Watching Weeds anymore is like any bad habit you can’t quite force yourself to break. The enjoyment you used to get from it may have dimmed, but you can’t stop yourself—yet—from indulging each summer, even if the prospect of actually being entertained seems more remote by the week.

I’m hard pressed to decide which odd couple I care about less: Nancy and Esteban, Andy and Audra (though Alanis Morrissette has been a nice surprise), Celia and Doug (OK, that last one wins hands down; these vulgarians’ connection to this series has grown more strained and less enjoyable each season). As Nancy’s life and circumstances have grown more detached from any semblance of reality, now that she’s playing house with a new baby in the plush villa of her crooked politician sorta-husband, I have grown similarly disengaged from the world of Weeds. I thought this might be the season Nancy broke ties altogether with the menaces from south of the border. No such luck, although we’ll have to see what fallout comes from the finale’s last little bloody shock. More on that in a few.

So what did we learn in this episode? “Men are weak.” The gospel of Nancy Botwin, and let’s do a checklist to see how right she is. 1) Her husband. Esteban is now a puppet of the lethal Mexican kingmaker Pilar, and he is helpless to fight back against her political machinations, no matter how humiliated Nancy is in the process. 2) Andy. He’s finally putting aside all man-child distractions (well, not Ms. Pac-Man, there are limits), including selling the General Lee, to woo his beloved ob-gyn Audra with a flex-fuel car. Too bad he flees the second he sees Audra’s jealous anti-abortion stalker waiting for them with a crossbow. So not cool. 3) Doug. Confronting Celia (who’s dolled up in Nancy-wannabe drag) over the missing pot she purloined, he’s clobbered by her pitcher of screwdrivers, trussed up in the storage locker, and becomes her bitch as she puts together a team to rival Nancy’s old drug crew. (The other members include her milquetoast ex-husband Dean, the return of timid Sanjay and newly revealed lucha libre wrestler Ignacio—and, of course, smug little Isabel, the “brains” of the operation.) 4) Guillermo. Nancy thought she’d enlisted him to off her nemesis Pilar, but the con she helped free is still on Pilar’s payroll and rats on Nancy instead. What’s the Mexican term for “tool?”

In one of the episode’s more disturbing moments, Esteban cuddles with Nancy, only to be repelled when he discovers she’s wearing his deodorant. “You smell like a man. You will not wear it again,” he barks. She complies in her tremulous, unhappy way. When she says, “You’re the man,” it’s anything but a compliment. What again is she doing with this horrible man? I know they had a baby together—it’s why she’s still alive—but witnessing her ambivalence with this glamorous goon over the very long haul isn’t nearly as compelling, or fun, as her misadventures in the drug trade back when her No. 1 priority was still looking after her family.

The family angle is the one part of the show that still resonates. The real tragedy amid the dark comedy of Weeds is that while Nancy went to desperate lengths to provide for her boys, she ended up corrupting them instead. She now looks at her unresponsive sons (including young misfit Shane, who recently took a bullet meant for her and seems to be enjoying the pain) and sees strangers. “I breast-fed both of you,” she informs her puzzled offspring, a rather poignant and needy statement given that Esteban has demanded Baby Boy Botwin go on formula. Silas, now a veteran of the pot trade, at least seems capable of noble gestures—he tries to rescue Esteban’s junkie daughter, another neglected child gone wrong, from the ravages of heroin. (Talk about a going-nowhere subplot; she’s shipped to rehab off camera, and we’re told Esteban cried.) But Shane’s another story. He embodies Nancy’s assertion that “We’re all broken.”

In the cliffhanger shocker (which has become a Weeds season-ending trademark), Pilar is having a blast at a swank dinner party threatening the lives of Nancy’s “extraneous” older children in front of their horrified mother when, out of nowhere, Shane takes a croquet mallet to Pilar’s stylish noggin, sending her apparently lifeless body into the pool, bloodying the water. Awww, look what mommy’s little psycho did.

It was just a week ago when Shane wondered aloud about turning back time and wishing things had turned out differently. (That prompted Nancy’s tearful declaration to Andy that “I would love to be ordinary,” which Andy didn’t buy for a second.) Is Weeds expressing some remorse for the unpleasant, unfunny corner it’s painted itself into? Maybe Shane taking murderous action can put this show back on course. I imagine I’ll be turning back in next summer, against my better judgment, to find out. Some habits are just so darned difficult to let go.

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