm moving a bunch of hash in a hurry, but he is just a baby and so he's no fuckin' help, but then the act of putting the formula in a bottle inspires her to... Invent a new drug entirely? I'm confused by this storyline but you know, I don't know anything about drugs. So maybe this is a trend or was at some point a trend. Maybe it's something the angry writer heard about at a poker game while he was high, and we're going to pretend it's real. Could be any of those. I guarantee you that this episode was written by somebody who loves poker and believes that poker skills are an indicator of masculinity. The signs are there.
Shane tries out names: "Silas Guinard. Mike Guinard!" Silas gets nervous and they fight out the same thing they've been trying to get us to fight out all year: Well, Andy has light hair, not that he's Silas's dad but maybe there is something going on, genetically, recessive or something, they haven't been in school in a very long time and if you don't know anything then everything's up for debate, but then if it's not that he's blonde like Andy then what is it? Why doesn't he have a Jewfro like Grandpa Lenny? Silas points out that Schiff is out to lunch, like, Lars could be black for all we know, and Shane makes a sub-Doug joke ("It's Lars, not DeLars") and they're on little electric scooters from Skymall, riding toward Lars's house, and when they get there Shane knocks on the door and Silas freaks out and Shane asks about the car Lars is selling and Lars, who looks not unlike Silas Botwin -- and laughs about how he ordered two scooters just like those from Skymall but they never arrived, which is to say they were never delivered by his postman, Mr. Schiff, who owns two scooters from Skymall -- runs off to get the keys, teeth brightly shining, and when Shane points out the resemblance and Silas tells him to go to hell, Shane gets a semi-okay joke: "Yeah, Helsinki!" Take what you can get.
I like this, this is interesting, and Nancy's pretty much adorably delighted throughout this entire scene: Andy constructs a drink around the hash with the delicate touch and subtle layering of a chef: "It's got to lift you up, but not too high or too fast. Then, once afloat, it must keep you there, with a steady hand, all night. And then once the complete experience has run its course, it has to gently lay you back, to a peaceful and restful sleep." One part grain alcohol -- and I think the script thinks a "part" is a unit of measure, because there aren't any other "parts" in this recipe, so why you gonna use words you don't understand -- a dash of hash, a hint of Red Bull, a soupçon of super secret ingredient (Schiff's heart medication) and before you know it, Doug's drinking something that, if there is a Jesus and His love is truly awesome, will cause Doug to shit out his eyeballs and die right here in front of us. There's your peaceful restful sleep.
Car talk, car talk, won't-get-very-far talk. Lars is a nice guy, wants to assure them that he's giving them a good deal and what to watch out for, et cetera. Silas sort of desperately wants the guy's approval, either way, because he seems like a normal man, like the man Silas is growing into. The car is red and, like its current owner, trashy and sportscarish. Lars admits that his girlfriend wants him to get rid of his ride because it was a pussy wagon at some point, and Silas finally intuits the situation and begs off even pretending to buy it: "I don't think I can buy something you're not really ready to sell." This flips some kind of switch in Lars's head and he decides that he isn't going to sell the car after all, because he loves it and -- get a load of this concept no Botwin has ever heard of -- you don't always have to do what chicks tell you to do. "Especially fat chicks!" Shane agrees, coming out of the house (after, I hope, seeing pictures of Lars's fat girlfriend inside) secretly having stolen a comb from Lars's bathroom: "DNA, my brother. Or should I say half-brother?"
Doug, how is your penis? Good to know. He gets Nancy to prod it with a spatula and then tries to dance with her and then tries to dance with Andy and yells about how he's en fuego and it's all quite droll.
Okay, so Nancy takes the marvelous medicine over to visit Hooman, and they make friends, and the scheme is that she's going to put it in call-brand bottles, which can then pour shots that Hooman can sell for twenty bucks, who cares anyway, there's a scheme. It involves cool folks and the kids these days and Hooman wearing an Ed Hardy t-shirt and calling things "fierce" and explaining that "only pussies want to fuck like rabbits," and the people will be fucking like dogs. More unfunny racism, they shake hands, more unfunny racism and using words you don't really understand, the end.
But soft! Chuck Klosterman/Ellis Tate? Not actually either of those. It's instead a fellow with a whole box of files on Nancy, Andy, Silas, Shane, Stevie, the whole thing. Who knows how far back it goes and what else he knows and why he is investigating or what he is investigating, but I'm guessing he's got a video camera too, with Dean and Jill and everybody else on it. Maybe he's one of those unprepossessing total murder guys like on Damages or maybe he's a grad student doing a report on zombie-making wasp queens of America or maybe he's a police. Sure enough we know he's got a shit-eating grin when he picks up the phone and reports -- to whom? -- that he finally, finally found her. Then he goes back to day-trading, disagreeing with Pitchfork, refusing to have a Facebook account, and getting just stoned enough to say shit like "Dude, remember OK Soda?"
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