Weeds has recently proceeded with such scattershot abandon — Celia in custody, then not; Nancy training to smuggle, then being deployed in a front; Albert Brooks nailing the absurd pathos his castmates all aspire to, then disappearing — that we hardly believe the unfolding allegory that dominated this episode was even planned by the writers. But it couldn’t possibly be an accident that Nancy’s maternity store obscures a tunnel that birthed so much trouble this last half-hour, could it? And that Celia decides to fold her yappy daughter back into her cold embrace? And that Nancy herself is watching her own children slip slowly away — particularly Silas, now wooed by none other than the neighborhood MILF? Sweet Mary: Maybe we should start calling it Moms.

Last night’s episode brought a terrifying moment: As Guillermo holds a gun to Celia's head, demanding to know why she was outside his warehouse with a disposable camera, Nancy flicks her gorgeous head, seemingly on the verge of feeding her former neighbor to the druggy beasts. Instead, she grabs the gun, says, “She's with me,” and then knocks out Celia's front tooth and shoves her in the dusty Prius. And so began an emotional, even sickening, Weeds.

“Hurry up and wait”: It’s a ruling concept of military life, and it was the ruling conceit of the first installment in HBO’s seven-part Iraq-war mini-series — which, after all, was written by David Simon and Ed Burns, reality-obsessed masterminds of The Wire, and based on the account of an embedded reporter for Rolling Stone. So, yeah, nothing really happened last night: As we meet them, the First Reconnaissance Battalion Marines are hanging around Camp Mathilda in Kuwait, indulging their homoerotic impulses and wondering when they’ll get to invade Iraq; then they begin leading the invasion of Iraq. But this onion’s got layers, of course. And if the tears aren’t flowing yet, the series has at least started revealing itself. We’ve color-coded our recap: Red for the hawkish, un-p.c. stuff, Blue for the blue-state bait, and Rainbow, well, that’s where we round up all the homoerotic happenings.

This season, Weeds has done away with the opening song, and along with it, the little ticky-tacky boxes on a hillside. We wish they would bring back the endless domestic scenes — Nancy in the tub, spraying a dying plant; Heylia and Conrad in the kitchen, baking cookies and ruminating on the blah blah blah of life, that theme we so enjoyed last episode. This one played out like a confused adventure satire: Rush Hour 3 meets Bonnie and Clyde — especially the latter, it being more cruel than funny.

Watching Weeds we sometimes wonder, What’s the point? Not of life, but the show: last season’s shoot-’em-ups, Tarantino-esque standoffs, senseless tattoos; even the patently absurd premise, the pot-dealing sweetheart who never gets caught and owns a big house. Is all this just a vehicle for the deliciousness of California domesticity and, more important, the deliciousness of Mary-Louise Parker? But then — then — there’s an episode like last night’s, where Jenji Kohan and her team of writers, hot on the heels of their very first Emmy nomination, truly deliver.

“We don’t shit where we eat. Or eat where we shit,” says Nancy to her boys, one of whom — Silas — is resplendently shirtless as he waters pot plants in his great-grandmother’s pink bathroom. (Silas is, let’s just say, no longer a boy. His rogue grandfather has even nicknamed him “Portnoy.”) “I’ve taken a shit on mushrooms,” Uncle Andy later declares as he whips batter in the kitchen. “And on a mushroom, actually.” There were, appropriately, a lot of references to shit this episode; our crew is deep in it.

When last we saw the crew, Nancy was on a Segway, deserting the prefab house she’d drenched in lighter fluid; her “accountant,” Doug, was singing folk ditties about fires and rivers to a gymnasium of displaced suburbanites; and the town of Agrestic was burning to the ground. Now, as Weeds returns for a fourth season, ashes fall from the sky (tasting like “loss — and muffins,” according to Doug), and Nancy and her boys hotfoot it to a beach town on the Mexican border, thereby inaugurating the young season’s drug-smuggling plotline.

Suffering through the convoluted plot twists and out-of-character action marring recent shows, we've told ourselves that all Battlestar chesslike moves were groundwork for something amazing. And our patience actually paid off! “Revelations,” the last episode before the season hiatus, might even sustain us until the show resumes in 2009.

As a serious remake of a campy seventies sci-fi show, Battlestar has defied expectations from the start. So it’s fitting that as we move closer to the big finale, this season is becoming something we never expected: a love story between two of its oldest characters.

As Battlestar’s final season continues to subdivide into competing story lines, we’ve accepted the fact that there are some narratives we’re emotionally invested in every week — and that others are real yawners concerning half-Cylon babies and imaginary opera houses. Friday’s episode had a typically busy plot that, most meaningfully, scooted along the quietly building love story between Bill Adama and Laura Roslin.