"Weeds" Crumbs

So I finally re-watched the Weeds series finale.  Like every other series finale basically ever, it made some people happy and left some unsatisfied, but most viewers, like me, probably felt some combination of the two.

It was nice what they tried to do with the symmetry of the show, with plenty of callbacks to the pilot and to the early halcyon days of the show.  But opening on a PTA meeting and bringing back Josh just weren't enough to make this episode the perfect cap on the series.  I've been talking to a number of my friends about it, and most of them agree that the early seasons were by far the best (though I would argue that Season 4 had some strong comedic highlights, particularly with Andy and Lenny but also Celia and Ignacio).  Season 5 was where things really started to go off the rails, and Season 6 was an absolute mess.  They brought back some of the spark for this final go-round, but it really was too little, too late.



Now, I know as soon as you read her name, you started thinking, "Oh yeah, what about Celia?"  Because she was such a perfect counterpoint to Nancy.  When Celia was removed from the scales, the show lost all sense of balance.  Nancy just became stuck wandering around in her own fucked-up head and continued to run her (and everyone else's) life into the ground because there was no one around to call her on her many, many heaping piles of bullshit.  It also took a lot of the humor out - Celia could always be counted on for a laugh - since when they tried to replace her with Jill, what they didn't realize is that Jill is The Worst.  Totally an Emily Valentine in every possible way.  I was very glad they left her out of the finale.

Coming into this, I thought I might talk about the mixed metaphor of foods and sons in this final episode...in the beginning, Nancy is constantly trying to feed people and concerning herself with how much is being eaten because she wants to be able to PROVIDE for these men in her life.  That's why she started dealing drugs to begin with, after all.  When she finds Andy in the kitchen, she offers him leftovers, but he still cooks breakfast, like always - he can take care of himself, and obviously, taking care of others comes much more naturally to him than it ever did for Nancy.  I mean, he owns a restaurant where he just makes people feel better with his food.  Then there's that scene with Stevie, post-botched-bar mitzvah, where she is making him a plate of food and giving in to what he wants.  It's like she's finally realized that the only way she can be a good mother and provide what he needs is to send him away.

But then the food motif disappears so who really knows, right?

I don't really need to delve into the vagaries of mustachioed alcoholic Shane (who managed to do some of the worst acting of the entire series in that bakery scene) or content, still-ashamed-of-his-dumb-father Silas, or cult leader Doug (of course) and the overly heavy-handed theme of SONS, THEY ARE OUR LEGACY.  From the beginning of the episode it's clear that the only people who truly matter here are Nancy and Andy.  And I thought the scene with them, the important one, was handled as well as it could be considering the unfortunate corner the writers painted themselves into.

There was a moment, back in the pivotal Season 4, when Nancy and Andy could've gotten together & it could've worked for the show.  She could have finally SEEN him and understood his love for her and her family and maybe she would've slipped up and gone back to hate-fucking dangerous men, but seeing the two of them in a relationship would've been compelling and honest storytelling.  Instead, we got season after season where Nancy treated him like a last resort and used him for everything he would give.  We watched her leech the heartfelt whimsy out of him.  And that just wasn't any fun.  So yes, I enjoyed the scene with them, because it was nice to see him finally stand up and be firm and put himself first.  But I wish such a scene had come much sooner than the final episode.

It's hard to write about Nancy the individual, because she remains a highly unrealistic and yet entirely static character.  Has she really learned or grown at all?  Nope.  And seeing her JUST NOW, twelve years later or whatever, kind of start to change is just not really very satisfying.  Did I enjoy the finale?  Yes.  It was fun seeing all our old friends again and the episode itself was pretty well-written (except for the "joke" about Isabelle being trans.  WTF was that?  A lazy, mildly offensive cop-out, that's what).  But the absence of Celia was impossible to ignore, and, though it tried, the episode was unable to capture the tricksy, subversive tone of the early seasons.  I'm left...not wanting more, but simply wondering, "What if...?"

I will admit that the final scene, backed by one of my favorite songs, Rilo Kiley's "Sixteen Miles", was beautiful and apropos, though it would've been even that much more beautiful if they had just gotten a snow machine.  Staring at bits of plastic stuck in Nancy's terrible hair kind of took me out of the moment.  But still. It was one of those times of non-hokey sentiment and poignancy that Weeds has occasionally done triumphantly, and a wonderful final image to carry with us as we move on to new worlds and new characters and leave all of these old friends behind.

Image via Alex Gets Real