"Silas, Do You Suck Dick?"

Good bye, Albert Brooks. Good bye.

Last night was Mr. Brooks last Weeds episode of the season (according to interviews), and it saw a number of plot-moving events happen. Last night was a very interesting episode, if not the most memorable (or good) of the season. So let's take a stroll.

I think it's a big cop out to have last week's episode end with Nancy about to off Bubbie herself, with a pillow, in the living room, and to start this week up post-funeral. I guess the writers realized that having their main character euthanize a 90+ year old woman on screen was not the most sympathetic step-forward they could take. But maybe it would have been for the best -- I already get the feeling that Nancy doesn't really have emotions anymore as much as modes of operation -- panic, less panic, and pissed of. So how great would it have been to see her emotionless face, with maybe a roll of the eyes, as the life escaped from her sons' great-grandmother? At this point I think WEEDS is on its way to becoming a sort-of Frankenstein story, where Nancy is the monster that everyone else lends a piece of themselves to create.

What was the deal with all the realtors in the episode? A lot of distracted screen time was spent with them. I hope they play a continued role in the rest of the season, if only to validate their existence in this episode. And what happened to the rest of the Agrestic cast? They are cutting characters left and right in this show. Dean and Isabella are notably absent, Conrad and Heylia are gone for good, so maybe this is their attempt to introduce some new "whacky" side characters. 

I wonder when Andy will realize Nancy has become an emotionless machine. After being played in the desert? Maybe. But unlikely. Like everyone else in the show, he is a complete idiot. It's actually a problem I've been having with Kevin Nealon's Doug. In the beginning of the show, he's kind of an idiot because he's really good at his job, and so he can sort of be a man-child in the rest of his time -- he's bored, and that's how he exists. But as the stakes for him have gotten higher and higher (literally and figuratively), he hasn't panicked or freaked out or become less of an idiot. Now, after his sham insurance plans for Agrestic were discovered, where does he flee to? To a known accomplice's place. Where he sits in a van and gets high all the time. Dude, were I on the run for fraud, the last thing I'd do is that. It's TV, I guess. It's just a disappointment. I prefer Nealon as a spoiled, intelligent man-child. C'est la vie.

Albert Brooks shows his characters true colors (in case we had missed them before) by being a total asshole to Shane and then walking out on the family with all of Nancy's formerly-hidden-money. Shane continues to be the most fucked up kid on the face of the Earth, and Silas is just an idiot. Does anyone else remember when he punctured his condoms and impregnated his deaf teenage girlfriend? That shit's fucked up. But they've taken a half-step back, and now he's not really a tragic figure, a young man waylaid by the premature death of his family's patriarch and the downward spiral of his mother, but instead just a guy who grows weed in a truck and gets high a lot. 

And of course, at the end of the episode, Celia gets caught and Nancy is put into a precarious position. My hope is, of course, that they just put a fucking bullet between Celia's eyes, but maybe that's just me. I mean, Nancy's already a murderer (see: Bubbie), so it's just the next step, ordering hits on people. But no, instead we'll get some girls-are-back-together crap before Nancy discovers what Celia's true motives are and it all comes to a head and (yawn). 

I was thinking about how I miss Marta, from the first two seasons. But it was a very, very different show then. I still like WEEDS -- I laughed a lot last night -- but it's not the show it used to be. 

But hey. It's better than nothing.

-RoboNixon

WEEDS - A Return to Form?

WEEDS is back on Showtime in its fourth season. With two episodes under the belt, it's time to kick the tires a bit and see how this baby rolls.

After a tired and meandering third season, Weeds seems to have returned to form... kind of. Gone is Agrestic, a tract-housing suburb so important to the show that it served as a character for three seasons. Instead, we get the the border-town of Ren Mar, complete with nearby ocean, German food, and miles of fencing separating America from Mexico. 

Gone are two of the shows biggest characters, Haylia, the supplier to Nancy's seller, and Conrad, not only the most-important non-Botwin Family character, but the romantic interest. 

But!! We get the addition of Albert Brooks as Nancy's gambling-addict father-in-law.

So where does that leave us?

Let's start with the good and work our way to the bad, eh? 

Albert Brooks is pretty terrific as Judah and Andy's father, who is a total asshole, a gambling addict, and 100% classic Albert Brooks. He's curmudgeonly, he's exasperated, and he doesn't want "Not-Francie's" family in the house. Good. Great. I'm only bummed knowing that Brooks is only contracted for two more episodes. Bummer. He brings an inner life and a sense of lived-in-ness that the show was missing all last season.

Andy. Justin Kirk is a pretty terrific actor all around, and while I imagine he's on this show to pay the bills, he never slacks off. It also helps that he's been given some great material to work with, like the scene in the 4th season premier where he tells Nancy about how her dead husband showed him pictures of her naked when they had first started dating. It's a great bit between the two actors, and it plays to a lot of the strengths the show has forgotten it has... 

And, of course, Mary-Louise Parker is great... when she has the chance. There's something a little crazy and sad in her eyes that makes her believable... even when she makes really, really, really terrible decisions. She's funny, and you can understand that she's just trying to carry on after the death of the person who was her other half...

Which leads us to one of my big problems. Which is that in season 1, Nancy sold weed to maintain this lifestyle for her and her children. As she got more involved in it, she lost track of where she was, and how her absence was affecting her children. But now, having burnt down their house, having picked her kids up and moved them hundreds of miles, having employed her eldest son in the drug trade, after ignoring her teenage son's obvious cries for help and attention, I begin to wonder... why is Nancy selling drugs? She has given up everything she sold weed to keep, not least of all her family. She is a terrible, terrible parent. Shane should be put into foster care, or should be adopted by someone at least moderately more stable. And Silas is just ... I mean, he's going to end up in a trailer, in the middle of the desert, making meth, and crossing over into AMC's Breaking Bad. We all know that's how it ends for him. 

So what does Nancy want?

With Conrad gone it's hard to say. When he was on the show, he provided a warm counterpoint to Nancy's ingenue. He was in the drug trade, but he knew how rough it was. He wanted to protect Nancy for the ugly angles of things. And for Nancy, he was the possibility, that maybe there was a new life ahead for her, that maybe she could find someone who she cared for, and cared for her. That maybe things could ultimately come together.

But not anymore.  So I'm left wondering why Nancy is working for the (much less threatening than last-season) Mexican drug-lords. I'm left wondering why they're on the lam, when I imagine Nancy has a chunk of insurance money coming her way from her house. And I'm left wondering where the show is going. 

The ship has righted itself. But I fear they've lost the map.

-RoboNixon