overnights

Weeds: Dead Mom Walking

Weeds

Machetes Up Top
Season 5 Episode 2

“You were an interesting person to know, Nancy Botwin,” yells Guillermo from behind the prison glass, his face sallow and bruised. We agree. Now she’s a dead mom walking, waking at the beginning of the episode to her mayor’s goon sitting in the living room demanding caffeine, his pistol on the coffee table.

The thing is, now that Nancy is only so many episodes away from possibly ending up in the landfill, she might actually become interesting again. That’s because, for the first time in seasons, everything she does is for her loved ones’ salvation, and this predicament she finds herself in is the direct result of a moral and mostly selfless — albeit possibly brain-dead — move: She ratted out the Mexican mafia because she couldn’t allow the trafficking of innocent teen girls carrying toy backpacks through that tunnel. She drew her line, and now it seems there is little she can do to escape certain doom. “Bikini wax, want one?” she asks Cesar, who has his feet in a tank full of skin-eating fish, having accompanied Nancy on one of her many pregnancy errands: a manicure. “My treat. Hurts like hell but Esteban really likes it and I know how you like to please the boss.”

A few towns away, Andy and Shane are snoring on the couch of Nancy’s sister, Jill Price-Gray with a hyphen, a.k.a. “bitch face” — played by none other than Jennifer Jason Leigh, looking spectacularly momlike and middle-aged. Andy has brought Shane up to hide him from the mafia’s wrath, but the randy uncle spends most of his time guzzling red wine with the dissatisfied housewife and banging her in the laundry. Shane looks on with his camera phone.

In a far less interesting and mostly frustrating subplot, Silas and Doug are being held up by a bunch of hairy outlaws deep in the forest and robbed for all the homegrown weed Silas has been diligently inventing for the past season. This just makes us anxious: We had our hopes riding on Silas and his green thumb bailing the Botwins out. And across the border, Celia is still hanging out in a tent with her daughter Quinn’s rebel-leader ex-boyfriend, and she’s begging him to let her stay. “Please, I like it here,” she grovels. “My hair doesn’t frizz. Do not make me go back there. Everyone hates me. I have no friends.”

It’s a sad state of affairs, but nowhere near as fraught — or compelling — as Nancy’s last scene. She ends the episode pantsless, practically raped, drunk on whiskey and fancy sushi — she figures if it’s her last meal, she should make it a good one — and with no choice but to get a ride home with Cesar. Of course, Nancy can’t die or the show dies with her. And so we’re forced to ask, how will she get out of this one once the baby arrives? We predict Cesar will have something to do with it. It’s hard to believe they’ve become allies, but we’ve seen him smile at a few of Nancy’s charms. If he doesn’t come through, it’s the landfill for Nancy. “Lady parts all chopped out,” explains Guillermo. “Face all unrecognizable.” Brutal.

Weeds: Dead Mom Walking