The best of creative endeavors sticks with the receptacle. Yes, human beings here have been reduced to things by which to hold information over for a week or so as the writers, actors and everyone else scurries to complete another installment of whatever show is at the time most entertaining to them. But if as one of those writers or producers, you begin to create a product that isn’t really able to stick with viewers for a time, there might be a problem. And I kinda feel like Weeds has gotten to that point. It’s unfortunate, as I’ve said elsewhere, but nonetheless true. The show seems to be headed down some path into the wilderness without a way to get back.

Glue finds Nancy scrambling to locate her husband who disappeared at the end of the previous episode. Unfortunately, being a white woman with just the slightest ability to speak Spanish in a Mexican hospital doesn’t afford her too many leads. While she’s accompanied by Cesar, her husband’s goon, it becomes some weird fairy tale with an ogre leading around some distressed maiden. The pairing, which has evolved over a season or so, seems to belie the character that has sprung up around Nancy.

After the death of her children’s father, she was determined to succeed on her own and give her two sons what they needed – alone, with only a few sporadic male suitors, but no one to help with the bills and such. She was a weird paradigmatic figure of feminism, attacking any problem that she encountered in a straightforward manner, or at least one that would work. There were always a number of guys sniffing around, as well there should be, but Nancy seemed to subsist on her grit. That doesn’t seem to be the case any longer. And while she might not need the company of a political figure from south of the boarder, it’s become clear that existing without Esteban could be a task that the heroine isn’t up to.

While Nancy’s traipsing around wards on various floors of some runaround hospital, her kids have been left with Esteban’s snooty, private school daughter. And as the contrived  tension between her and Silas is reaching a point where nudity might be in order sooner or later, a few of her boarding school pals come by, blow some smack and are ready to take advantage of the passed out visage. Shane scares ‘em off. Yep, Shane.

As the theatrics are being played out at the mansion portion of the Botwin empire, Andy’s decided to ask Alanis Morissette’s character to marry him. That sounds all well and good, accept Andy wants the engagement ring that his brother gave to Nancy – which she doesn’t wear any longer, obviously. That debate takes up a good deal of the narrative as the show bounces back and forth between mansion and hospital. And while Esteban isn’t found, per se, he is spotted at a lectern just prior to the conclusion of the episode leaving audiences wondering if Nancy’s going to have to fend for herself once again.