Full Review of "Pittsburgh"
9.5
"Superb"
"Pittsburgh", the finale of Weeds' sophomore season, produces a satisfying conclusion to the year. With lives and plenty of weed at stake, Nancy and Conrad's growing operation reaches its climax as a betrayed DEA agent Peter Scottson demands every dime from an impending weed sale, but the buyer, drug dealer 'U-Turn', has no intention of paying as he brings loaded guns to the meeting place. The episode keeps you on your toes and soon adds a third party in the mix, and by the end, you will be teased and left in the lurch with a trio of gripping, unresolved situations that will almost certainly make you come back for next season's premiere. The fates of quite a few characters remain in the balance, yet it also provides several great laughs in both the A- and B-plots, with comedy in the show's DNA.
The episode starts with Nancy sitting in Silas' room, which is littered with stolen "drug free zone" signs and surveillance cameras. Lupita comments that Silas went on this rebellious streak for Nancy's sake implying that he's helping her avoid being caught as she deals drugs which was also my initial thought. However, the fact that he's still missing on his younger brother's graduation from elementary school signifies that perhaps he has other motives in mind.
Silas is not the only family member to disappoint Shane, as Nancy abruptly gets up and leaves the graduation ceremony before the event is finished. Shane, obviously devastated by this, takes comfort by hanging around Kat, Andy's crazy former lover. At least the reasons for Nancy's departure are clear and understandable to us: she has to go to the grow house to meet up with her business partner Conrad, where an intimidating and threatening Peter reminds them to give him the money they'll receive from U-Turn for the harvested batch of "MILF weed". Before he takes his leave, he sneeringly tells Conrad that Nancy "f***s like a wild animal". Unfortunately for us, the sexual tension between Nancy and Conrad isn't discussed between them in the remainder of the episode. And unfortunately for Peter, he's soon executed while in his truck, waiting for the deal to conclude.
Peter's demise is quite tragic, even if he's been painted as a major antagonist in the last two episodes of this season. He's hurt. He took a significant sacrifice to have a shot at a romance with Nancy and gain her trust when they got married in Las Vegas. In return, despite her best efforts to love Peter, Nancy ends up stringing him along. The deeper Nancy gets into the drug trade, the more their relationship deteriorates. The fable of the scorpion and the frog (referred a few times throughout the season) is fittingly apt, because even though Nancy and Peter try to make a go of it and coexist together, they are both driven by their nature. Remember that when they first met, Nancy wasn't growing. She wasn't selling her own product and raking in easy money. All she was doing was selling weed in small amounts just to get by. She was a struggling widow who couldn't afford the middle-class lifestyle. The transformation of her situation is quite radical, and this is despite Peter's pleas for her to consider a different line of work. And when Peter felt double-crossed as he listened in on Nancy's phone call to Conrad at the end of "Mile Deep and a Foot Wide", he revealed his true colours. He thinks drug dealers are the scum of the earth, and he aggressively makes his point clear when he threatens to kill Conrad, becomes ice cold to Nancy, and plans to mug them of their money.
Despite him being the villain in Nancy's story, it's easy to forget that Peter holds a morally good job as a DEA agent. Nancy is a drug dealer the type of person that most people would normally shun in society. Peter was ridiculed at work when Nancy went behind his back and tipped off Heylia about his intended drug bust. He wanted to put a plan into motion to take down the bigger fish, U-Turn. Sure, he's crooked. It's true that because I was continuously rooting for the protagonist in the story, I didn't want to see him get away with his misdeeds, and in the end, he probably got what was coming to him. But I sympathised with him, because he had no idea what he was getting into when he tried to get closer to Nancy in the first season. He couldn't have predicted how far she was going to go down this drug-dealing path. In addition, it perhaps feels harsher knowing that he was killed by the Armenian posse, who are arguably more merciless and ethically wrong. Peter angered them by merely doing his job and taking down their base of operations (albeit to enhance his relationship with Nancy rather than uphold the law).
Funnily enough, Nancy tipping off Heylia has inadvertently put her in danger in more ways than one. The extra strain on her and Peter's relationship obviously does her no favours, but it also means that U-Turn is free to do as he pleases. When she tries to flog the weed to U-Turn at a bargain price, U-Turn responds by turning up at the grow house and holding her and Conrad at gunpoint with automatic weapons. Things get a little bit worse when the Armenians come in, also with guns, and demand payment for their disposal of Peter. Interestingly, Conrad appears to have had an inkling that Peter was going to get whacked; he calmly tells the Armenians that he doesn't have the money, because U-Turn wasn't planning on holding up their end of the deal. In contrast, Nancy is struggling to come to terms with what happened to Peter. Even though she's been in the drug business for a while now, this is the first time where the consequences have been grave and cost someone their life. Her facial expressions give away her shock and guilt (Mary-Louise Parker is consistently fantastic in these scenes), and this is all while U-Turn and the Armenians couldn't give less of a damn about the deceased agent and are instead arguing about who gets to take home the massive stash of weed.
The two factions then point their guns at Nancy to make her open the safe and take out the weed. In such intense moments, it is a credit that the episode can still draw out some uncomfortable chuckles from me with black humour, most notably when everyone shouts at Nancy in unison that Peter's dead and when Nancy has to be told to "open the f***ing safe" three times after she fails to compose herself.
Unfortunately, when she opens the safe, she finds all of the weed gone and in its place, a "drug free zone" sign. Silas' ulterior motive is revealed when a panicked Nancy calls him on the phone: he wants in on the drug scheme. Whether he was stealing the signs and the cameras to ensure that the weed operation continues unharmed or to prove he can be an asset to the team is open for debate, but it's clear that he's trying to force his way into the business. Silas' smug face doesn't last long, though. Storing the weed hostage inside the boot of his car, he hangs up when he sees Celia and a police officer pull up behind him, with Celia angrily accusing him of stealing the cameras. This situation in turn makes Nancy's much worse. With several guns trained on her and no weed to appease either U-Turn or the Armenians, it looks like her time is up. What a tantalisingly cruel cliffhanger.
The other unresolved plot ending wasn't quite as interesting. Kat reveals to Andy (while giving him a handjob) that she stole over a million bucks' worth of poker chips, which is the reason why she's being pursued by a bounty hunter known as Abumchuk. She wants Andy to accompany her as she flees to South America, but he refuses. Shane, upset that his mother and brother are nowhere to be seen at the graduation party, is easily convinced by Kat to come with her, and they ride off in Andy's van. Not long after Andy realises that Shane's gone missing does he go after him with Abumchuk on his truck. While I really like Zooey Deschanel in both her acting and musical career, I'm slightly ambivalent about her character. On one hand, Deschanel wonderfully mixes quirky and crazy for Kat, and makes her mostly fun to watch in the scenes that she's in. On the other, Kat hasn't added much consequential value to the show. Her actions and interactions with the Botwins don't appear to likely impact the core characters in any meaningful way in the long run, unless there's something to be gained from Shane's misadventure when the next season picks up. However, there's more good than bad about this plotline, and perhaps I wouldn't have nitpicked this much if there wasn't extra emphasis on it, being part of the season finale and all.
Overall, the second season has been a huge success from my perspective, with more focus on the drama side of things than the comedy. The slight change in direction and the more serious tone have shown many benefits. Not only are the episodes more compelling to watch, as the characters are involved in longer story arcs with more at stake, but I also cared about them more than I ever did back in the first season. That said, there were still plenty of laugh-out-loud moments over the twelve episodes this year, and "Pittsburgh" is no different from the rest. The comedic highlight is probably this heated exchange between Dean and Doug after Dean, unable to reach Doug's face, punches his neck instead: "You're freakishly tall" / "I'm also freakishly long, so imagine how much of me was inside your wife". The great thing about "Pittsburgh" is that it delivers on what Weeds set out to accomplish, and goes further. It's a half-hour of drama with some extremely intense scenarios, and it isn't afraid to sprinkle the runtime with plenty of laughs even in uncomfortable moments.moreless
