Season six of Weeds takes weird turn with trip up north

Way back in early August, when promos for season six of Weeds hit the World Wide Web, it looked like Showtime’s struggling former darling was about to get back on its feet. Season four got weird when Nancy Botwin (Mary-Louise Parker) fled the suburban dystopia of Agrestic and hooked up with a Mexican drug cartel.

Season five was even worse, with Nancy’s bizarre marriage to Tijuana mayor/drug lord Esteban (Demián Bichir), the birth of their seemingly invisible baby, and the weak threat of villainess Pilar Zuzua (Kate del Castillo), whose welcome death came at the hands of Nancy’s now-nutso son Shane (Alexander Gould).

But the trailers and TV spots for season six showed a stark depar- ture from the previous seasons, showing the Botwins fleeing Cali- fornia in the wake of Pilar’s mur- der, shedding their old identities and taking on new life as the New- mans up north. Gone, it seemed, were the days in which we would be subject to Esteban’s raspy voice, secret tunnels to Mexico, and Nan- cy’s inability to use anything other than her sexual wiles to get her out of trouble. Weeds was starting over, with new identities, a new location and a whole host of new adventures ahead.

We’re now five episodes into the season, and while, yes, the Botwins have morphed into the Newmans, and yes, they have fled fire-happy SoCo in favor of the far corners of the Northwest, the rebirth of Weeds hasn’t been quite as awesome as we ex- pected. The season opens right where season five ended, with Shane and Nancy standing over Pilar’s lifeless body floating in a pool post-Shane busting her head open with a croquet mallet. Nancy, in a vodka-induced haze, pulled herself together enough to push her entire family (brother- in-law A ndy, played by Justin Kirk, eldest son Silas, played by Hunter Parish, and ne’er seen infant Stevie Ray) into a mini-van. The entire episode chronicled the family’s attempt to pack up their lives and go, including some extended focus on Andy’s decision to leave his doctor fiancée (Alanis Morissette) in the dust.

Episode two takes the Botwins up the coast on a fruitless voyage to the Canadian border, with some gas station pit stops along the way. Cesar (Enrique Castillo) and Ignacio (Hemky Madera), Esteban’s two henchmen, have returned and are hot on the fugitive family’s trail. It is in this episode that the Botwins become the Newmans in a seriously sad ID-burning ceremony – Andy becomes Randy, Nancy calls herself Nathalie, Shane is Shawn, Stevie Ray is renamed Ari, and Silas, who is reluctant to let the driver’s license he worked so hard to get go up in flames, is christened Mike.

The third episode chronicles the Newmans’ new jobs at a Seattle hotel, with Nancy/Nathalie as a maid , Andy/Randy as a dishwasher, and Silas/Mike as a bellhop. Shane/Shawn is put on babysitting duty for Stevie Ray/Ari, though that is probably not one of Nancy/Nathalie’s wisest decisions. The Nancy in Nathalie needs more of an adventure, which she finds in the form of a hippie weed-dealer who drives a hard bargain. It’s okay, though, because where the Botwins were big into marijuana, the Newmans only deal with hash. Doug (Kevin Nealon) — remember him? That old Agrestic burnout? — shows up at the very end, and gets pulled along on the hunt with Cesar and Ignacio.

Episode four delves a little deeper into the Newmans’ lives in Seattle. Silas ends up on a college campus and sees what life would have been like had that crazy Nancy never ruined his adolescence with her weed-dealing antics. Shane makes friends with some lonely pill-popping housewives, and Andy impresses a testy chef with his culinary skills. Nancy, on the other hand, is right back where she started, selling hash to hotel guests.

Episode five, which aired Monday night, marks a return to the Andy-loves-Nancy plotline that peppered the previous season, and Nancy/Nathalie tells Andy/Randy, perhaps not too definitively, that nothing will ever happen between them. Nancy/ Nathalie gets into an altercation with a fellow hotel maid, and there are a couple of catfights. Silas/Mike fully embraces college life/women, and Shane continues to come off as totally crazy. Oh, but at the end, it turns out that Cesar and Esteban finally find the family and have Shane in the back of their car.

Season six has had some moments that reflect a return to the wonderful Weeds from years past — the ID burning ceremony, for instance, and virtually every exchange between Andy and Nancy—but for the most part, a lot of things that made Weeds so great in its early days are nowhere to be seen. The ever-crazy, ever- amazing Agrestic housewife Celia Hodes (Elizabeth Perkins) is gone this season, along with her absolutely awesome daughter Isabelle (Allie Grant) and always hilarious husband, Dean (Andy Milder).

Most importantly, while the Seattle scene is a nice change from the Mexican border of seasons four and five, something still feels off on the show without Agrestic. Weeds lost its way when it lost its focus as a dark comedy chronicling the life of a suburban THC-dealing single mother and became a full-blown drug circus of crazy. It’s fine that the creators want to do something different with the show, because after six seasons the old stuff can get kind of formulaic, but it seems at this point that Weeds isn’t even close to what it used to be.

Back in seasons one and two, when Nancy was still a unwitting widow who stumbled into the small-time drug trade, when Silas was still a whiny adolescent with weird hair, Andy was kind of a creep who cyber-sexed with Silas’ deaf girlfriend and Shane was a ten-year-old that staged terrorist hostage videos during playdates, Weeds was wacky and offbeat, but it had a certain energy to it, an endearing aura that pulled you in and made you care about each and every character.

True, we’re only five episodes deep, and Weeds still has some time to make a comeback, but it already feels like the characters we learned to love years ago have morphed into two-dimensional versions of themselves.

We felt bad for Nancy when things went awry in the begin- ning, and we cheered her on as she found knew ways to wile her way out of things, but now we know she’s just going to suck on her iced-coffee straw and bat her eyes, and things will be just fine.

We adored watching Andy hand out weird advice to his nephews about love, life and the pursuit of happiness, but now his words of wisdom are run- ning stale, and his antics are less amusing.

But of course, as any television watcher/sports fan knows, the season can always get better.