My wife has never been exposed to Weeds before this season. I think she’s seen an episode here and there, but whatever she saw didn’t impress her enough to continue, I guess. She’s been following this season with me for the most part, but she had to leave during the scene where Nancy kept forcing Andy to take care of the baby throughout the middle of the night, not once getting up to help herself. So all-encompassing has my wife’s hatred of Nancy Botwin become that she can’t even be in the same room as her. When I told her the episode ended with one of Nancy’s kids getting shot, she said, “Good.” Pretty sure that’s not what the show was going for.
I don’t share my wife’s hatred (a hatred much of the fanbase seems to share if cursory scans of a number of forums are any indication), but I can see where it’s coming from. Weeds has been working so hard to make Nancy such a venal and self-obsessed character for so long that it’s hard to work up a lot of affection for her when the show does something like shoot Shane in the arm. Obviously one of the major moral points of the show is the way that Nancy’s choices have been visited on her children, how her decision to get into drug dealing has corrupted them just as much as it’s corrupted her. And, yes, it would be sad if Shane were to die, considering he’s one of the few characters left on the show who still seems somewhat redeemable. But by focusing so much of the grief over how the gunman aiming for Nancy (or Esteban, I guess) actually hit Shane on Nancy’s face, the show just keeps hitting us in the face with Nancy’s realization that her criminal shenanigans have had, omg, repercussions.
Anyway, most of this episode was about how Nancy and Andy are settling in with the baby and all that good stuff. The baby, as babies do, continually demands to be fed or cleaned or … I don’t know, baby things, and Nancy is tiring of her obligations, instead insisting that Andy agree to take care of the fake kid she foisted on him. While I get that the show is trying to make me think that Andy so wants something in his life to bring him maturity (and/or is so hung up on Nancy that he’ll do whatever she wants), I’m not terribly sure I buy that he would saddle himself with the legal and moral burdens of having a kid, particularly the child of a dangerous drug lord, just to satisfy his own personal whims. Then again, the characters on this show have done stupider things to satisfy their own personal whims, so what do I know? But it sure is tough on ol’ Andy! He can’t even find the time to masturbate, so he has to do it in bed, while Nancy’s trying to sleep.
So the baby is turning into more of a pain than Andy thought he would be (I guess Andy imagined having a fake son would be all fun and games). This is too bad. There was genuine dramatic potential in the storyline of a man who’s never been serious about anything forcing himself to be serious about something that he really had no good reason to be serious about (and, indeed, could very well be putting himself in danger for being serious about). Instead, this mostly dissolves into a long series of good, old-fashioned “It’s hard to take care of a baby!” jokes, which culminate in a scene where Andy and Nancy sit, sipping drinks and talking about parenting, that’s actually pretty well-written until Nancy goes into the bathroom, tries to pump her breast milk, fails and has to recruit Andy to suckle her to get her started. This image, I think, is trying to conflate both Andy’s erotic feelings toward Nancy and the fact that she’s an ersatz mother to him at the same time, but it mostly just comes off as making one think that Nancy is an awful, horrible, terrible person (the theme of the episode, apparently). It’s not transgressive just because it thinks it is.