Pensamientos Acerca de Televisión

Weeds: “No Man Is Pudding”

I've been wanting to avoid talking about certain episodes of the fourth season of Weeds because that was when the show started to become maddeningly uneven. Not because of the Mexican characters. In fact, when I look back at that season, I get more irritated by the white non-Hispanic characters like the one played by Albert Brooks. But I get a sense from certain online comments by fans of Weeds that the whole show started going downhill in the fourth season because the main character Nancy Botwin got involved with Mexicans and that was the fault of the Mexican characters that the show kept going downhill. I don't agree with that argument. However, I suspect that a lot of people out there do.

In any event, "No Man Is Pudding" is one of my favorite episodes of Weeds if for no other reason that it has such a surreally WTF-type ending. I have tried several times to try to think of a written description that could do it justice but perhaps the best way to describe it is to show you this.



And yes, that was Demián Bichir of A Better Life fame standing there at the end with a big cigar in his hand. For that matter, Mary-Louise Parker -- aka Nancy Botwin -- also put on a pretty good performance even though most of it in that sequence was just a reaction.

Anyway, with all this talk about building a wall on the Mexican-U.S, border, I could not help thinking of this sequence as the ultimate argument against such a project. There are obviously more idealistic reasons but I don't see President Trump paying much attention to those. "They're just going to go under it" is no doubt far from the best argument I can come up with but at least there is a small -- very small -- chance that he might listen to it. But who knows?

Then again there have already been real-life examples of that tunnel -- and yet Trump is still trying to go ahead with his Wall project. Heck, there was even one on the Canadian-U.S. border. I'm kinda surprised that we haven't heard more about that one.

And now I'm imagining a bunch of Canadians in Ontario digging a tunnel under the Detroit River and finally saying upon its completion. "Okay, hosers! We're open for business."

Hmmm.

Perhaps I'm better off thinking about that tunnel in terms of yonic symbolism. Nancy Botwin stares into a tunnel and sees -- what, exactly? Life? Death? A path to heaven? Her own -- ahem -- yoni? The mind boggles at the possibilities. I might have to write another essay about this episode very soon. We'll see.