IMHO "Weeds" (5.04): Super Lucky Happy

I've been a huge Weeds fan for years, and the thing is, I wouldn't get to worked up over the stuff in this episode.  Seriously, this show is very dark and very mean when it comes to its comedy (especially when it comes to Doug).  Agent Till and his partner had a pretty explicit scene last year, and for a while one of Nancy's right hand men was a gay college student.  The show is pretty even handidly nasty to everyone.   

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Sorry, Snicks, I usually think you are right on with your posts, but you're way off on this one.  They treated the gay relationship as any other relationship and this episode just showed how the tragic loss pushed Agent Till over the edge. 

The faggot line showed just how nasty the landlady could be.  And, sorry, but it's true to life that people are that way.   If you were a loyal viewer of the show you would know this was played to show her ignorance and not an insult towards Silas and Doug.

Judging a show by one episode, when it has spent several seasons building its storyline would be akin to somebody reviewing a movie based on two minutes in the middle.

This show has been very gay friendly and inclusive - and last nights episode was no different.  In fact, they treated Agent Till as any other person who has gone off the deep end when their spouse is brutally murdered. 

You really should have found someone to review this episode who is familiar with the series.

"Weeds" is mostly an equal opportunity ridiculer. The "faggot" punch line was a bit much, but I don't think we were supposed to find it funny. Afterall, Doug has a gay son and Nancy had a gay male employee, and we were laughing AT, not WITH, the people who mocked them.

In any case, I am hoping that Till wasn't snuffed out. 

Hi, Snicks,

Thanks for covering this. As this is the first time you've really watched an episode, you might not know that what was even more deeply ugly about the episode (at least to me) is that the death of Agent Till's lover last season was particularly brutal (a beyond the pale torture image, and while "Weeds" has killed off characters, it's hard to think where this "dark comedy" has ever been that casually vicious to a non-criminal or non-villainous character, like Till's lover). That ugly death was at least qualified by the thought that we were going to see Agent Till's revenge play out, and that there would be significant payoff that wouldn't have just exploited gay characters. 

Instead, Agent Till has been mostly absent this season (even the slight revenge he got apparently happened off camera), and what do we get instead?  As you point out, a cheap "Dirty Dancing" joke (I believe the joke was even worse, as over at TWOP, they say he actually says "nobody puts baby in a coroner"... groan).  Then we have a scene in a subplot that ends with a punchline of an Asian woman calling two characters "f*gg*ts" (hardy har har.  Even under normal circumstances, this kind of casual homophobic humor, like we still see in some movies, would be obnoxious.  When placed in context of a thirty-minute episode that also has the show's main character passively endorse the murder of a gay man, it's pretty unforgiveable).

I get "moral ambiguity" on these cable shows.  I love shows like Breaking Bad, The Sopranos, and, up until recently Weeds.  But my problem here is in the show's (pardon the pun) execution of this material, not in a scenario where the main character does something dark, selfish, and complicated. Why, for instance, does the show do such things as feeling the need to make a joke about Agent Till getting an erection in such a silly slap fight, right before they kill him off?  Oh, he's gay.  I get it... fighting for his life with another man he can't control how sexually turned on he is. That's not just cheap humor, that's a vile move, in context of what happens next.

Not to mention that, all season, we've seen the virtual disappearance of GLBT characters like Isabelle and Sanjay (who really pretty much vanished last season).

I'm wondering if the creators of Weeds have been following Breaking Bad and feel they have to go more "dark" this season (for instance, Nancy's rape a few episodes ago, something that also better have some serious dramatic payback later this season to avoid being grossly exploitive).  But this doesn't really mix well with the constant humor elements of this half-hour "comedy"... even if it's a "dark" comedy, it's still a comedy, something shows like Breaking Bad and The Sopranos which deal with moral consequences and serious drama in a longer, sometimes somber, form, never claimed to be. 

I mean, having just sat through watching poor, put-upon heterosexual Nancy condemn a gay man to death for seeking justice for his murdered lover, I really wasn't in the mood for the tone of next week's hiiii-larious preview (Fun, upbeat music plays while a wacky, comical woman tells one of the characters she wants to have sex.  Gee, that really looks funny after what we just saw.)  

I used to love this show.  It used to be one of my favorites. I've seen every episode. But after last night's show, not only would I give Weeds a major "down" arrow, I think the show may have lost me for good.

I didn't find the Asian woman amusing either. It's such a cheap way to make her stand out. She could have finagled her way into getting a cut of the business instead. The gay agent was written to be creepy, but the way the show got rid of him was even creepier. It's like a horrible heterosexual relationship got reaffirmed by the blood of a gay man. To counteract the overdose of hetero-ness of this show, I just imagine Andy, Doug and Silas are all gay...

...And I know I may come across as over-reacting (and I don't wish to offend anyone here), but...

...when, for example, Weeds does a scenario where one of the female heterosexual characters is in love with a man who is tortured to death by having his skin sheared off with a sander, and then that straight female character goes after revenge, but gets captured and while she's fighting for her life her assailant notes "Look how hard your nipples are getting," and in the next scene poor old Nancy calls in Esteban to have the woman killed (but feels really, really conflicted and mopey about it), I think then, maybe, we can start to talk about how the show's an "equal opportunity offender."  Somehow I'm not sensing the writers ever coming up with such a storyline.

Also, I do want to point out that Doug's son has never been a major character on the show (I can't remember if we've ever even seen him; when he's (rarely) mentioned at all, he's usually the punchline in a Doug joke), and Sanjay has pretty much been written off the series at this point, except for the rare cameo.  Was "Weeds" once really cool about working in gay and lesbian characters as just part of the overall climate?  Yeah, particularly the mighty Isabelle, but something's going badly wrong in that department the last couple of seasons.

Like I said earlier, since the end of last season, I kept thinking they were going somewhere with the Agent Till storyline that wouldn't just end in either more cheap gay jokes or images of violent gay victimization. Last night's episode makes me think I was totally wrong.

If anything, I take issue with the fact that most of the homophobic commentary on the show comes from the mouths of characters that are not white. I'm thinking of Black U-turn forcing Sanjay to have sex with a woman; Latino Ignacio being disgusted by Till's boner; and the Asian landlady spouting off "faggot."

There's nothing "equal opportunity" about portraying racial minorities as the sole espousers of homophobia. 

The first three seasons of this show were amazing but the 4th not as much. I consider my self a pretty big fan.

I personally was bothered both by this episode and the killing of the DEA agent's partner prior. It was so weird to me to kill his partner last season let alone in the most gruesome was they killed anyone. And the DEA agent was kinda a joke this whole episode, he wasn't taken frankly too seriously. Until they kill him ... When the drug lord's bodyguard comes down from the stairs and talks to him, that scene was just off to me. Did anyone else get a weird vibe at that moment?

As for the random faggot from the Asian landlord, it just seemed odd and annoying to randomly throw in.

For the reader above I only remember Doug's son in the season premiere.

I think it's interesting that the relationship between Till and Schlatter is the only one in recent Weeds memory that seems genuine and sweet.  Nancy is with a murdering rapist, Andy sleeps with anyone, Hunter has dated a psycho and later an older woman (while that wasn't harmful, there is certainly an imbalance of power when one person in the relationship is barely out of puberty), etc.  Till and Schlatter were committed, loving, and even worked together!  Also, Till seemed to be the only character whose moral compass remained intact.  I'll miss him.

"Go, or go ahead and surprise me."  -- Rufus Wainwright

But this episode made me angry so I'm chiming in.

Now, Weeds has always just been slightly higher than iffy, in my opinion, in terms of how it treats the gay characters and the liberal use of the f-word (faggot) for "comedic" purposes has always gotten on my nerves. A lot of the time it is intended as some kind of punchline/derogatory statement and on the occasion one of the main characters says it no other character ever says anything about how it's a disgusting, unnecessary word. I suppose I understand the writers might not want to moralize that, but then why not just have the characters NOT say it? What does that word add to a scene that's so integral? The correct answer, by the way, is nothing.

Why don't they have some of the non-black characters use "nigger" or something akin to that in a comical or derogatory fashion? Because it's a gross, nasty word and there's nothing funny about it--but the f-word is a laugh riot, apparently. Ha ha.

Okay, so I went on that rant because I was disgusted with the way Captain Till's character was portrayed in that episode, which also featured the "comical" use of the f-word. The mockery of his relationship with the partner who was brutally, brutally murdered last season (the "nobody puts baby in a corner" shit) and him getting a "comical" boner when figthing with that one guy (Ignacio?) was ridiculous. The fact that they killed him would have sucked anyway, because I liked him, but it wouldn't have been detestable if they hadn't made him into a big homo joke before killing him.

I'm really disgusted with Weeds right now.

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