‘Weeds’: Now With Heroin — and Murder!

“Bringing the hammer down,” says Andy, in his tighty-whiteys, frying eggs in the morning. “Turn it out to bitch. Hard-core.”

“Go wash your hands,” says Nancy, wearing a floppy, wrappy, evening dress that shows off her lovely legs. “All I need now is for the boys to eat heroin eggs for breakfast.”

Heroin, yes, heroin. Smack, junk, horse. It was introduced last episode, and now it’s in Nancy’s laundry room, reducing Andy to a horny baby and further obligating Nancy to U-Turn.

U-Turn spends most of the episode topless and sweating until his heart clutches up on the top of a mountain and sweet, enormous Marvin does a Tony Soprano on his ass. Murder, yes, murder. When all fails and plots careen way off even the absurd-o-meter, put one big man in a helpless situation (remember Christopher Moltisanti’s SUV crash?) and shove his closest friend’s arm in his face. It was a surprisingly sad moment, but we had wondered when and how it might happen.

In other anticipated moments: Mary-Kate Olsen. She’s luminous and flirty and “tight with the Lord.” She’s the bingo teacher at the retirement home where Silas is doing community service (selling them the sweet stuff of the Earth that, “Yes sir, will fuck you up good”). We’re not sure what the point of Olsen’s character, Tara, is — has she come to sprinkle a little godly faith into the decaying soul of Agrestic? Is she the next Zooey Deschanel, whose kookiness will run her out of town with an increasingly neglected Shane and the chest full of Nancy’s heroin? Will Silas sadistically get her pregnant, like he did the last girlfriend, and take Weeds into OC territory?

All this remains to be seen. For now, we content ourselves with the possibility of Nancy returning to her garden-variety suburban-Mom existence, dealing by day and dating FBI agents by night. —Emma Pearse