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Hooman, Nancy's charming new bartender friend, directs them to a guy for passports, but Andy somehow ends up being tasked with the murder of the guy's daughter's fiancé. Who happens to be Hooman. So suddenly Andy's in the middle of this Sunni-Shia conflict with a scary business guy on the one hand and this dear young bottle service douchebag on the other, trying to play both sides off each other.
Silas gets about one beer in with Lars before admitting his paternity worries; being told that his high school girlfriend might have hidden a now college-age kid from him sends Lars into a tailspin. Andy tries to explain to Silas how it's probably not true and doesn't matter anyway, but you know Silas. He's going to wig until he's done wigging. Or at least until Andy makes the most rational suggestion of all, which is: Ask Nancy.
Mr. Schiff drinks a bunch of the invented drug drink and goes into a whole delightful meltdown, which Shane enjoys just as much as anybody else watching it would. Doug, on learning sadly that he was not included in the passport plan, rushes off to make his own arrangements. I'm guessing at least this and the Andy-murder plot will be the things that Owen Meany themselves into the finale cliffhanger and getting Nancy off whatever hook she's on. And speaking of, what's Nancy doing?
Well, tracking this Ellis Tate who approached her in the graveyard, since Schiff remembers Ellis Tate being a chubby happy girl and not Chuck Klosterman at all. Over at the library, she's attacked by the wonderful, perfect, sorely missed genius Stephnie Weir, and confirms Schiff's story. Arranging that coffee date, Nancy manages to sneak into his motel room and find all his sneaky spy stuff, including the dossiers and whatnot on their whole family, going back to the tunnel (possibly as far back as Peter?).
This Vaughn Coleman, is he FBI? Working for Esteban? Part of the video camera thing? None of the above: He's a writer for the San Diego County Tribune, as Nancy finds out when she has to mace him halfway through sneaking his sneaky stuff, doing a story on Nancy's whole weird life. Which Nancy's all too willing to describe, if he'll help her get out of the country for good.
Want more? The full recap starts right below!Nancy's conversation with Hooman Jaka, the ladykiller bartender guy, starts off in a pretty bad place: Apparently tomorrow night, her delivery, will also be "Wax On Wax Off" night, in which quote "ladies who show me the bald stuff get in free." First of all, "ladies" who show strangers their "stuff" are not ladies. Second of all: Gross in every way. That makes me want to put on a skeleton costume and sweep the leg of the universe.
Of course Nancy asks about the guys and their bald stuff, which he calls "just sick" but actually outside of porn, where it's utilitarian, in real life I think it's a brilliant strategy, not just because of forced-perspective reasons like the Hobbits but mostly because it makes it look vulnerable, like a baby bird, and you want to make it feel better. Like in that Kate Bush song where she finds the scared baby fox. (Not that Kate Bush would be welcome, at least not on WOWO night.)
But there's a sort of feminist twist to this encounter and this season that seems pretty half-baked, as per with this show, that comes around in a sec. So but still, I'm not qualified to talk about waxing because I don't understand it. Like, I think Precious's mom is about the worst thing in the world because when she's not talking about how obesity is this moral victory, she's parading around her unshaven legs like they are also a moral victory. I don't care about lady-legs one way or the other, but I do hate grandstanding.
And I remember that I complained about Precious's Mom in like, the larger sense, how everything about her is horrible because that's her choice, and this girl I know was like, "You'd prefer she had hairless legs like a tween?" And what I think was going on there was base-level Jezebelism ("Calling that person fat is racist and that's homophobic!") where you just get to bitch, about anything, on the imaginary internet, to people who agree with you, and feel like a heroine? But I think also it was just getting legs and vaginas confused, and thinking the outrage would do double-duty.
But so now, implicated, I have to worry about shaven vaginas and unshaven vaginas, when before I thought vaginas were pretty great, when I thought about them at all. Either way, if you're showing me your stuff -- whether it's your actual stuff or your historical stuff -- you are unwelcome at best, because it's unsavory. Shave them or don't, just don't make it my personal problem. And this show, sometimes it's like that too. But I think that the show makes a very valid point about the difference between sexism and misogyny that the internet maybe never understood in the first place, and has no real reason ever to do so, because self-serving stances are what the internet is about.
So Hooman is all over Nancy's other problem, which is getting passports, and he gets really excited because he thinks it's a drug thing, and he tells her to go to Morocco, and how he can get her his number and like this, and she's like, "No, this is not a movie. Just passports." He says he can help with that, but that she has to send a man and the man can tell this fellow that Jaka sent him. (Right away red flag, because though Hooman is loveable he is Sketch Supreme.)
But why send a man? Nancy pretends to be confused by this, that it's a sexist thing and that there is oppression, because she just recently learned about it. Literally, in her life, she just learned that men are not only people, but people who are out to get you. And it troubles her! So while it comes off pretty racist that she's asking one Muslim why another and by extension all Muslims hate women, it's also a valid question to ask one man about another, and by extension all, men. And he answers for both, and when he does he tells the whole of all creation, and she will know it. This is the way it begins:
"You guys scare the shit out of us."
And while I don't think this is what the show was originally about I think it's been about that for a very long time, and for a very good reason, which is that it is totally true. Everybody comes from the same place, and without it nobody would exist, so every social rule between men and women ever created is about protecting it, regulating it, possessing it, preserving its power while taking away its power. The word taboo doesn't mean something bad, it means something so powerful and divine that it's terrifying.
Men spend their whole lives, societies, wars, cultures fleeing from the fact that it always wins, and will always win, because without it we're toast. As long as men have establishing power over the narrative where it's there for them, to buy and sell and fuck, to insult and to degrade and to take pictures, they don't have to think about the fact that it owns them. Completely.
From The Faerie Queene to Sharon Stone to Angelina Jolie, there's the story of the female vampire who steals the soul of the man's true beloved. Or the men go into the house and they don't come out. It's all about men because they don't understand stories that aren't about men, and men pay the money for the stories. But outside that general cultural narrative -- which will always exist, endlessly recreating itself -- there's the shadow economy we talk about, where select women who see the system for what it is are able to go outside that shitty mechanism and work it like a videogame.
Normally this is where I bring up gay men as the other radical element that ruins that economy -- who, like hot chicks, are forced into silence and infantilism in order to survive -- but of course this show doesn't have any of those. What it does have is a femme fatale with mysterious supernatural powers and darkness like a black hole, who after six seasons is only now revealing her basic mundane details to us. Who is getting shaded in, after all that time, and thereby losing her power. In a way that's fundamental to any hero cycle, which is what this actually is, but looks so different and meets such different requirements that it often seems to have no plot at all.
Because she is a widow, wearing widow's weeds even today, she couldn't be a succubus and she never plays that archetype. But she plays vampire, and siren, every single time. And there aren't many narratives smart enough to tell that story from her point of view, because there aren't many narratives that women have enough industrial currency to tell. Which makes this show itself part of the shadow economy, a nonstandard narrative passing itself off as a dark comedy rather than the supernatural biography of a vampire. The lady in black who moves in the shadows behind the scenes of every part of the male narrative like Forrest Gump, pushing buttons and holding onto it as hard she can so she doesn't fall off into the outer darkness. The second she lost her man, Nancy lost her place in the system. Everything else is survival.
And so as a man, or a person upholding the straight narrative which is all of us, you have your orders of severity: Sexism is living in the Matrix and thinking it's real and anybody who says different is a problem. Feminism is living in the Matrix and realizing it. Bad feminism means assuming the whole thing is evil just because you've recently learned about it, but don't have perspective on the difference between descriptive and prescriptive or between sexism -- which is about ignorance -- and misogyny, which is about malice. And misogyny is fighting for the lie regardless. Hooman is sexist, the Popsicle Patty situation in a second is misogynist. (PS: "Matrix." Not unintentional, there or here.)
My gays deal with the same lexical confusion: Fearing homosexuals is unfortunate but understandable, like any other kind of ignorance, but hating homosexuals is called "homophobia," because we don't have a separate word for it. I don't see this getting cleared up any time soon, because we like things oversimplified and we all love to be outraged, but that's the difference. One c
an be educated, the other one can't: It already knows the truth, but has sided with evil.
Funny Mike rides up to Lars's house on his stolen scooter and they chat about this and that, I guess the fat girlfriend broke up with him, so Silas finagles his way in there helping him move out. They sit down for a beer. "When I was 19, I was in a Whitesnake cover band," Lars says. "You could've gone camping in my hair." I like how Lars is just like this nice, Dearborn loser. Exactly the kind of guy you can see in her trail of dead. If he were super awesome this story would feel one way, and if he were a jerk it would go the other way, but instead it's in the middle. Just this douchey, nice guy.
He'd make a good dad for a person, if that were a thing you could choose. But not a good boyfriend or husband, unless you like them dumb and sweet and malleable, which just means you deserve nothing at all. This is so Nancy: Doesn't like 'em malleable, but the ones that get in under her radar -- bad but not evil -- and she mauls them too. Not because it's their nature but because of hers. Totally get that impulse, right? You want a man you can respect, but not one you have to respect. Somebody that will spank you but won't punch you.
Lars talks about the pussy in his bitchin' Camaro, and Silas makes a sort of slanty fun of him, sounding him for depths that don't exist, but the more he judges Lars the more he comes to like him: This is the simple man he was born to be. The simple man he thought Judah was. Maybe he was. Silas asks, casually, where Lars went to high school. East Dearborn, he says: "Take a Liking to a Viking!" Silas sidles up to it without looking and screws his courage to the sticking place and pretends to be surprised: "Really? My mom went there!" Nancy Price? Lars can't believe it, tosses out a STFU, and admits he used to ("f...") "date" Nancy Price once. "You don't look anything like her!" Lars says. "Here's hoping," Silas thinks.
Schiff calls Silas Midas and Shane he calls Swan, and he wants to get bunkbeds for them and he wants them not to fight about the top bunk and he wants to put in a new wall for more privacy and he wants this and that. Shane's like, "We are not going to be here for long. You are the beachhead, consider yourself established." Schiff doesn't hear. He's been ignoring teenagers for a long time now. "And you're right! You're only gonna be here a little while longer, and then it's just gonna be me and your mom!"
Just entirely making up male narratives, from whole cloth, with no input from anybody. Deaf to it. It's what child molesters do; it's what men do. Schiff's been living here with Nancy, alone, for thirty years. Why should three kids, her life partner, and retarded Doug factor into that dream, now that it's coming true?
Nancy sends Swan out to empty the car, and Schiff starts in on her about his renovation plans. While she was prone to go along with Esteban's plans, because she loved him, she knows now that it's too dangerous to even begin to dream like that. Not that she would, but he doesn't know that. The smile on her face is twenty years old. Schiff wants to put his massage table to the bed, so he can be with her and tend his sciatica at the same time. She tells him not to go to all that trouble and he tells her their troubles are behind them; for him it's true, and all that matters is what Schiff says.
Nancy asks about Ellis Tate, the crumbum from the cemetery, and he takes a minute before he remembers. Nancy's glad, because that means his cover story was real: "Yeah, nebbishy white guy? Glasses." No, Ellis Tate was a fat girl, very good at Geometry and very good at Lunch. Before Nancy can process this or think about her step in the Tate issue, Andy comes out wowing about another of Schiff's Skymall purchases, the showerhead that turns the water colors. "It's like I'm shrooming! The only thing that would have made it better is a large-breasted fairy in there with me."
While Doug plays with a "purifying wand" in a glass of water -- "I'm so over Brita" -- Nancy rolls her eyes, because honestly Doug puts worse things in his body daily than particulates, waits for Schiff to go away (he doesn't get it) and sends Andy to see the guy about the passports, and explains about the "no-lady zone." There are so many people in the room who aren't in on their whole two-person Team Botwin action; Schiff and Doug just stand around awkwardly and eventually disappear, because they don't understand chemistry, which is why they are both lost.
Doug asks what picture they'll use for his passport, and there's an awkward thing where I think instead of telling him to fuck off because he has no place in any of this, they decide that it's too awkward and decide to include him. Doug runs off -- back to Agrestic, as it turns out -- to grab his from home. Sad. Sadder, if I didn't hate Doug so much. Andy makes the inevitable "Loved him in Star Wars" crack about Hooman Jaka, and they break.
Nancy heads to the Viking library for some amazing interactions and to see if she can connect Ellis Tate to Klosterman. The librarian lady goes, "If you're looking for Bob Seger, those ones were vandalized years ago." Nancy politely corrects her -- "Bob is an ... acquired taste, I was looking for '84 to '87, actually?" -- and the librarian leaves with a hilarious, "Nobody good in those years!" Behind Nancy is standing one of my favorite people in the world, Stephnie Weir, looking all crazy like she does and feeling all kinds of historical trauma and reminding Nancy of who she is and was.
"Viking Pride, right right. You told Maureen Byrne I was a prude. In the locker room after gym, you said if I ever let a... A dick inside me it would turn into a popsicle. Then everyone started calling me Popsicle Patty." I don't actually remember much of 1984-1987 inclusive, and I've never really been a teenage girl, but I guess I can accept that "frigid" was a dangerous mean thing to imply, and maybe still is. I've always found it weird as a put-down, whether in the '50s or now. I mean, it's not possible that the world is so incredibly shitty that both having sex and not having sex are equal insults, because then what the fuck are you supposed to do?
Lady problems, they are a mess. It's more interesting that Nancy chose to express her power in such a nasty way: In this brick dance universe sex isn't bad, there are no sluts or whores (unless you sleep with Zack Morris), but not having sex? Well, that's unforgivable. Or maybe she was just calling her ugly in a very subtle way. I really have no idea. It seems like a cliché, like something that might have once happened that could be the basis for a joke in this scene at the library, but for all I know you could actually ruin a woman's life by calling her a "prude" in the girl's gym. If so, I have to give the girls of 1984-87 inclusive a lot more credit.
Nancy's like, "I do not recollect this instance, but that sounds pretty mean, so sorry?" Unfortunately, Popsicle Patty took it to heart, fucked fourteen guys junior year, got thrown out of the house and never went to college, and now she works at the high school, another corpse in the trail of dead: "I have had herpes for 27 years! But I am no prude!"
Nancy dives the fuck into her yearbooks, now that Phyllis has returned, and tries to be gracious about it considering this woman totally just attacked her out of nowhere, but Patty's not exactly out of bounds to whisper bitch! as she's walking away. And the day they took pictures, Ellis Tate wasn't available. She calls him for a date, flirty and cute, and wonders what she's gonna do about this one. If you asked her right now who Popsicle Patty was I have the funny feeling she wouldn't know who you were talking about.
Daoud Mahmud is the name of the passport guy, who intimidates Andy in just about every way he can from the moment he enters his office. When Andy brings up "passports," complete with airquotes, the dude has a whole conversation with imaginary finger-bunnies about how probably Andy is a cop. It's kind of scary. Andy namedrops Hooman Jaka, having buried the lede, and Mahmud goes apeshit.
"That fucking piece-of-shit cocksucker, I spit on Hooman Jaka!" Andy backs off and agrees that we hate Jaka, but that they've done business together, which Mahmud turns around to mean that Andy is a "crook piece of shit" too and you can see Andy just give up entirely. He goes into a whole gentle puppies rampage about how he's just there for the sake of the children, etc. "Think of me and my family as farmers, seeking shade in a summer drought, with a plague of locusts eating our fields." Then, farmer talk.
Andy finally seals the deal with his "very cute baby" who is in "grave danger." But it's not the gift of gab -- Nancy's bad luck with male authority has been infecting Andy a lot this season, no? -- that gets Mahmud: "I sense your desperation." Andy ducks his head, beautifully and sweetly, with a near-silent thank you; it might be the best part of the episode. He gets an address and bounces like the secret of Gummiberry Juice. (Dude, that's totally what they should call the invented drink!)
Fuckin' Schiff is like decorating Stevie's room at this point -- "What about a baseball theme?" -- and before Shane can warn him, he swigs some Gummiberry Juice from the fridge. ("New York's hottest club is Pants! Nightlife superstar drag queen Amber Alert is back with a party that answers the question, 'Whence?' They've got everything: Teddybear spycams, tooth-necklace gods, and Richard Dreyfuss on hash-laced energy drinks.") I'm sure this bothers Shane for a good three seconds before he decides that the rest of the day is about to get awesome.
Schiff tells Shane to fill out the grocery list, and sadly is like, "Include some stuff for your mother, unless she's still trying to live on Doritos and Tab." Um, that sweet sweet kiss of a fourteen-year-old who just ate a bunch of Doritos. I hope this guy dies. Shane tells him to get over it and he's bouncing on this trampoline like it's sexy and he's all, "It'll take some time." Shane tries to explain, again and again, that they're leaving and not coming back, and then the Gummiberries hit and he starts bouncing all over the place, screaming. Literally, on a Skymall trampoline, and weeping. He stops being able to swallow and then his eyes start acting weird, and it peaks. It's like a command performance, if you find this stuff amusing.
Lars on dating Nancy Price: After high school it didn't fizzle, there were college break hookups. "Sometimes a faucet still drips after you turn it off." That's gross, but kind of sweet if you don't think about it too hard. Super accurate, either way. And it's true, you can't ever turn off the things that used to flood you. We're all the same ages we've ever been, and now Silas is learning that even in his boy narrative there are shadows and surprises: That the world was constructed around him, and now it's his duty to bring it down around himself. To know the world. This is the way it begins:
"I think I'm your son."
Silas stutters around it in circles, stops making sense altogether, winds slowly down, and finally Lars breathes and asks if he's talked to Nancypants yet. Of course not. "Mother of shit," is what he says, and yeah. Silas agrees. He apologizes and leaves, promising he doesn't want anything or anything, and thanks him for the beer, and leaves. It's pretty sad, either way, and they are both very good guys. Any other show, this would be the amazing point of the episode, but here it's just like this tiny real thing about men, sitting amongst all the crazy and the wreckage. Which is another way of saying Silas.
The address Mahmud gave Andy is his house. They sit upstairs and right away rule out American passports. "I could do Iceland, their economy has tanked and they're on fire." But he wants five grand and Andy only has three. Which pisses him off enough to say goodbye, because he's got to worry about the wedding of his daughter, who is running around screaming about her wedding. Fiancé? Hooman Jaka. Who is, among one presumes or at least hopes other things, Shi'a. "I am Jordanian Sunni, you think I would let my daughter marry a Shi'ite? To plant a tomato in a cornfield?"
Instead of getting the fuck on up out of this conversation, Andy expresses compassion for the racism, and Mahmud responds with a proposal: Kill Hooman Jaka. He can't just break them up, Mahmud already tried that with somebody hotter than Andy. (Andy also finds this difficult to envision, but thinks maybe it's about weird cultural norms rather than the nonsense concept of somebody hotter than himself.) And that's the deal. I mean, I know it would be hard for, say, me to get ahold of a fake passport, but I assumed that's because I have good taste in friends. The Botwins: That's not the case. So it's realistic that it's difficult, but surprising because this show is not realistic ever.
Nancy's staking out Fake Ellis's motel room when Andy calls her, and this is the amazing conversation: "Do we need more money?" she asks, and Andy responds, "No, we need Shane." I love that, so much. He explains about poor sweet Hooman, and Nancy thinks aloud, "Well, he is kind of a douche..." There's almost panic in Andy's voice this time, as he explains that he can't kill anybody, like she's going to ask him and he is going to have to say no, and finally she sighs and agrees that they can't kill anybody. She tells him to get creative and he whines that he's always creative and she's always something -- "fucked by Zack Morris" probably is what he was going to say -- but she has to hang up because Fake Ellis just left his Gen X nest.
"You hos are always leaving stuff behind! Now find your bag of dildos and make sure you lock the door on the way out!" I just wanted to reproduce that sentence. Important thing is, the cleaning lady just let Nancy into Ellis's room. (Passports, those take five episodes. Getting into a motel room: Disturbingly easy.) First the DVDs of every interview, labeled with ex-friends and ex-family; then clippings going back past the tunnel, then a beautiful 8x10 of Silas and one of Andy, and then she just starts putting everything in a pile on the floor, wigging out.
When Klosterman comes back a second later, apologizing for his poor undercover skills, Nancy maces him immediately. Turns out he's a journalist with the San Diego County Tribune. Name of Vaughn Coleman -- "People always assume I'm black" -- and finally explains what he's been up to. "I'm writing your story," he says. It's the only thing that saves him.
Andy rolls up on Silas, still shell-shocked, riding back to Schiff's on his scooter, and woggles at him. "Hey little boy, want some candy?" Minutes later they're sitting on the curb, Silas nearly in tears, and Andy freaking out about this latest thing. Silas adds up all the evidence and Andy knocks it down again -- "Plenty of Nordic in our family, you never heard of Great Uncle Hans? Crazy Finn" -- and then points out the actual, glaring truth: That Silas is Judah's son either way. More than he was ever Nancy's.
But Silas thinks, maybe Judah stared at him in the hospital for hours because he was looking for a resemblance, and that even if Lars isn't that cool at least he's "easy," that's the word he uses, "easy," and that's the most damning part of all. She ran away with Stevie because Esteban wasn't easy in the right way, but if he had been she'd have left a lot sooner. "So you met an easy guy, who looks like you, that your mom used to date." Andy is grossed out, of course, because he's weirded out by anybody dating Nancypants.
"Judah's your dad. But you're looking for something, I get that." Silas swears he's not "looking" for anything, just trying to find one hard fact in
the whole world that he can hold onto, because his mother's narrative is falling apart in the face of all these facts. "Truth is, you're a Botwin. Admittedly that can be difficult, we're a brood of tortured souls, but that's the beauty of a tribe, we can kvetch." Once again the idea of asking Nancy about it comes up, and this time you can see them both swallow the futility of Nancy ever telling anybody the truth, about anything. They want facts and narratives that make sense; they're men.
Doug doesn't like Schiff's jumpy moshing trip -- "He's not doing it right, you gotta embrace the light and dark equally" -- but they like even less his schmoopy whining insanity. He's like more horribly romantic than Andy ever was: "She's my true north! And if she leaves me, I'm nothing. So if she leaves me, I'm going to kill myself!" Do it. Shane and Doug don't care, I vote yes, Nancy was probably going to smother you for your house anyway. Doug finally leaves for Agrestic -- Shane's back to babysitting once again -- and I hope he comes back really motherfucking soon.
Nancy makes fun of Coleman's bald spot and demands he tell her everything he knows so far. Seems it started with a story on Esteban's connection to Pilar, but when she died, it was weird that Nancy -- "the American wife of a Mexican politician/gangster" -- suddenly vanished. She tells him to fuck off back to San Diego, "write about Comic-Con and Captain Magnetard or whatever," and he yells at her for thinking he's some sort of jerk-off basement blogger, despite his obsessive dressing the part. "I've won awards!" he screams, which is how she knows she has him. Boy narrative.
She tells him she'll just deny everything to the fact-checker, which he points out is not a real thing and in fact a thing from Almost Famous, and that he'd make up details if she doesn't help, although he'd be sad: "But hey, James Frey still has a book deal, and I want mine." And if there isn't anything to tell? "Drugs? Tunnels? Murder?" Good point: "I know my fucking story," she hisses, and that's exactly what she means. She thinks for a second and asks who knows they're in Michigan.
"My editor knows I found you, but I didn't tell him where. But if I was able to find you, how long before the bad guys find you? And I don't mean the FBI." Esteban is going to find her, and soon: But they can expose the whole thing first, if she plays along. She snorts, at the very idea: "Clark Kent to my rescue!" But then it happens: He finds the right words at the right time to undo her spectacularly. The bathtub was surrounded by candles on the night she told the truth. "Are you telling me after all's said and done you don't want your story on the record?"
That's all she's ever wanted; it's the only thing she'll never get to have. Her only power lies in having no power and her only story lies in having no story, and still the fuckers find a way to use it against her. But it's true for women, too: That's the only thing Oprah's selling, for example: Permission to have a story and to tell that story. She just thought it was a strength, until the stories finally caught up to her and she realized she wasn't invisible at all. That all her stories were one story, assembling it from the pieces of the stories that matter; that rebelling against the boy narrative means failure within that narrative, no matter how Daredevil it feels at the time. He's offering her a chance to tell her story to the world, a place for it hacked from dry stone soil, and by claiming it rejoin it. To be justified in the eyes of the world, which means other people, which means men. To be legitimized. Silas said he wasn't looking for anything but he was looking for that.
Andy goes to Hooman with one of those stories: He's Nathalie's guy, the Gummiberry gourmand, capable of being a boy like Hooman for a few moments at a time. Sitrep: "Dudes are like what? and girls, three chicks just did a dirty carpool right in the middle of the dancefloor." They're calling it the Legspreader, which is just stupid and gross but not as stupid and gross as Andy's racist suggestions; there's a lot of confusion now in the conversation, between Andy trying to admit that he's got to kill Hooman and Hooman turning everything into more coded bro talk. Hooman swears he's not a bad guy -- "You see me dipping it in the candy here? No! No, it's because I'm Shi'a, fucking racist Jordanian piece of shit" -- and Andy tries to get him onboard with some bizarre plan for week, with a little Jewish paranoia, considering where he is, tossed in for good luck.
Nancy threatens Coleman elliptically -- "you know my history" -- and he's recovered enough for a fantastic comeback: "You'll marry me?" She's not impressed. He apologizes and they start again. She can't help but smile, to herself and others. Gratitude.
She will sort through all the lies, the stories, the Nancies and the Laceys and the Nathalies, all the people she left behind. She'll tell him about her shame, that night in the bathtub when she came clean, and she'll tell him what came out of the tunnel. The way it finally felt to tell the truth to a man she trusted. She'll tell him about U-Turn and Marvin, about Celia and Dean, about muffins and edibles and a thousand fires set in her name. About Guillermo, Cesar, Pilar and Esteban. About Conrad and Heylia, and the day her husband died. She'll tell him everything, every word of it true, and her heart will leap like a dove in her chest as the sun is coming up, and this is the way it begins:
"My name is Nancy Botwin."
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