Left Hanging in the Weeds
Now
this is how you do a cliff-hanger.
I'd lost track of
Weeds since the fall season kicked into gear, but I recently plunged into a marathon of the last half of the season (thanks, Showtime On Demand!) just in time for Monday's second-season finale. And it was a doozy.
Watching these episodes en masse also reinforced to me how much more pungent (so to speak) of a suburban social satire
Weeds has become than
Desperate Housewives, against which I once negatively compared
Weeds as a weakly stepsister. (
Housewives is better than a year ago, but now seems to me little more than a fun if uneven escapist romp of a soap, minus the first season's more poignant and provocative sting.)
What I've appreciated about
Weeds in its second season is its confident, unpredictable narrative muscle, which has been flexing since the first-season cliff-hanger, in which we learned that pot-peddling widow Nancy (Mary-Louise Parker) had just slept with a DEA agent, Peter (Martin Donovan), who at first seemed just like another nice soccer dad.
That twist fueled much of the current season, during which Peter revealed he knew what Nancy did for a living and then they impulsively married. This secret relationship inevitably went sour, due to his jealousy, her ambivalence and "Agent Whitebread"'s need to score some busts, which put some of her associates in the feds' crosshairs.
But speaking of crosshairs: this cliff-hanger, wow.
Following little Shane's revolutionary-style grade-school graduation speech ("You have failed us all! Everything is not OK!"), with its shout-out to
Snakes on a Plane, we move to the long-awaited drug deal. Here's where Nancy and Conrad, under Peter's extortionist thumb, have arranged to sell their stash of high-quality "MILF weed" (thanks, Snoop Dogg, for that) to U-Turn's gang, with Peter planning to pocket the profits.
But little did Peter suspect that Haylia (whom he'd earlier raided, to no effect) had enlisted the Armenian hit squad to take revenge on the agent, who's now presumed dead. So we're left with tremulous, panicked Nancy learning her sort-of husband is dead while Armenian and gangsta weaponry are pointed right at her. (The Armenian assassins bust in to collect the money, which U-Turn neglected to bring, in favor of guns.) As Nancy opens the safe to retrieve the drugs, she learns to her horror that her son Silas has absconded with the weed - and then we see that Silas and his trunkful of pot is about to be busted by the cops, courtesy of Celia, who's getting payback for Silas'vandalism of her "Drug-Free-Zone" paraphernalia. Yikes, yikes and yikes.
That final image of Nancy in a ferociously scary standoff is such a classic "no-way-out" scenario. How will they get her, and everyone else, out of these various messes?
Plenty to mull on while we wait for Showtime to give the show an official renewal, which probably means waiting until next summer for a new batch of episodes. Like I wrote when I reviewed the show in August, you could get a contact high just from watching something that's this much fun. (See Matt Mitovich's very revealing
Q&A with series creator Jenji Kohan for more info.)
