All ten episodes of Netflix’s Disjointed became available Friday, August 25 and was an easy binge watch. Each episode is a half-hour long and it’s about Ruth Whitefeather Feldman (Kathy Bates), a cannabis lawyer, cannabis activist and user, as she runs her marijuana dispensary, Ruth’s Alternative Caring.
Ruth prides herself on her reputation as a marijuana activist. She loves sticking it to The Man. With marijuana legal in California, she is now making loads of money off of it. She dispenses both medicinal and recreational pot. In Episode 1 titled “Omega Strain”, she says she is spreading the gospel of marijuana because it heals the sick, calms the afflicted and “ushers in a golden age of people not being such dicks all the time.” The title of each episode is also the name of a strain of marijuana sold in her shop.
Joining Ruth is her son, Travis (Aaron Moten), who recently graduated with a MBA and hopes to co-manage his mother’s shop. Travis’s father – divorced from Ruth – is a Black Panther who became a corporate lawyer for Big Pharma. Ruth teases Travis that he has gone to the dark side now that he possesses a MBA. The employees are Carter (Tone Bell), an Iraqi War veteran suffering from PTSD, who is the taser carrying security guard, Jenny (Elizabeth Ho) and Olivia (Elizabeth Alderfer) the ‘budtenders’, and Pete (Dougie Baldwin), the plant grower. The interesting storyline is with Carter. His flashbacks are animated and inserted into each episode as he deals with stress and his war memories are triggered.
Sometimes Carter suffers from hallucinations as he watches the security monitor and the hallucinations play out on his monitor. In Episode 3 titled “Rutherford B. Haze”, Ruth suggests that Carter use cannabis for his anxiety and depression after he locks himself in her office to calm himself down. He is the only one at the dispensary who doesn’t smoke. He opens up to Olivia, when she comes to check on him, that he lost three buddies in Fallujah. He was deployed for three tours in Iraq.
By Episode 8 titled “Pyongyang Green”, Carter tells Ruth that smoking pot all the time isn’t enough and he feels alone when he is home, away from work. He says, “I did three combat tours in Iraq and I feel more safe there than I do as a black man in America.” He says he can’t get more than two or three hours of sleep at night, messes up relationships with women and feels guilty to be alive. She offers him the name of a friend who counsels veterans with PTSD, which he initially refuses but does end up accepting by the series end.
There are a couple of political references to past presidents made in a rather bipartisan way. In Episode 3, a photo of Ruth and former President Jimmy Carter causes Ruth to comment that yes, that is Carter standing next to her. “That guy loved three things, weed, peanuts and failure.” In Episode 5 titled “Schrodinger’s Pot”, tells Carter that she has been fighting all her life – “DEA agents, prison, Nixon, Reagan…”.
The last two episodes, titled “Olivia’s S***balls” and “The Worst”, deal with a DEA raid on the dispensary. While California state law made the use of marijuana legal, it is still against federal law. So, within the gray area, DEA makes raids on dispensaries and confiscates cash and product. Ruth calls the raid a shake down but her establishment was raided because a tape of two loyal customers giving out joints to minors in her parking lot was shown to DEA. This provides Ruth with an opportunity to lecture on the ineffectiveness of the War on Drugs.
This series uses fake commercials as a filler to the plot – Lay’s potato chips, a parody of the Coors beer commercial substituting pot growing cowboys, Cannafoam – cannibus infused shaving cream, etc. The various employees also make YouTube videos for the Strain O’ The Day of marijuana to promote products. Cheech and Chong make a cameo appearance via YouTube as the very last scene.
All in all, I have to say this series was a disappointment. I was hoping for a real comedy but instead, it fell short. There are puns and some silly scenes of stoned people but mostly it misses the mark to be very entertaining. Inserting the YouTube and animation seem like these additions were necessary because the storylines came up lacking in depth.
