Weeds – Lady’s a Charm: A good day for Blanca is not such a good day for Celia
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- June
- 24
Yeah, I’m late. I promised my Weeds recap would go up last night, but I was too zonked to think, let alone type, coherently by 10:30 p.m.
OK, so anyway, the gigantic gap in my Weeds viewing may be affecting my judgment. I’m catching up thanks to NetFlix, but so far I’ve only seen Season One and the first half of Season Two.
Maybe that explains why I’m finding this incredibly dark turn so far this season so jarring. I like it, don’t get me wrong. I could watch Mary Louise Parker act, by turns, shifty, motherly, cavalier, driven and panicked all day long.
But cross-border drug trafficking? That’s a far cry from a widow who turns to small-scale pot dealing. There could have been a block of heroin under her hybrid’s manifold for all she knew, yet her biggest concern seemed to be finding a baño at the checkpoint and keeping the creepy-funny kid in the next car from peeking.
And when Guillermo chides her for losing his inhalers and explains the importance of a dry run to Tijuana and back by pointing out those guys who flew those planes into the towers practiced beforehand, it cemented the realization that this is a very different show than what it first set out to be.
Nancy hadn’t known of Celia’s arrest, but as Doug pointed out—though not without giggling—everybody fingered Celia for the grow house and kept Nancy out of it. So as Celia rots in a federal jail, morphing into her cellmate’s special girl and sporting the grooviest prison makeover, Nancy is busy setting up a new business. Of course that entailed a border survey with Guillermo that we saw last week, one that apparently resulted in her crossing the field of view of a federal surveillance camera.
That’s a big bombshell to drop in the second episode of what we know so far is going to be a 13-episode season. I guess it’ll take a few weeks for the feds to track her down, and then they’ll have to spring the trap. Is there any chance the season isn’t spiraling toward her arrest? Chime in if you have a theory, by all means.
Back at Bubbie’s house, Silas is watering his plants in the shower. The banter between him, Nancy and Shane in that bathroom scene was classic, a good reminder of what makes this show fun to watch. You can never put your finger on what her relationship with her kids is supposed to be. Sometimes she’s fiercely protective, but in general drug dealing and protectiveness are not typically tandem parental qualities. She more like their crazy aunt, if you ask me.
Albert Brooks as Grandpa Lenny continues to be a hoot. His retelling of his son’s great disappointment, the day Andy squandered the $100 Lenny gave him to put down on a sure thing, laid out Lenny’s true character. Who gives a kid $100 and sends him to the track on his bike? That the kid blew a $20,000 payoff is all he can focus on, not that he as a father is the bigger disappointment. And of course he blows the $300 Nancy reluctantly gave him.
But even he isn’t so easy to write off. He clearly cares for his dying mother, even if he’s basically ransacking her home as she slowly fades away. He isn’t neglecting her in the process, even if he does assign Shane the age-inappropriate task of babysitting Bubbie. Judging by the scenes from next week, the Bubbie storyline should come to a head soon.
Actually, Bubbie’s gasping Yiddish plea to kill her is hardly subtle foreshadowing.
I can’t get too caught up in that when I’m so distracted by the likelihood that the feds will be coming hard after Nancy sooner rather than later. If the writers stall on that point, it could be a distraction for me, plot-wise. Then again, it’ll probably be no more a distraction than that dress Nancy wore to Tijuana.
Wasn’t she embarrassed to have her kids see her dressed like that?
This entry was posted
on Tuesday, June 24th, 2008 at 11:11 am by Brian Howard.
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