"Weeds" mini-cap: Nancy's maternal instincts are called upon

Episode 5, “No Man is Pudding,” starts all warm and cuddly with Celia begging for her life while gnawing on a gun in front of Nancy, Guillermo and the gang after being caught staking out Guillermo’s place. The feel-goodness got worse when Nancy, who apparently has watched a few too many Scorsese films, hijacks Guillermo’s gun and pistol-whips Celia so hard she knocks Celia’s tooth out! (Dang. There went my hope for a sexy Nancy-Celia reunion.)

Nancy was actually trying to front to Guillermo that she knew Celia was outside and that she was going to teach Celia a lesson for not following Nancy’s instructions. Poor Celia just can’t seem to catch a break this season. Where’s the woman’s moxie? Is it on vacation with Heylia and Conrad?

Nancy manages to keep Celia from getting killed at Guillermo’s but it’s not clear if it’s because Nancy would rather kill Celia herself. Guillermo’s annoyed by it all but he tells Nancy to meet him at a new outlet mall later in the day.

Andy left the rendezvous spot with a group of illegal immigrants heading for Iowa. Iowa? Yeah, Iowa. The writers made sure that the coyote leading the group suffered from illegal immigrant coyote stereotype syndrome. This syndrome made him rather unpleasant to everyone regardless of gender and it placed him in probable sexual assault perpetrator stratosphere regarding the lone female immigrant.

Andy befriends the woman, who enjoys making character marzipan, and he also befriends one man who has been promised that there is excellent ocean fishing in Iowa. Both new friends complain about the cost and the treatment of the coyote.

As the immigrants begin to board a delivery truck carrying large cases of pudding, they’re told that if they eat or ruin the pudding they’d be dead. As Andy tries to board the truck he has to pay. He only has six bucks so the coyote takes Andy’s prized belt buckle, too.

Silas is setting up his own pot business in the closet of one of the spare rooms since closets do not get impounded for parking illegally on the street. Shane points out that Nancy does not want Silas’s plants growing in the house but really, who listens to Nancy? During his set up, Silas stumbles upon a bee hive embedded in the wall and Doug gets stung and he’s very allergic to bee stings. Silas agrees to cut Shane in on his profits if Shane helps him kill the bees. So now even Shane is in on the drug business? Sad.

Nancy gets the details about Celia spying for Capt. Till while she drives to finally pick up Andy from the night before. She discovers that Andy is not there. She orders Celia out of the car so that she can be alone to think about the mess she’s caused. Will the audience finally see Nancy have her “drug running is very bad” epiphany? Nah, Nancy blames the whole mess on Celia!

Celia, ever so narcissistic, leans into Nancy’s car window and tells Nancy that she forgives her for allowing her to take the fall for the grow house in Agrestic. Nancy, ever even more narcissistic, raises the car window up with Celia’s head wedged inside as Nancy drives around slowly trying to figure out what to do next and if that plan would include actually killing Celia. Nancy the benevolent finally stops the car and spares Celia’s life.

On board the pudding truck, the marzipan woman shares her struggles and pains about her trip north and says that they are only seen as cargo not as human beings. Andy, feeling the sting of his lost belt buckle and six bucks, I guess, becomes a philosopher and says that no man is pudding. This is very true, but some men have minds of Jello and I would generally put Andy and Doug in that group.

Nancy meets up with Guillermo at the new outlet mall near the Mexican border. She brings Celia with her and Celia looks like she has recently escaped from a psych ward. Guillermo assumes that Nancy is a lesbian and that Celia is her lesbian stalker because all lesbians have at least one, I guess. Nancy plays along and says that she now has Celia on a leash. (Will that be in next week’s episode?)

Guillermo wants Nancy to be the manager of a maternity store he’s opening. Nancy’s disappointed and frustrated because she’s in the drug business for the action and for the big money. She says she owes it to her family to bring in big money because she’s put them through so much already. Rationalization is one powerful ego defense mechanism isn’t it?

Guillermo tells her to name her price and that she can earn it by being the nice white suburban lady selling maternity clothes. He needs her as the front. He just about guarantees that she’ll earn it but has to run it by “the man above.”

Andy waits with the others for the next method of transportation to illegally take them somewhere when the coyote stereotype begins to bark out sexually crude comments to the woman and reaches for her. Andy hops up and defends her and the coyote starts to rough him up. Andy pulls out Guillermo’s gun (from the cooler) and shoots the coyote in the knee and all the immigrants flee. Let freedom ring?

What a day. Finally, the Botwins are all together again for dinner. Silas and Shane’s faces are red from bee stings, Doug’s face is grossly distorted from bee stings, Andy is red and sunburned from his day as an illegal immigrant, Celia tries to eat a piece of Popeye’s chicken but can’t get her swollen mouth with the missing tooth open wide enough to bite down and Andy’s two new friends also had been invited.

Nancy gets all mushy and maternal as she addressed each family member and vowed to be more attentive to the kids and to be a better friend to Celia and gave Andy props for being a good person and she welcomes the newest American visitors and gives them advice as to how to remain in the country. At the end of dinner Celia reminds Nancy of Capt. Till.

Nancy meets with Till at his fave karaoke bar. Nancy reminds Till that her ex-husband was a rogue DEA agent and that Till knew it and helped cover it all up. She told him to lay off Celia and that she, Nancy, is now living a mundane life as a store manager. She explains her days and we see her bored to tears as she dutifully opens the maternity shop and closes it each day with no variation.

The final scene though shows Nancy as she hears a noisy commotion coming from the store’s office. Boxes in the middle of the room are banging up and down (OK, who else thought it was Celia and Guillermo getting to know each other better?) Nancy kicks away the boxes and a man emerges from a hatch in the floor. The hatch reveals a long underground tunnel that leads across the border into that initial auto body shop that Guillermo sent Nancy to fix her tail light and to seal drugs into Guillermo’s SUV! Whoa. Also in the shop was a business looking dude puffing on a cigar, presumably the “man above” Guillermo referenced. Wow.

The show just got light years more interesting. What will happen tonight?