‘Weeds’ Review: “Allosaurus Crush Castle”

This season of 'Weeds' seems bound and determined to keep Nancy, well, bound and determined to stick with what her family knows best -- even if that means just finding more legal and socially acceptable means of doing so.

It looks like I was wrong -- Nancy didn't demolish Silas' pot; it was his banana-pants new friend RJ, who has conveniently wound up in a mental hospital, claiming he was off his meds when he snatched Silas' plants and hid them in a closet at his parents' house. Silas throws on some burglar gear and endeavors to retrieve his plants, but inadvertently walks into a surprise birthday party, where it's presumed he's the stripper they hired. (And Silas is a terrible stripper who does, like, zero stripping.)

But the biggest take away here is that I was wrong, and for a show like 'Weeds,' which has become woefully predictable with the cyclical nature of one Nancy Botwin, this is fabulous news. It seemed like 'Weeds' would end its final season without much changing for anyone, and it didn't feel like Jenji Kohan & Co. were treating this final season like a legitimate farewell, but the wheels finally appear to be spinning.

It's just unfortunate that it's taken disposable characters like RJ and Tim Scottson (the latter of which shouldn't have been so disposable, but alas) to get us to a point in the season where we finally have some momentum. RJ is such a bizarre, throwaway character who would fit better in previous seasons as plot filler, but in the final season it seems odd to include someone so easily dismissed and useless to plot propulsion.

But I don't want to dwell too much on the negative this week when there's some honest-to-goodness development going on. Nancy has befriended one of the soccer dad's from Stevie's team -- a pharmaceutical sales rep who can get her a job at his company under the pretense that she used to work as a rep herself for a company which no longer exists (a half-lie) in exchange for her allowing his snot-nosed, friendless jerk child sleep over with Stevie. But Nancy is also worried about Silas, whom she finds drunkenly cleaning his grow room. Silas gives a speech about his predicament, his mannerisms and demeanor so eerily similar to Mary Louise Parker's, and by episode's end, Nancy has negotiated a position for Silas at the company as well -- upon discovering that the company sells faux marijuana pills and is working on engineering legit THC meds.

Meanwhile, Jill has discovered she's pregnant, prompting Doug and Andy to contemplate what this means for them. Doug abandoned his ex-wife when she had their most recent child, so for him this could be a chance to right a past wrong and prove he's the man he should have been. For Andy, the self-proclaimed "glue of the Botwin family," this means taking on a new level of responsibility, and one that involves something more intimate and personal. No longer is it about caring for Nancy's children or watching everyone else's back -- now he has a tiny life of his own to look after, and he might actually have to get a job and take care of his own Andy business. Speaking of which -- when was the last time we saw Andy with a job anyway?

Shane continues to excel with his girlfriend in the police academy, but when he lets two of his dumber classmates pay him to write essays for their exasperated instructor (a hilarious Bill Fagerbakke), he gets busted, which results in him suggesting to his teacher that they could work out an even better deal than Shane using the bribe money to bribe his teacher, considering there will be several more assignments coming down the pike. If anyone has really grown on this show, it's Shane, who has truly been raised in his mother's illegal empire and whose mind was the most impressionable -- an asset that has allowed him to learn from Nancy's mistakes. He is just as conniving as she is, but without all the sloppiness.

This week's "Little Boxes" theme was sung by Bomb the Music Industry! and you can listen below: