Scenic World

I wrote earlier that the second season of Weeds left me chilly. Well, buckaroos, have I got some good news for you! It gets all crazy and super-well-put-together again!

The premise is imaginative, zany, and impossible, but not impossible enough to fall outside the realm of some alternate universe naturalism. All of this is relatively unimportant. The pay-off, for me at least, is straight-up whimsy, that bizarro varietal of comfort which convinces, however briefly, that anything is possible.

They put together this ass-kicking montage of Nancy--suburban mom turned drug-lord protagonist--and her new reality: working retail in a maternity store, the legit front for a drug business over which she no longer has control. The execution was completly outside the normal mode of the show--the use of voice-over; the faux-conclusiveness; the solemnity--and you could just feel Nancy drying up, the intensity of her frustration. Moments like that make you realize how deep she got into it, what a terrible, corrupt person she is, but also how much she loved it, nay! how much she needed it. Cut back to the present, as Nancy closes up shop, and there's a thumping in the back room. Nancy enters to find... a man emerging from a tunnel to Mexico, trapped under a pile of boxes. He yells in Spanish, telling her not to put boxes there, ever again, and the camera follows as he walks back into the tunnel. We see crews of filthy diggers, lanterns, and drugs in maternity store bags as the guy walks back yelling instructions. Cue some awesome, kind of bubbly imagination land music and Nancy, that adorable risk-junkie, goes straight down the all but literal rabbit hole with only a moment's pause for wonderment, sticking her head in where she doesn't belong all over again but knowing, a little better this time, exactly what that may entail.

Awesome character moment, awesome music (you just have to trust me), and a perfect example of a show being true to its fundamental roots as an experiment in fantasy.