WEEDS “A Shoe for a Shoe” Advance Review

WEEDS “A Shoe For A Shoe” Season 6 Episode 6 – The “A Shoe for a Shoe” episode of WEEDS, which I had the chance to see early, picks up exactly where we left off: the Botwins are in meltdown mode with Shane in the clutches of Cesar and Ignacio and police and child services at the door. Cesar wants Nancy to bring Stevie to make a trade, so after wiggling out of the child protective services situation, Nancy makes like a mother lion and goes to a skee ball museum to try to get her son back.

I think this is a mostly disappointing episode. With everything in Nancy’s life imploding at the end of “Boomerang,” I expected an epic and suspenseful wild ride, but there’s surprisingly little tension here. So much interaction happens by phone that it blunts the sense of danger and clunky scenes at a diner with a too-quirky waitress don’t help. Conversely, because of the alleged high stakes, there just isn’t that much fun in the episode either. Oh, and Andy, Doug, and Silas are all pathetic. It had to be said.

Silas wants to have a hypothetical conversation about giving Stevie to Esteban because he really wants to go to college and he realizes Stevie is a “time bomb.” Listen for the Dexter shout-out–one of the best lines in the episode.

Ignacio and Shane spend much of the episode bonding: remembering good times, swapping first kill stories, and having a disgusting eating contest. Shane continues his quest to become the next American Psycho, and Alexander Gould is doing an excellent job with the material and seems to be having a good time doing it.

A hungry Doug spends the episode staring at food. When they cut Elizabeth Perkins because they couldn’t figure out how to write Celia in, they should also have left Kevin Nealon behind because Doug is pointless so far this season. Eating sugar substitute packets? Really?

Best lines: “Would you really put a bullet in me?;” “That was bratty;” “Cesar and I have a rapport: he has an icy stare, I have melty eyes. We’re frenemies;” “You should have seen me. I was heroic;” “Oh, Shane; no more Spanish.” Silas’s conversation with the sign language interpreter (why is she there, exactly?) is the finniest exchange of the episode.

“A Shoe for a Shoe” is my least favorite episode of the season. Weeds had been building up some momentum as Nancy built up her hash business, but it screeches to a halt as the show resets again. I feel like Weeds has no idea what kind of show it wants to be anymore and it’s drifting aimlessly. Mary Louise Parker, as always, shines in her scenes, especially when she’s leaving Esteban messages, and I think she makes even bad episodes of Weeds worth watching.

Hopefully you like the episode more than I did. What are your thoughts about “A Shoe for a Shoe?”

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