Pour one out to Showtime’s Weeds, y’all. But not the good stuff. The show no longer deserves it. However, as we reflect upon last night’s weak, bummer of a series finale, let’s remember the good times: The first three seasons. It was once a great show. A darkly funny show. A show with a small universe of fantastic characters who all lived in the nice suburban town of Aggrestic, where a widowed suburban mom by the name of Nancy Botwin became a small-time pot dealer in order to support her family with the help of her quirky brother-in-law, Andy.
That show looked like this:
Remember this show? Remember Doug, the hilarious pothead neighbor who smoked up with Andy. He was also an accountant who helped Nancy launder money through a bakery shop. Then there was Silas, who was an angsty suburban teenager, and then Shane, the odd but precocious younger brother with a sinister streak.
We’ve come so far since then, almost entirely to the detriment of Jenji Kohan’s show. I will give Kohan this much credit, however: At the end of season three, she knew that the smaller-scare suburban premise had been completely exhausted. The thing to do, then, would’ve been to cancel the show. But in America, we don’t cancel shows at the top of their game. We let them run until they’re creatively bankrupt.
So, Nancy Botwin went from anti-hero to sex villain: She married the mayor of Mexico City, who was also the leader of a drug cartel. She was responsible for a lot of people’s deaths. Hell, even her son, Shane, killed someone. Nancy turned into a horrible, uncaring mother, and a pretty terrible all-around person. She neglected her family. She screwed over Andy every other episode. She had sex with Zack Morris. Then was there season on the lam; then she spent some time in jail and got herself a lesbian lover. Then she got shot in the head, but survived. Then she moved back to the suburbs to help raise her son, Stevie, who she had with the now dead drug kingpin.
Though she tried to go straight, the allure of pot kept bringing her back. Eventually, her and Silas struck a deal with big tobacco to turn their pot-growing expertise into a corporate enterprise; Shane became a crooked cop; Doug found a tax loophole for religious exemptions and started his own cult; and Andy finally got some sense and left Nancy.
That brings us, more or less, to last night’s one-hour finale. It zoomed ahead into the future, about seven or eight years or so, and centered on the bar mitzvah of little Stevie, now grown up and on the brink of manhood. It was excuse enough to bring back the whole gang once again and see how they’re doing in the future.
Here’s the Cliff’s Notes:
![[avatar]](http://p.uproxxcdn.com/photo/4006/thumb)
![[image]](http://cdn.uproxx.com/wp-content/thumbnails/130/110/2013/05/1280-1-boardwalk-empire-terence-winter-150x150.jpg)
![[image]](http://cdn.uproxx.com/wp-content/thumbnails/130/110/2013/04/mlp-axe-150x150.gif)
![[image]](http://cdn.uproxx.com/wp-content/thumbnails/130/110/2013/04/heather-graham-150x150.jpg)
![[image]](http://cdn.uproxx.com/wp-content/thumbnails/130/110/2013/04/Dexter_Banner_by_TankeyX-150x150.jpg)
So glad i stopped watching after they zach morris thing. this just sounds awful.
So glad I stopped watching after S.4. I heard how bad they went off the rails with this and the only way this should have ended was with Nancy dead. She was a terrible mother/person/business-woman/drug dealer etc. and she should not have come out of this thing unscathed.
Boo-urns!
Yeah. It didn’t make any sense to me that she didn’t die. Why else, in the beginning of the season, would they tell us that a bullet remained lodged in her brain and that it could move at any moment and kill her? They forgot to pull the trigger on Chekhov’s gun.
It sounds like they were trying to mimic the whole Breaking Bad anti-hero thing, but had absolutely no idea how to do it properly.
This literally makes me angry. What an asinine ending. I stopped watching after Shane killed the lady in Mexico I don’t know how many seasons back, and it sounds like it got so, SO much worse after that. I used to really love this show, but I have zero regrets over dropping it.
Oh Dustin – you forgot to update. In the later seasons, did she ever manage to get the Fartbucks straw surgically unattached from her idiot whore maw?
Those last five minutes made me want to punch the television.
I wish I could have quit while the show was ahead, but Andy and Doug buried a hole deep into my brain and I had to watch simply because those two are hilarious. The rest of the show fell apart and I’ll be surprised to see the actors who play Silas and Shane in anything else.
That deaf chick is totally hot though.
yes. same here.
I pulled my chute during the cartel season. Sounds like I made the right call.
Same as me, a couple episodes in. You could tell at the time that Mexico was Nancy jumping the shark.
As soon as she peed in the cup and they were like this was test run I literally turn off the TV looked at my roommate and said “Never again.”
For all the bad, that final image is great.
This season had so much potential to it, but as predicted everything fell apart mid-season. Thankfully the episode prior was a great one and Andy finally had the balls to fuck her then tell her to piss off. This finale is the definition of “Limping to the Barn”.
My biggest problem with this show is the lack of consequences, and even when they do show the consequences to Nancy’s actions they take it back, almost right away. And to think AMC thought Breaking Bad was too identical at the beginning.
Good riddance.
Obviously the show had really gone downhill over the years, but I stuck with it just because I was attached. That finale, however, was infuriatingly bad. Terrible storytelling.
Why introduce Shane being an alcoholic and then getting cured in the last episode ever? Why would anyone care about Stevie having an existential crisis in the last episode ever? Why bring up that Nancy married the rabbi she broke up with and then he died? Why have Megan suddenly hate Nancy? Why reintroduce Conrad in the penultimate episode, and then not have him in the finale? Why bring back Doug’s gay son who hasn’t even been mentioned for years? Why spend all of this last season giving Shane a black girlfriend and then forgetting about her?
They literally could not have found a way to make that finale any worse. I thought it would have been a much more satisfying end to the series if the prior episode were the last. If our final image was Andy finally having sex with Nancy and then running away. But then again, literally anything would have been a much more satisfying ending than what we got.
Agreed. We considered stopping after Andy left Nancy screaming his name in a postcoital panic, but they sucked us in for one last flailing attempt to bring it all back home.
Nitpick: For a boy, it’s bar mitzvah. Bah/Bat mitzvah is for a girl.
I actually didn’t start Weeds until this summer. I heard everyone go on about how much it jumped the shark and isn’t good anymore but I still wanted to form my own opinion. I enjoyed most of it. I got fully caught up last week, just in time for the finale. I can pinpoint the exact moment it jumps the shark. The episode where Nancy bangs Zack Morris. That was a horrible episode and it was downhill from there. 7 was a pretty bad season. This season was weak but not as bad. Also didn’t mind the finale but I HATED the time jump. I just feel it’s always a cop out plot device. Don’t know where to go? Fuck it, jump a couple of years.
Whelp, I pulled the plug about two episodes after Agrestic burned down and it sounds like I did the right thing.
Andy’s masturbation talk to Shane was the high water mark, for me.
there was a show called weeds?!??
so some down-on-their-luck Suburbanite turns to the ever increasingly dangerous drug underworld to provide for their family? Somebody want to explain to me why Weeds blows yet Breaking Bad has its dick sucked on what seems like a bi-daily basis here…
similarly, at least I can jerk it to Nancy Botwin…Walter White, not so much. Not saying I haven’t…just not so much.
weeds blows because of poor writing.
the first 3 seasons were sterling, things cooled off quite a bit over the next couple, and then it simply became downright abhorrent.
yet i watched ALL of it..
There was a town called Majestic? Are we certain it wasn’t called ‘Agrestic?’
Ha! You’re just following me around today from site to site, eh? Noted and corrected. Thanks!
there was also regrestic
Agrestic was rebuilt after the fire and became Majestic. Years later, in this season’s penultimate episode it was shown that it is now called Regrestic.
I kept hate watching it out of spite. The only show I ever dropped all together was Dexter after season 4 and The Walking Dead because I’m a comic book fanboy and that show is nothing like the comic.
Seen all but this season. I may get around to it, if my DVR explodes and I can’t see anything new.
Sounds terrible.
and this doesnt even mention doug’s cult attire and the iphone 37
I continued watching out of some misplaced sense of allegiance. Last week’s episode finally brought forth everything I had wanted out of this final season and I felt was actually the best episode in years.
Then this finale aired. I’m glad the show is over. It just completely wasted the goodwill last week’s episode bought.
Two things: it’s Agrestic with one ‘g’ and her third(?) husband was the mayor of Tijuana, not Mexico City. Otherwise I’m with you all the way.
I was so happy when, in the episode before the finale, Andy fucked Nancy and then left her laying there. Fucked her on the same place where her first husband, his brother, had died. Poetic justice. I hate Nancy with the heat of a thousand fiery suns.
In my opinion, Nancy dieing would have been the easy out.
In the end, she wound up worse off than that. No one needed her anymore…and even worse than that, no one even wanted her.
I stopped watching during the first Ren Mar season, then a couple of years later I picked it back up but quit after Shane killed Pilar, and then earlier this year I picked it back up again in time for this final season. It’s been a very up and down show, but I really enjoyed the season they spent on the run before Nancy went to prison.
I haven’t enjoyed Weeds much this last season but that finale really worked for me. Unexpectedly so. I didn’t realize I had any emotion left invested in Weeds, but tears were jerked. So happy for Andy. Now excuse me while I put on a Rilo Kiley CD for the first time in five or six years.
I finally got around to watching this a couple nights ago (though I missed the first 15 minutes or so). It took me a while — sort of embarrassingly long, I must admit — to figure out that it was a hoffs-drawlar, but I actually really enjoyed it. This season has felt totally aimless, but then at the end of the third-to-last episode they suddenly realized, “Shit, we have to wrap this up somehow,” and the last two episodes worked really well for me. Liked them a lot, felt slightly rewarded for having come back to the show for these last two seasons.
Wasn’t perfect, though. I REALLY wish Doug had died. Of murder. Gruesomely. Game of Thrones-style. And I liked what they were doing with Nancy for a large part of the episode, in terms of her seeming kind of miserable — that definitely seemed appropriate and well-deserved — but then towards the end things started to seem like they would work out for her, which was a little disappointing. Loved what they did with Silas and Andy, though, and Shane’s story seemed fitting as well (that mustache, haha). Overall a fairly cathartic couple episodes, and a decent finale. Nothing I’ll remember for very long, but I liked it.
I find it funny that most of you are getting upset over fictional characters. I LOVED the show, I didn’t like how it ended, but im not going to get upset and make some rant and bash the show and its creators for it. Funny people!!