overnights

‘Weeds’: Return of the MILF

Weeds

Excellent Treasures
Season 4 Episode 6

Photo courtesy of Showtime


Weeds has recently proceeded with such scattershot abandon — Celia in custody, then not; Nancy training to smuggle, then being deployed in a front; Albert Brooks nailing the absurd pathos his castmates all aspire to, then disappearing — that we hardly believe the unfolding allegory that dominated this episode was even planned by the writers. But it couldn’t possibly be an accident that Nancy’s maternity store obscures a tunnel that birthed so much trouble this last half-hour, could it? And that Celia decides to fold her yappy daughter back into her cold embrace? And that Nancy herself is watching her own children slip slowly away — particularly Silas, now wooed by none other than the neighborhood MILF? Sweet Mary: Maybe we should start calling it Moms.

Entitled Nancy, speaker of Spanglish, leveler of crushing, shrugging gazes: If Mary Louise-Parker wins this Emmy, it will be for perfecting the White Lady Who Gets Away With Everything. What’s driving Ms. Daisy, and where will it all lead? Spankings, apparently: She stupidly (of course) follows the tunnel, pushes through a door, and catches the eye of some Mexican suits, one of whom — the mayor of Tijuana — later has her stuffed in a trunk and brought to him, tousle-haired, so he can offer her the punishment we know, as a Bad Mother, she so hotly desires. But they’re interrupted. So we have to wait until next week for that.

Doug and Andy, meanwhile, indulge their own fantasies, spiraling down, dizzily, from harassing big-titted Asians on the boardwalk to Doug exposing himself to Celia to Doug promising a pretty illegal, as she’s wrestled off, that he’ll rescue her from Immigration. Andy, for his part, suggests the two employ themselves as coyotes — people (as opposed to drug, but what’s the difference?) smugglers. And that pretty illegal, by the way? She emerges with her people not from the tunnel — but the ocean. You’re born alone … —Nick Catucci