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Wow. I wish this episode had a safeword. You know, you don't usually come to Weeds looking for a good cry. It happens -- the sex tape, the punishment light, the butter cookies -- but never like you think it will, and never for the right reasons.
Doug heads back to Agrestic/now Regrestic for his passport, but once he gets a load of ex-wife Dana's new husband (think To Sir, With Love), he decides he doesn't even want to go to Copenhagen, he just wants to sit in the treehouse and be in love with her and, you know, suck the same way Doug always sucks.
Back in Dearborn, meanwhile, Schiff has robbed the post office to pay for Copenhagen tickets, and is now on the run not just for Nancy's sake but also his own. And Andy has engineered a genius callback to Shane's first-season weirdness, videotaping Hooman's fake murder complete with bag-over-head, but then Daud requests Hooman's penis, which sends the boys to hottie coroner Ike Barinholtz to get a fake penis, which does not convince Daud, but then Daud's wife sells him the passports anyway, because since when does an Andy plot need a point.
For cash, Nancy spins out a whole yarn for Klosterman all about how she and Judah were kinky swingers (safeword: "Fran Tarkenton"), but eventually he baits her into a massive fight that is both a pretty nasty Gen X/viewer revenge on Nancy Botwin scenario, and a pretty massive breakthrough for Nancy herself. After he backs her into enough corners and confronts her with enough of her contradictions, she throws a tantrum that is so in character it's out of character, and eventually comes back contrite.
While the boys are going through Schiff's secret room of mail he's stolen over the years for passport money, Silas finally gets his paternity results. And, shockingly, Lars is the father after all. Silas climbs in bed with Nancy, kisses her goodbye, and disappears. It is absolutely the saddest scene I can think of that involves anything other than Nancy driving and crying, which is usually how they get you.
Klosterman's figured out Shane killed Pilar, and knows the other people on the Botwins' tail won't be long figuring it out either. Fast forward to the morning, where of course Klosterman's room's been tossed and he's presumably dead and Nancy's finally caught by Esteban. Guillermo's there too! And that's the score as we head into the finale: Nancy's finally completely exposed, Andy is sad for some reason, Shane is weird, Silas is gone, Schiff is crazy, and Doug is as far away as possible. Not so wonderful, this wonderful.
Want more? The full recap starts right below!A: "Judah used to like to dress me up. Loan me out. We would lock eyes while I was being used by... Whoever. His best friend, my son's third grade teacher, the manager at Panda Express... I've never told anyone that we swung. Swang? That we were swingers. You know what, our safeword was Fran Tarkenton."
Vaughn the Reporter gets pissed about these obvious lies and shuts down the recorder. Came to it, she couldn't do it. But she's got plenty of secrets we haven't heard yet.
Q: Why would you not want to know?
Nancy admits to burning her house down, which actually does surprise him. She can't hide the Lacey smile when she says it. It was the first time she was happy since he died. Those little boxes. At first Vaughn thinks she means she burnt Agrestic down, but no: Just the scene of the crimes. Her house, her crimes. Nancy looks away and stands up to take her jacket off, and tells him to start over. Maybe they can be more honest when he asks questions. But the question, she'll never answer.
Q: "Who killed Pilar Zuazo?"
A: That's a tunnel he's not allowed to enter. She smiles and closes that door. She's always hated the sun.
Doug lets himself into his old house, his little box, and the only thing that's changed is apparently the giant black man that lives there now, and tackles him to the ground. Like Doug's not gonna go racist in six seconds. Dana finds the men tussling on the floor -- she looks like you always thought she would -- and her new husband goes to make coffee.
Doug assumes the husband is the butler, of course, despite his dad sweater, and asks after the kids. Jessie's in bed, the girls are at camp, and Josh lives in Chicago now. Always did like that kid. I sincerely wish him all good things. Doug won't tell Dana why he's really there, so he says he wants to make amends -- "God touched me spiritually, not..." -- Jessie runs in yelling for her daddy, straight past Doug and into the butler's arms. Her new husband's name is Wilfred and he looks about fifty. They seem happy. He seems very nice.
Andy puts a bag over Hooman's head and fires a gun into it, just like back in the day when Strange Botwin used to play Mock Hostages. It's a convincing illusion -- at least Daoud is impressed -- and Andy promises they buried him somewhere spooky and shallow. Daoud says that sex and death are the two motivating forces of men's lives, as well as racism, which is all very deep and annoying. Andy asks for their passports and he is told instead to bring him Hooman's dick. So this'll be a Stee epis...
A: Yep, there it is! Stephen Falk. I'm getting good at this game.
Andy and Hooman -- wearing Ed Hardy and one star-bright shining earring -- head over to Ike Barinholtz's funeral parlor for the organ. He points them over to the John Does and goes back to his noodles.
Vaughn's curious about Cesar's getting shot with a crossbow, and Nancy's fake confused ten-yard stare is even more impressive than when Cesar almost got that quarter in the Skeeball machine to bean her with. That was like the most awesome thing that's ever happened on this show that didn't arise from Nancy going purposefully nuts. She won't tell him why the cartel's after her, either, and then she gets a text. Smiling, lying, she says it's from her son: He's found a girl, because he always finds a girl.
Q: "Shane?"
A funny place to go with the options, and she tells him to take Shane's name out his mouth.
Q: Why did she leave Esteban?
A: "He was gay! He took a gay lover named Arrrrmando."
Nancy seems less convinced by herself than ever.
Q: Why did she leave Esteban?
A: She didn't.
Q: Why is she running?
A:
Questions aren't going to work.
Q: How about Vaughn tells Nancy the story and she can fill in whatever blanks she feels like filling in? A valid third strategy.
A: Vaughn's take is that Nancy married a player in the biggest drug cartel in Mexico, and his boss hated her, and she died, and Nancy ran.
Q: Anything else in this theory of Vaughn's?
A: "Shane killed Pilar Zuazo."
Nancy's fake smile drips down her face like a Dali timepiece and she stares, stares, until finally Vaughn tells her to blink once if he's right. She stares at him like a Halloween mask, like a taxidermied pet, like a Clockwork Orange, like God loved Jacob. Things start to be weirder.
Hooman, and thank God he didn't have to die, picks the largest brownest penis he can find and Ike tells them the poor fella fell of a roof trying to rob a liquor store. That is so embarrassing! You're already doing something tacky and then on top of it, you die falling off a roof. Andy thinks about sex and death but mostly death and gives a wonderful speech about the life of struggle and the sadness of alcoholism. Right before Andy starts praying, Ike Barinholtz cuts off the penis and puts it in a jar. He's certainly been more crushworthy in his life but you know what, I can't stand the smell of formaldehyde anyway.
Lars hands Funny Mike another beer and he gets out of the stupid car and bemoans the fact that Nancy's so hard to pin down about things.
A: Turns out Nancy was always like that. Well, except that one time Lars impregnated her.
Perhaps Lars will grow into fatherhood, like a seed to a mighty oak, and at that point he will stop talking about fucking a boy's mother in front of the boy. Or on this show, probably not. Silas admits they're leaving for Amsterdam "soon" and Lars asks if he's okay.
A:
That's all it takes for Silas to start crying, which is the price of being an honest person, and he wigs a little about how his whole childhood was a lie. Like everybody else. He tells Lars about the DNA test and Lars smiles and shrugs: "Then tomorrow I'll be a father! Or not."
Q: You walk down the tunnel and what's at the end, you figure it out when you get there but at least you'll know, right? But why would you not want to know?
A: Lars is easy.
Since they don't know, Schrödinger's Sperm: "Let's go do something fun." He hands Silas the keys to the car and they joke around and it's sweet. Lars is easy. Q and A are the same thing, when your parents aren't quite so hard to pin down.
Doug congratulates Wilfred on his cake and talks really loud and calls him old -- he's an architect -- and Wilfred offers him the guest bedroom so that he will go the fuck away. He gives a short speech about Kerouac and Wilfred laughs, because Wilfred knew Jack Kerouac from when he was a jazz pianist. Dana can barely keep herself from applauding the funny way life has gone, and Wilfred comforts Doug about being such a fucking loser.
A: "Everyone has their own life trajectory. Not too many years ago I was completely lost! Yes, adrift at sea, feeling like I was never going to reach land..."
Doug falls in love a little bit with Wilfred, impossibly cool and post-Doug, because that's how he feels too. The whole time we've known him. But of course, Wilfred is talking about his supercool reality where he and Sidney Poitier took a skiff out past the breakers or whatever. I never thought the Doug parts of an episode would be my favorite parts of an episode, but nothing trumps Doug getting shit on.
To prove he knows Nancy better than she thinks, Vaughn describes the word clouds that arose when he combined all his transcriptions: Nancy's adjectives are MANIPULATIVE, SEXY, TOUGH, RECKLESS and BITCH. Well. "Bitch is a noun," Nancy says defensively, but I wouldn't really want to hear the one down anyway. Shane: CREEPY, WEIRD, SCARY, GLOOMY, and VIOLENT. It's the worst possible indictment; she refuses to stick around for Silas's word cloud -- even though it would probably cheer her up at this point -- because the words don't lie and that's ten things that are her own damn fault. Choking back angry tears, she heads for the door for probably the fifth time in this episode alone.
Q: "Fill in the blanks, or I'm going to do it myself."
All those promises about her story, all the possibility of redress and truth and reconciliation, vanished the second she actually had to think. Because her story isn't vindication: The details don't prop up or mend anything. They just make it impossible to run, which makes them unacceptable. Confession was a nice dream, but absolution is an impossibility. She locks herself in the bathroom this time.
A: "Here's your story: Things happened to her, she dealt with them."
Vaughn points out how often she speaks, thinks, lives in the passive voice: Things happened to her, around her, but never inside her: She was not the author of the narrative, just its editor. Judah happened to her. She dealt with it. She's dealing with it now. It happens. It continues to happen.
"You walked down the tunnel: You. With your legs."
Q: What else would you do? Why wouldn't you want to know?
A: A normal woman, he explains, would have pretended to see nothing. This is the story she wanted to tell to begin with, but he caged her in with the truth.
Q: "Why did you run?"
When she tells him it's complicated he says that's not a story. For her, that's the story: Things happened. It was complicated. He doesn't accept that story.
Q: "What did you write on your divorce papers?"
It's another way of answering his question that he can't see yet because she's put him on the defensive: Manipulative. Tough. She knows he's divorced because she went through his wallet: Kid picture, no wife picture. Either he's divorced or she's ugly, Nancy opines, and his face gets sad.
A: "We grew apart."
Exactly. Complicated.
A: No. Simple. Vaughn simplifies, because the truth is less complicated but infinitely more shameful, which again is the answer he's looking for but he can't see it. Sexy. Bitch. The wife slept around on him. He went looking for another vampire, to see just how she did it. How she complicated his story. To untangle it from sex and death, he went looking to see how a braver and infinitely worse woman escaped, and why. Why she ran.
A: Nancy brings up Guillermo and he thinks he gets it -- thinks her story and his story intersect, somehow -- but she's not saying she slept with him, she's going back to the story from two seasons ago. That Guillermo killed Pilar, not anybody else. Like he was supposed to do, with her eggs in his head. Before he betrayed her to another manipulative, sexy, tough and reckless bitch. Before he went to jail, and burnt off any power she'd ever had over him with the strength of his hate.
A: Vaughn produces a picture of a party in Mexicali the night of the murder: Guillermo wasn't anywhere near Pilar the night she died.
He breaks her stories like cobwebs and throws old betrayals in her face, so she shoves more things off his desk, baring her teeth. Cops and rehab are the same thing; for Nancy a journalist is also the same thing because all he wants is the truth, and when she thinks about the truth it falls apart into stories again. It was complicated. Things happened, and were dealt with. Anything else pulls her out of the story altogether. Shines a light too bright down the tunnel, the length of the tunnel, and she's always hated the sun.
"Deal's off," she screams, throwing his camera against the wall and shattering it, stomping like a toddler.
Q: "Who does this?"
He shrieks now, mystified and angry, voice higher than hers. She's winning and he doesn't even see it: "I'm glad I didn't go to high school with you!"
A: "Spoiled cunt like you? Wouldn't even get a cup of coffee with me?"
Her breath goes out, whoosh, and she realizes it was the right play, but way too aggressive. She wanted him beaten, not angry. A slap, not a punch: Sexy, manipulative. Popsicle Patty could tell you the end of this story: You have to make them think you want them just enough that they want more. Once the C word comes into it, you've lost, because they can't even hear the song anymore.
A: They have to feel like men in order to have their masculinity threatened: Otherwise it's just the same old story. Girls that will never have you aren't really girls anymore. Just cunts.
Vaughn throws her shit out the door and tells her the deal's off, and she gets terrified. Her eyes get big and she reevaluates him for a sec before begging him to back things up. He shoves her, physically, out the door. He is disgusted. And why?
A: Because she broke his camera. Because she was playing chess and he was playing checkers and he didn't see she was going to give him what she wanted, in due time. That she needed it a certain way -- a slap, not a punch -- so that she wouldn't get scared in the telling. But she's too Sexy, too Tough, so the game fooled him into thinking the game was over.
Schiff's in a postal uniform when he shows Hooman and Shane the secret room full of stolen mail. They need money, because Hooman's in hiding while his dick makes the rounds and he can't sell anymore Gummiberry Juice right now. The hostage murder set is still up in the corner. Schiff bitches about his customers -- once he got poop for Christmas -- and turns on the lights. It's full of stuff, mostly Skymall; he admits he's not great at postal servicing.
Daoud knows on sight that the dick in the jar isn't Hooman's, which is much smaller. He knows this because he saw his erstwhile son-in-law naked at the baths once. "That rude asshole never even took off his bluetooth." Andy swears the dick is just plumping from edema, but Daoud apparently knows more about this than we do. Which is a hell of a lot more than we did a second ago.
Q: Remember a second ago? When we didn't know about that?
Q: "I ask you to kill one worthless idiot and you try to deceive me?"
Like Daoud's got a leg to kvetch on. Just as Andy's gesturing around with the "Jaka cock," Daoud's hot daughter and wife come in yelling in their nighties. They are totally horrified that he had her boyfriend murdered! Daughter pours the cock and cock water and noodles over her dad's head, and maybe some more stuff happened but I sure as fuck wasn't looking.
"Even the Jews think that man is cheap," says the mom once Daoud's chased the daughter into the house, and Andy laughs like that's a funny joke, and she offers the passports: Only $5K now, so she can get a Birkin.
Q: I guess that means they need $2K now in addition to the airfare and stuff. Nancy better come correct.
Hooman and Schiff and Shane are opening up every grandma-scrawled envelope, piling the cash in the middle of the room while discussing things like Indian casinos and the puppetric wonders of Jeff Dunham. When Silas arrives, Shane is awesome: "We're stealing Christmas card money from the past!"
Q: Oh, and he has the paternity results too.
A:
Q: Why would you not want to know?
Hooman opens a letter Schiff stole that was addressed to him. "I GOT INTO COLLEGE?" Schiff stares mutely; Hooman makes a hilarious mad face that goes on way too long.
Nancy's been reduced to standing outside Vaughn's motel window, knocking like a meek Catherine Earnshaw, and Vaughn paces around in his tweedy mess of an outfit, still hating Nancy and, synecdochically, women. The other side of her particular coin. She's never tried so hard to get into a trap before.
Eventually he lets her in, and time passes, and she tells him her story now that she trusts him, and as they're wrapping up she apologizes for the camera. "You wait to publish, and you don't say where we're going." He has no idea where they're going, and when she gives her alias -- Celia Hodes -- he giggles more honestly than he's done anything else.
A: He might not be under her spell but he was never under any illusions about her capabilities: The exact kind of man she actually deserves, of course, but she can't even see him. Confession is a rollercoaster too. He turns off the recorder.
Q/A: "They'll find you. Pilar doesn't just disappear and nobody has to answer, she's a legitimate businesswoman. Someone has to answer. It's an open murder investigation, and not just the cops: FBI. Them. And if I'm coming to that conclusion -- Shane -- then others will too."
It's an unvarnished truth, a set of them lined up like shot glasses, but for some reason it seems almost more of an admission on Vaughn's part: The respect, in his voice and in what he's saying. The way he doesn't treat her like a goddess or a bitch, just another human being. He doesn't hate her, he doesn't love her. He likes her okay. He got over it. She's not a cunt, not a vampire, not a monster, not a bitch, not even sexy: Just a woman. Just the thing she keeps saying she is. The only truth the fourth estate has is truth, and the second that gun's not pointed at her she can look at it for what it is. She knows he's not wrong.
Nancy's eyes get a little shiny but she doesn't cry. The last of Vaughn's advance goes into her hands and he asks her where she pulled Fran Tarkenton from. She laughs and looks away and to the right, memory: Tells him the first honest story, without meaning to.
A: "Judah loved him. He had his signed rookie card, between two pieces of glass. Said we were going to buy our retirement house in Hawaii with it. I check online not so long ago? It's worth like... Seven hundred dollars. Ridiculous. I mean, can you imagine? I hate the sun. Judah was... So..."
She swallows. It's the most she's ever said about him. She swallows and clears her throat and apologizes again for the camera: "That was mean," she says.
What she means is "Thank you." For being her friend, for a second. For forcing her out, and letting her back in. For that cup of coffee they almost never had, and the way she could just remember the bear, for a second, without it hurting.
"Guess your word cloud was right," she says as she's going. "Who does that?" he asked, and the answer was "bitches." If you're a girl, "mean" and "bitch" are synonyms, which is why women are never cross or unpleasant or disagreeable. Until they are. And then they're just cunts.
Q: "Why didn't I know Josh was gay? Even as a baby he looked gay. Gay baby!"
Doug's got every piece of paper and photograph out, in the living room. Dana goes right on back to bed, because that is some classic fuckin' Doug to be mainlining, at any hour. Doug begs her to hash it out a little bit, a little truth and reconciliation: "Don't keep it in, you're gonna give yourself butt cancer."
Dana swears she's not angry: In fact, she's happy. I believe it. If we can get our asses on that plane without Doug, fuck it, I'll marry Wilfred. I'd marry Schiff to make that dream come true. "You married Uncle Phil from The Fresh Prince Of Bel-Air, that's an obvious cry for help."
Q: Why is Doug really there, all the way back to the little boxes, which Google tells me is at least a day and a half both ways without stopping, which is a ridiculous amount of time to leave Nancy unattended and assume she'll be where you left her.
A: Doug is home for his passport and needs Dana's key for the safety deposit box. She grabs it from a side table and throws it at him so that he will get the fuck, but Doug has changed his mind: Seeing Dana and their daughter (whose name he gets wrong) has completely transformed his perception and now he realizes that Jesus saved him from Ignacio for exactly the reason of ruining her happy marriage, right here in Agrestic.
"It's called Regrestic now," Dana says, which is fucking awesome, and yet somehow Doug tops it: "Well that's retarded!" For some reason that exchange made me miss Isabelle.
Dana explains that he is not relevant to this family -- "just the idiot man-baby who walked out on us" -- and that he doesn't have permission to ruin her life again. He pulls the whole "Are you as turned on as I am right now?" and she punches him. For some reason that exchange made me miss Celia.
Andy comes home to yell at Hooman about his dick and then tells Hooman to run to the Mahmoods and try one more time so that he won't end up alone and dead like Andy is clearly going to. Hooman waves his college acceptance letter in the air and then skinny-jeans himself off into a great new Botwin-free existence. Andy is tripping out on the dead people, like Daoud said he would eventually, and points out that the money they've amassed is not enough for anything they need.
"Guess Copenhagen's off," Andy whines, just as Nancy's returning. She looks like she's been crying; it's because she's been crying. She hands Andy the huge Vaughn wad, for the passports, and then Schiff runs off on some pathetic errand or another, to get money for the tickets. Nancy drops face-down on the bed, exhausted, and soon enough her men appear, one by one, to express themselves.
Andy cries about death. Schiff crows about get
ting the air tickets; apparently he's going along and they'll be -- he explains like a kid on a band trip -- sitting together. Andy wigs about his "life plan" and where his dick will end up; he begins to plan his funeral: "Open bar. Big picture of me...." Schiff hints around for a handjob, I think. Andy's ashes will be split: Half set adrift on an ice floe in Glacier Bay and the other half blown into an old bully's face with the greeting, Anus Botwin says hi. He's a poet, he really is. Schiff hints around for a blowjob. Andy threatens to haunt her with murder hallucinations, flying babies, giant Hellmouth in her closet -- "yeah, real nightmare shit" -- if she doesn't follow his instructions to the letter.
Sex, death, sex, death. No sex talk from Andy, nothing but sex talk from Schiff who's practically dead. The cellos are going and it's all very hilarious and right when you think the gag is over, it's way worse than that. There are lies you can cover up so well, with so many lovely things, good things, sunlight, you could forget you ever told them. You can rub them out but they're never really gone. There's always a stain. Sometimes it takes just a hairbrush; sometimes maternity is harder to prove: A mother knows where her children are, at all times; when her son approaches the door she can feel him out there, almost like a smell. Like butter cookies. Silas comes in quietly.
Q: "Can I lie to you for a second?"
Silas smiles sadly, and wraps his arms around his mother. "I used to love sleeping between you and Dad. I felt so safe." She smiles to herself, wakes up against him. He's so big now. Against him it's like a furnace. Measured against her in this bed and every bed, until he was taller than she is.
"It doesn't really feel like anything now..."
His voice breaks and she turns her head, surprised. He talks and she listens and she can't really hear what he's saying until he's done saying it. Her crime, his confession. The question she never thought they'd ask; the reason she can't ever stop missing the bear.
Q: What's the worst thing you've ever done?
A: "At least I don't have to worry about dropping dead at forty from a bad ticker. Lars, he's in great shape."
He doesn't cry. He doesn't stop smiling. He doesn't stop loving her. She's not a vampire, not a monster, not a bitch. Not a mother anymore: Just a woman. Just the thing she keeps saying she is. He kisses her shoulder, and an arm, and before she sees him cry he says goodbye.
"I sincerely wish you all good things," he says, squeezing her hand. Pressing something into it: The truth. She reads it and she falls apart; she sobs under the comforter and falls asleep.
In the morning they're getting dressed and getting packed and she's still there, still in her jacket, tears dry on her cheeks. Vaughn texts: Nancy, Have info from FBI source. Stop by before you leave. URGENT. She calls for Andy and he finally appears; she sends him to the airport. He's excited, and a little scared, and then more scared.
Q: "Plan A, Plan B or Plan C?"
A: "I'll let you know."
Which is no answer at all. Her throat hurts; she's still sleepy. The price of honesty is a raw throat and sore abs, once you've cried yourself out. In the car she begs Silas to call, at least so she can say goodbye. She signs the text "Mom." Me, Mom.
A: Silas plays the guitar with Lars, missing the message. Doing something fun. Easy.
A: Doug sits in his treehouse, watching Dana in the morning.
A: Schiff packs quickly, desperately; the footage from his robbery last night already on the news.
A: Shane chats animatedly to the girls from the sex line commercial; to him, Andy's not paying attention. He can't even hear Shane.
Q: Plan A, Plan B, Plan C.
A: Daredevil Girl Survives Fall.
A: Things happened to her. She dealt with them.
Andy doesn't cry, he just feels empty. He doesn't want to know.
The room's been tossed; Vaughn's TV is playing the croquet murder again and again. She steps inside before thinking twice, worried about her friend. Guillermo's behind the door, he slams it when she's inside, when she's finally turned to run. It's the first time she's fought so hard to get into this trap. Esteban appears, playing her back.
A: "You know every time I'm walking down that tunnel, every time, and once I find out what's at the end, I'll figure out then. But at least I'll know. I'll know."
He is still beautiful. His face is sad. He's trying to solve a mystery. He rewinds and plays, rewinds and plays. Her story. Things happened.
A: "No, every time I'm walking down that tunnel, every time, and once I find out what's at the end, I'll figure out then but at least I'll know. I'll know."
Her t-shirt reads You Say You Want A Revolution. It's the same tunnel, every time. It's the same answer, to the same question, every time.
A: Why would you not want to know?
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