If ever there were an actress made for the quirky, off-center rhythms of Weeds, it’s probably the quirky, off-center Jennifer Jason Leigh, an actress who, like series star Mary-Louise Parker, seems perpetually underrated despite turning in great performance after great performance. Leigh can occasionally become too grating, but once you get into her rhythms, she’s always fascinating to watch. Here, she’s been cast as Nancy’s sister, Jill, an underappreciated soccer mom, who almost seems to offer us a glimpse into who Nancy was before the death of her husband (though from all accounts, Nancy and her husband’s relationship was far better than the marriage depicted here). This kind of ersatz time travel is always more interesting than straight flashbacks, and tossing Justin Kirk and Leigh into scenes together was a good creative decision.
Leigh’s Jill is the mother to two pink-clad twins and the wife to a bike-obsessed husband who seems to only be a flitting presence in her life. Every scene set in her house was a winner here, especially an early scene when both twins chose “HAM!” for breakfast, and a later scene depicting Jill and Andy slowly falling into each other’s arms while drinking through woozily disorienting jump cuts. (“No, that’s just your face!”) The jump cuts were almost imperceptible the first few times they happened, as if someone just made a mistake in the editing room at finding matching frames to cut between, but as the scene went on and you got into the rhythm (or lack thereof) of them, it all made for such a good way to look at a woman whose wheels are slowly coming off.
Granted, Weeds has been to this well many, many, many times before in its first four seasons, but something about the combination of the sharp performance by Leigh and inserting Andy into the mix of the seemingly perfect suburban family made them pay off better than they probably should have. The story’s conclusion – wherein Andy got his Nancy lust ya-yas out by having sex with a Jill just looking to have someone appreciate her – was a little rote and not nearly as funny as anything that came before (underscored as it was by that irritating, “Isn’t this wacky?!” music that seems to plague this show and all others even vaguely like it), but in general, I’m in favor of Leigh joining this cast for whatever number of episodes she signed on for.
The main story tonight involved Nancy slowly realizing that the baby in her womb is not quite the get-out-of-death-free card she had hoped it would be in last week’s episode. Once Guillermo points out to her from behind bars that women in her predicament usually end up as dead bodies in a landfill, she goes on a self-destructive tear, eating sushi, smoking a cigarette AND drinking whiskey in one scene, clearly just looking for a way out of the predicament she finds herself in. Even if Esteban lets her carry the baby to term, she’s got a nine-month window in which to figure out a way to keep herself from being killed. Esteban’s goon, who is in her house at episode’s beginning, is fairly easy to lose (in an almost too-goofy scene where little fish nibble at the dead skin cells on his feet), but this won’t always be the case.