What I’m Watching: Weeds

Weeds: Season 5, Episode 11 “Ducks and Tigers” (C+)

There’s a point where a show becomes too much to take. “Weeds” has been treading that fine line for almost the entirety of its fifth season, and now it’s pretty much crossed the threshold. Esteban’s arrest for corruption basically undoes everything that’s occurred this season, and most importantly over the past two episodes, and puts Nancy back in the same place she was before she met Esteban. Just when things were finally coming together, they fall apart again. Obviously that’s expected, but the show doesn’t even allow more than a moment of bliss or a glimpse at how things might actually work. There seems to be a fervent determination to keep Nancy cycling through the same plotlines of getting dangerously closer and closer to a man in some form or another (Conrad, Peter, U-Turn, Bill, Guillermo, Esteban) and then having him abruptly ejected from her life. It’s all very repetitive, and the same is true for Celia. While her excitement at lesbian experimentation is amusing, I believe she actually said to Nancy in the first season that she had slept with a woman in college, and it’s nothing new in the way it affects her relationships with other people. Isabelle has always hated her and seen her try to manipulate her into liking her, and she’s definitely teamed with Dean and Doug before to take down Celia. Only Andy is actually headed in a new direction, and his new doctor companion will likely disappear from his life as soon as Esteban fully disappears from Nancy’s and she’ll have to move on to another town with another dangerous man.