SkimIt
It hasn't been a great final season for Weeds. The show has squandered all of the good will it built up with the first couple of seasons, but I still wasn't expecting a finale that will go down in the annals of ill-conceived series finales.
Nancy's Biggest Dilemmas
Nancy (Mary-Louise Parker) has been through a lot over the course of the show. Things turn out about as well as anyone could have hoped, I suppose, for a suburban drug dealer who has destroyed many lives and had her own endangered many times. She's slept with murderous competitors and associates (Alejandro, Esteban, Demetri and the more benign Conrad), inadvertently started a relationship with a DEA agent whom she ended up marrying, helped a psychopathic arsonist, Guillermo (Guillermo Diaz), smuggle unwilling sex workers across the border, became another woman's lover in prison and helped her son Shane (Alexander Gould) avoid punishment for committing murder.
She betrayed nearly all of her partners, at one point or another, and hired her other son Silas (Hunter Parrish) to deal and then grow marijuana for her. But from the finale you'd think the biggest error in judgment she ever made was not sleeping with Andy (Justin Kirk) sooner. Uncle Andy's errors in judgment are too many to list.
Weeds Goes SyFy
Speaking of errors in judgment, for some reason the finale of Weeds takes place about eight or nine years into the future. iPhones will be transparent then, but there are still no flying cars. More pertinently, Nancy owns a big chain of marijuana cafes, Stevie (Mateus Ward) is about to be bar mitzvahed, which draws past associates from far and wide to visit Connecticut. Will Andy show up? Part of the disappointment of the finale was Nancy's seeming dependence on having Andy back in her life. After all she's been through, she's still just as hopelessly lost as in the pilot. Remember that amazing, sad moment when she broke down and fell into Conrad's arms? There's a weak echo of that scene here with Andy.
Where Are They Now?
Silas is married to Megan (Shoshannah Stern) and they have an infant daughter. Megan hates Nancy for the way she raised Silas, which I guess is understandable, but one does wish she wouldn't be so shrill about it. Shane is an alcoholic loser who still hangs out with the broken-down Ouelette (Michael Harney). Doug's (Kevin Nealon) idiot cult is in full flower. What exactly do they believe? Too much trouble to write, apparently. Andy has a young daughter and a restaurant back in California and rejects Nancy's pleas to come back to her. Again, all this time I thought fending off Andy was one of the wiser decisions Nancy had made, but apparently Jenji Kohan thinks it was a big mistake.
Marijuana Makes Us Laugh at Nothing
Stevie's bar mitzvah (and the boy does have some sort of coming-of-age type revelation, but I don't know who this character is, so who really cares?) is as notable for who doesn't show up as for who does. Conrad misses it and Celia Hodes, Nancy's main antagonist for several seasons, doesn't even merit a mention. Doug's there, of course, and his gay son Josh (Justin Chatwin), unseen since the pilot, also turns up. Why are we supposed to feel anything positive about Doug again? With the way he treats women, people of other ethnicities, his own family? He's a ridiculous, vile character and wholly unpleasant whenever he's onscreen, but there he is, ruining what might have been a tender moment with Nance, Andy, Silas and Shane as the final credits come up.
The positive aspect of the show's slide into mediocrity and worse is that I won't waste another moment of my life wondering what happened to these characters. Parker is a great actress and I'm sure she'll go on to far more worthy projects. Eight years is a long time to waste on dope.
Best Lines
"We spend way too much time together. You're gonna make me gay."
--Stevie tries to convince Nancy to send him to boarding school.
"I fear for my people, Nance. Rest of the country has health care, has marijuana and tax revenue from marijuana. My dumb__ sore loser region evokes states' rights, keeps itself sick and angry."
--Crick (Patch Darragh) tells Nancy about the South.
"I had my adventures. Now I date men named Norman."
--Nancy tells Crick she doesn't want to sell the business to Starbucks.
"Okay, did you guys know Shane once killed a woman? Welcome home."
-Silas responds to Shane saying he's done having secrets.
"I'd like to take this time to call bulls__t on this whole show."
-Stevie makes a speech decrying Weeds. I mean, his bar mitzvah.
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