overnights

‘Weeds’: Nancy Has Her Vision Quest

Weeds

The Love Circle Overlap
Season 4 Episode 10

The mayor realizes he really needs to get a bigger couch.Photo: Courtesy of Showtime


Nancy begins the episode in a blissful state, awakening in the arms of the craven mayor of Mexico. It’s a moment soon ruined by the realization that the mayor has breakfast meeting in another country, and that Nancy’s kids are in another room.

Across town, Celia wakes up handcuffed to a strange bed, her daughter explaining her mom’s poisons to a presumptuous room-service guy: “mostly Xanax and coke.” Isabelle has called in Celia’s nearest and dearest — “Such an unexpected pleasure to see you, loser,” she says by way of greeting her ex, Dean — for a family intervention led by a woman with a librarian’s bun.

Even farther across town, Doug, the “sad, tall, angry baby man,” (as he’s so perfectly described by his Mexican charges) finally gets his long-anticipated reunion with “my Hope,” the curly haired Mexican refugee he met on the beach, at the scene of her arrest for illegal entry to the U.S.

Back home, Shane and Silas are having related experiences: Silas is learning that MILF love is not all it’s cracked up to be; Shane has associated himself with two pierced schoolgirls who are exploring their sexuality with the help of one of those position-of-the-day Internet columns.

So went an episode centered on love and (literal) headaches: When a grubby adolescent Mexican stowaway comes crawling through the maternity-store trapdoor, Nancy seizes up in pain. As the migraines recur, Mayor Esteban offers relief. “Do you trust me?” he asks. Enter the shaman with bowls of freshly brewed ayawaska, the Amazon plant that, explains the mayor, is a rocket ship to peyote’s bicycle. Sweating, vomiting in a metal vase, as the shaman chants “no more hiding,” Nancy has an epiphany: “I’m a fucking liar.” At episode’s end, she and Andy sit, looking out to the early-morning ocean, sharing their faults. Nancy: “I negotiate things that should not be up for debate; I tell myself I’m not doing harm when I am.” Andy: “I was a bad coyote, and why don’t I have a girlfriend?”

And out of the ocean comes the trapdoor refugee, wearing a tattered Quinceañera frock and clutching a glittery bag. Is she a symbol of Nancy’s grim past? We’re not sure, but we’re grateful for a more reflective Nancy.

‘Weeds’: Nancy Has Her Vision Quest