"Hey Nance, don't worry; nothing'll happen in this scene other than my seeing your boobs."
Well, kids, expectations for the Weeds Season Four finale were so low that it was kind of being panned before it was ever even aired. And? It was indeed a frustrating, uneven ending to a frustrating, uneven season, with plot twists and red herrings popping up where they weren't needed. Heck, they couldn't even get the Mary-Louise Parker bathtub scene right!
Things got off to a strange start, with Esteban debating with his bodyguard whether Nancy was indeed the source. Despite sanding a guy's face off to get the her name, the bodyguard was unable to convince Esteban, who's clearly thinking with his dick and who's clearly torn since there were all these portentously cropped shots of his and the bodyguard's faces. That means tension! Later on, though, the bodyguard produces pictures of Nancy with Agent Till, and Esteban is forced to ask Nancy to come meet him.
While Esteban was needing convincing, however, Nancy's spent a while getting "grilled" by Till, who's going thorugh the motions of "questioning" Nance before letting her go. (We know this is all a put-on, because Dean is acting as Nancy's counsel.) This was going somewhat boringly until Till learns of his partner's gruesome face, and he demands to know who the owner of the tunnel is. Nancy keeps her mouth shut, but at a price; Till pledges to kill anyone connected with the real owner, including Nancy, to get his revenge.
On the northern side of the border, we find ourselves in bed with Silas and Lisa, which ain't so bad a place to be, except that they get caught by both Lisa's kid and her ex, causing Silas to blow the joint without giving any of it a second thought, including Lisa's kid. A Botwin that doesn't know when to nurture? Get out of here! No really, go as fast as you can, Silas. And Happy 18th Birthday! Also, goodbye Julie Bowen, we'll always have those skin care commercials you do.
Meanwhile, Doug has wrapped up the entire Maria plotline by calling INS on her and getting her deported. Not even a line for the poor girl, Jenji Kohan? Really? OK. Instead, we get Doug and Andy girlfighting over their women -- Andy says Doug's still in love with his wife, and Doug says Andy's in love with Nancy -- and yeah, we were all like "Whaaaaaaa?" Sure it makes sense, in a way -- Andy's in love with life with life with Nancy, focusing that feeling onto her is a natural step. But there was so little context for Doug saying it -- what the fuck does he know? -- that only Justin Kirk's endless reserves of talent and charm in depicting the confusion that this accusation creates make this thread work. At one point late in the show, Shane asks him and Silas if anyone would like a popsicle, and Kirk unrolls his response -- "Yes, I would like a popsicle." -- with such adolescent, lovesick mopeyness that we just want to pick his skinny frame up and give him a hug.
Which brings us to that bathtub scene. Andy wants to know why Nancy's not in jail; Nancy wants to clean up after getting out of the pen. So Andy sits with her, makes a couple funny comments about Nancy's boobs, and comes over to run the water and listen to her as she gets stuff off her chest. OK, that's all great. That's a classic TV setup for a kiss, for an awkward but pithy moment, for tension defusing physical comedy, for Nancy to notice Andy's got a boner and say "What the hell." These are all things that might have happened. But what did happen? A trippy, nearly looping, no dialogue reverie -- apparently by Andy -- while Nancy spills her guts. Really? What the hell, indeed. Are we back on the ayahuasca? No, we're just trapped in a kinda forced plot complication that Kohan, the show's creator and author of this episode, can't fully commit to. Great, just what this show needed; more fear of commitment.
Oh, and while we're on ridiculous developments: Celia goes to see her daughter in Oaxaca and gets kidnapped by her for $200,000, and Doug acts like he's gonna kill himself but he's just auto-erotically asphixiating. Yawn, guys; yaw-awn.
So, Nancy goes off to see Esteban, suspecting that she might lose her life, and dictating a touching, overdue suicide note of sorts as part of the ridiculous birthday gift basket she's ordering for her eldest; and after she goes, Shane, Silas, and Andy all contemplate how to get along without her, another long-overdue conversation that ends even more poorly: with Shane finding the stash Silas had to yank from Lisa's cheese shop and working a corner, Wire-style, with them two chicks from the threeway.
And then when Nancy goes to see Esteban, he tells her he knows that she's the snitch and she tells him that she's pregnant. Yeaaaahhhh... Um, wow, Jenji Kohan, really? No comeuppance? No escape on a boat? No bloody shootout? No "Little Boxes"? Nothing we really needed at all, just a bunch on unanswered questions, a "see you soon" blackout, and the theme to Jordan, Jesse GO! You know, we used to think that we hated Nancy a little, and that our desire to see Nancy suffer a little was part of some distressing subtext that we were forcing into the show, but we've come up with another possibility: that it's Kohan and the writers that hate Nancy because they can't in good faith rehabilitate her inability to be a decent mom, and they can't commit fully to her self-destructive streak. Thus we end where we began just a few months ago: with no Agrestic to battle, Nancy's waging a war of attrition on herself, and by proxy her family. And as with most wars of attrition, there's no victory; just a tally of who's left standing when the dust -- which only now, at the end of the season, seems to be getting kicked up -- clears.
See ya in 2009.
PREVIOUSLY:
Our Weeds Archive