Although the third season of Showtime's Weeds hasn't been as consistent as the second, I found Monday (Nov. 19) night's season finale to be rather moving.

[A mandatory evacuation has been imposed if you don't want the episode spoiled.]

The Weeds finale was about looking back to the premise of the series premiere and reflecting. In the show's pilot, we met Nancy Botwin, widow and mother, a woman entrenched in suburbia and in a cookie cutter version of the American Dream. Lacking in a college degree or easily marketable skills, Nancy decided that the only way to maintain her position in the world was to sell pot. By the second season, she determined that the only way to maintain her position was to vertically integrate, to take over manufacturing as well as distribution. If the third season was about Nancy's life spiraling out of control, then the finale was about resignation, both miserable and ultimately liberating.

For some reason, as the episode ended, my mind flashed to the lowest-level literary reference imaginable -- Stephen King's Salem's Lot, a favorite childhood book for this recapper. The book concludes [Spoilers!] with our hero Ben facing the idea that his childhood might forever be overrun by vampires, so he goes to the top of a hill, lights a cigarette and starts a fire that he hopes will engulf the town.

"But they say fire purifies," Ben says. "Purification should count for something, don't you think?"

That's what I thought watching Nancy douse her perfect home with gasoline to the effectively utilized strains of State Radio's "Keepsake," a song that includes the appropriate and on-the-nose lyric, "I'm gonna put my family back together again."

"Judah, if you're still here... I tried," Nancy set before setting the house aflame, the house that was her husband's dream all along.

For Nancy, the idea of being able to stay was far worse than the idea of being smoked out. That was the point of her conversation with dealer/firestarter Guillermo as they stood on a hill watching Majestic and Agrestic burn. The first time I watched the episode, the scene felt too heavy-handed, but the second time through I saw that Guillermo was supposed to be a bizarre oracle of gangsta Zen, offering platitudes like, "FEMA's gonna set them up at the Marriott. They're gonna get room service for two months, premium cable... Then they'll come back, see it all built up bigger, brighter. And then God's gonna burn it down again, cuz they don't belong here in the first place. And the who thing starts over. Circle of life."

Guillermo, the guru incapable of telling South from West, asked Nancy to identify her house, the symbol of everything she'd been selling her soul for and she responded, "That one. No, it's that one. I don't know. It's over there somewhere."

His exiting words, more threat than solace, "Maybe the fire won't get there. You could stay here forever."

Given that season two ended with a Mexican Standoff, Nancy's fake-ish husband killed, her eldest son arrested and her youngest son being driven across the country by a crazed hippy chick fleeing a Native Alaskan, how could things not have continued to go astray? Brother-in-law Andy was consigned to the army, went AWOL after the untimely death of his bunker buddy, became a porn caterer and a foot fetish star and eventually ceased to have a storyline. Silas did community service, dated a religious fanatic, was forced to learn about growing pot and got beat up by bikers. Shane suffered through summer school at a fundamentalist church, experimented with pot and eventually felt so neglected he began having conversations with his dead father. And Nancy was forced into indentured servitude to a gangster, became his protegee, watched him die, got a job, had sex with one inappropriate man and one slightly more appropriate man, tried to make a friend and was betrayed and finally made a deal with the Devil to stay in business. Yeah, it was time to leave.

It hard to guess where Nancy, Andy, Silas and Shane can go next. We know it won't be Pittsburgh, but we also know that Roy Till and the DEA are bound to come after them. What will Season Four hold? We'll have to wait for next summer to find out.

Some favorite parts of the finale:

Hard to know if Doug's revenge went the way he planned, but his banjo songs at the evacuation center -- with sample lyrics like "Where there's fire/ People like to smoke" and "It's just like the Super Dome/ 'Cept everyone's white and middle class." -- were a treat.

Nancy isn't the only one making a change, or do we doubt Heylia when she said "I'm gettin' too old for this s***. Growin' here and runnin' there. F*** it.  I'm goin' legit."

While the scene with Nancy and Guillermo was over-the-top, her break-up scene with Conrad was far more subtle (and topical), based around a discussion of Thanksgiving turkey. ["Heylia makes these deep-fried turkeys. Unbelievable." "Yeah, I can't really see myself deep-frying. I'm more of a bake-and-broil kind of girl. Microwave. Think I could fit a turkey in the microwave?"]

Favorite line of the episode: Roy Till's "Jesus, Groff, if I let you stick your finger up my a**, can I get a Porsche?" (Runner-up: "Jesus does not make you flame retardant.")

Favorite deadpan Mary-Louise Parker line of the night: "Oy vey"

The show went fittingly old school for the opening and closing credits, using Malvina Reynolds' original for the opening and Pete Seeger over the mournful closing shots of the fire encroaching on our favorite Agrestic locations.

What'd you think of the finale? And the season as a whole? Where do you see the show going next year?

Comments

Who sings the final song of last nights episode? Not Little Boxes, but the one when Nancy was spreading the gasoline??? I loved it!

Tiff | Nov 20, 2007 7:32:19 AM | #

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As it says in the recap, that was State Radio's "Keepsake."

-Daniel

Daniel | Nov 20, 2007 8:09:05 AM | #

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@Tiff: State Radio : keepsake

Greg | Nov 20, 2007 10:24:47 AM | #

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I liked the finale. And like you said it was good to see Weeds getting back to its roots in the past few weeks with Shane seeing his dead dad. I thought that the dead father issue was never resolved and its good to see them looking at this still, as I think it was a core theme in the first season.

Also it was nice to see Weeds expand to 15 episodes per season, I hope they keep that up!

congested | Nov 21, 2007 5:25:04 PM | #

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great way to end the first era of the show, and it's exciting to think about the show reinventing itself into something new and fresh. just hope they keep all the awesome characters....

Nate | Nov 25, 2007 2:14:32 AM | #

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