overnights

‘Weeds’: Nancy, Rat

Weeds

Head Cheese
Season 4 Episode 11

We’ve heard of jumping the shark, but shooting it?Photo: Courtesy of Showtime


Is 13 too young to be having sex? Nancy thinks so. “What happened here last night?” she asks Shane and his two pierced girlfriends who had stayed over. Shane, surlier than ever, isn’t about to let his “slaphappy drug dealer” of a mother dictate his sex life (a refreshing development from recent Oedipal entanglements). “Where were you last night?” he asks. “Quit pretending to be a mom.”

Doug, meanwhile, is desperate to get laid. He move into a divey apartment with Maria, the Mexican immigrant, who learns what a sleaze this sad, tall, angry baby man is when he begs her to see even just “one boob.” “I spent 25 years with a woman who wouldn’t put out. I deserve some. I smuggled [Maria] here,” he whines to Andy. It’s too gross to be funny, but thankfully Maria has Doug’s number: “He is a terrible man,” she tells Andy. “He is a criminal and wants to make me his whore. He has warts on his genitals.”

Speaking of calling out criminals, traffic through the maternity-store tunnel continues, and Nancy is no longer able to turn a blind eye. After asking her hunky mayor what’s coming through the tunnel — pot, heroine, girls? — she is told to go back to her children. But the problem with that is Nancy’s kids are out of her control — Shane learning life’s facts and Silas busy with his now-booming “sandwich” business. So she makes a call. Till, the FBI dude whom Nancy once threatened to rat out for corruption, shows up while Nancy sits in some garden, swathed in a straw hat and playing with a Rubik’s Cube. “Thanks for coming,” she says.

There being two episodes left this season, this rat-out comes at an opportune time: Will the Botwins stay in Ren Mar? Will Nancy continue her lascivious affair with Mayor Esteban? Will Celia, sequestered away in a low-rent rehab facility (the fancy place worked out that her insurance belonged to a deceased Korean woman and shipped her out) come to Nancy’s rescue, as Nancy did her when Guillermo’s men caught Celia snooping outside the warehouse? Can Nancy’s conscience be sustained without the death of a major character, or at least another relocation? And if it’s the latter, where won’t the Mexican mafia find her?

‘Weeds’: Nancy, Rat