Weeds

2010_1_27 “Weeds.”
Sue and I finished “Weeds,” the 5th Season last night. It was not quite what it used to be and a million miles from where it was in the beginning, that is to say, a lighthearted satire with the ticky-tack song leading the way. The ending of Season 5 perfectly illustrates what I am talking about. The tone was angrier and there was more violence, and what humor there was was spottier, falling in the cracks between dramatic events and sequences. Some of the humor seemed out of place because of the change of tone. There will be a 6th Season and I won’t be surprised to see the series end in a tragedy.
Nancy Botwin’s (Mary-Louise Parker) attempt to have Pilar Suazo eliminated comes to naught because Guillermo Diaz was in Pilar’s employ and told her what Nancy wanted him to do. Pilar throws this in Nancy’s face at the party she was throwing for Estaban Reyes (Damian Bichir) who has just return to being her political protégé. This encounter occurred at poolside while the party was happening inside the mansion. Pilar got Estaban to re-up with her by blackmailing him; by showing him all the documents and photos she had on file that illustrated his illegal activities. He told Nancy he had no choice. And worst of all Pilar, who Nancy called “Mexicunt,” then threatened to kill Nancy’s two boys, Silas (Hunter Parish) and Shane (Alex Gould.) She reacts with horror and with loathing for this evil bitch she has to deal with as her chief tormentor. Then, suddenly, someone off camera whacked Pilar hard on the side of the head with a croquet mallet, sending her flying into the pool. After her splash down we saw her body floating spread-eagle in the water, blood oozing out of her head.
In the short interval before we see who wielded the mallet I considered who the assailant might be. My first choice was Cesar (Enrique Castillo) who was, after all, the professional killer in the current cast of characters. We had earlier seen him dispassionately dispatch three guys without blinking an eye. Or it could have been Ignacio (Hemky Madera) one crazy Mexican who had recently beaten the hell out of a golfer who had the nerve to give him the finger. He had picked up a 5 iron and clubbed the poor bastard into unconsciousness. Shane had witnessed this abuse and was repulsed by it, calling Ignacio an “animal.” He could have enjoyed killing a woman just for the pleasure of it. But no, I wasn’t even close: it was Shane who did it, Nancy’s 14 year son. And the first thing he said to his shocked mother who was standing there with her mouth open was, “I couldn’t find a golf club.” The camera returns to Pilar’s body floating in the blue water, a bird’s eye view.
So at the conclusion of the 5th Season we see Shane, the youngster in the crowd, go from being horrified by Ignacio violence with a stranger with a 5 iron, which had made him so critical of the men who worked for Estaban, his mother’s drug lord husband, to the trauma he felt after he got shot and began to see life from a darker perspective during his recovery period, to the violent 14 year old who threatened some would-be rapists with a knife at their throat and by copying the behavior and technique of Ignacio, who earlier had repulsed him. He had come full circle in his attitude about violence. Nancy, already disturbed and ill at ease with her parenting, felt like a failure after Shane’s attack on Pilar, which did of course remove her tormentor from the scene and prevented her from harming Silas and Shane, so maybe it could be read as a good thing, or at least self-defense. But the rationalization didn’t bear up that well against the weight and gravity of the karma, the moral consequence of the killing and her life style. She had run afoul of the choice she had made shortly after the death of her husband, Judah. She had had no idea of what the consequences could be. One son had nothing going except his skill at growing and selling pot, while her baby had just crushed the skull of a woman and he did not feel bad over what he did. She realized she could never win any prizes for parenting, and neither would Estaban. It turned out that his visiting teenage daughter who lived in Paris and went to school there, who he had felt was a higher caliber person than Nancy’s two boys, was crushed when he was told she was a heroin addict. That stopped his bragging and cut him down to her size.
Many other things happened during the 5th Season to the secondary characters. The clownish personalities, Celia (Elizabeth Perkins) and Dean Hodes and Doug Wilson, were a bit boring and over the top, too absurd next to the drama going on the with the primary characters. Andy Botwin (Justin Kirk) fell in love with the female doctor, Audra Kitson (Alanis Monisette) but deserts her when the anti-abortionist captures her. Earlier he had an affair with Nancy’s sister (Jennifer Jason Leigh.) But, in the final analysis, Season 5 was focused on the momentum toward a darker space for the Botwin family.