Bubbles

I guess it'd been awhile since the last ridiculous sex death. This one wasn't quite as good as Henri screwing someone out the window, but to be fair, that's pretty tough to beat.

If the show was just an hour of Max sitting around and brushing his hair, I'd enjoy it more.

And not legit enough to not use a fake ID to book the venue, even though Jared was old enough to book it and was standing right there. After Carter told him Ben was the one skimming credit card data at the bar, Jared went to Ben and threatened him that he'd have to do something for him in exchange for not reporting him to the police. This episode was the first time they revealed what exactly Ben was doing for him, but it was clearly implied that it would be something shady.

It's such a ridiculous plot contrivance that Carter went to stay with Lori because she had nowhere else to go. None of her friends even have parents to object to taking her in! Bird, Max, Gabe - any one of them would have let her stay with them if she'd bothered to ask. Even Not Ofie (I can never remember blond kid's name), the only non-Wilson kid on this show who actually lives with his parents, could probably have got permission for her to stay there for a night or two, like he did with Gabe. I'm really disappointed that they seem to be going the stereotypical crazy ex-girlfriend route with Jared's ex. It actually would have been refreshing if her side of the story held up and he turned out to be a jerk that jumps to "bitches be crazy" when women don't put up with his crap.

Or at least a photo where he actually looks like Zig. I mean, that shirt has sleeves.

I didn't see her behavior during the interview as being able to collect herself when needed - I took it as pretty much the opposite. It was ill-advised for her to be jumping in on her client's radio interview at all. Publicists generally don't run in and grab the mic to interrupt an interview. To me, that moment and the one where she pulled out the gun (which could easily have escalated the fight and gotten someone killed) demonstrated that both her judgement and her impulse control are pretty much shot at this point.

Depends on whether she recognized Gretchen from the cafe at the beginning of the episode. If a woman I thought was checking out my husband showed up at our door, having conveniently found our lost dog, and invited herself in, I'd probably be a little wary of her intentions.

I don't think he was explicitly hitting on Gretchen, but it did seem like he was testing the waters and then tried to walk it back when she wasn't responsive. The first time he suggested getting together seemed deliberately ambiguous, along the lines of, "we should go for a drink sometime" with no mention of Jimmy or his wife, and then he mentioned the prospect of getting a divorce shortly after. The second time he specifically included Jimmy and added in that his wife goes to bed early and wouldn't mind. The third time, after Jimmy and his wife came back, he suggested all four of them should get together for dinner.

The actor who played Castleroy has a recurring role on Heroes Reborn.

Aislinn had a small part on tonight's episode of Heroes Reborn. The actor who plays Hunter has a fairly major role on Reign this season. Not sure what that means in terms of whether he'll still be on Degrassi: Next Class. Also spotted on Reign was Anya's fantasy boyfriend, Dr. Chris.

Recovering alcoholic buys a bar? What is this, Cheers?

Sigh. Call me crazy, but it seems like intensive therapy with the support of your loving husband might be a more effective strategy for getting a grip on an all-consuming obsession than leaving your husband and diving headlong into said obsession. You don't fix yourself by leaning into what's broken. It's ridiculous that TPTB think this move increases the stakes on the relationship. If you don't believe that they'll be tearfully reunited during a sweeps period sometime this season, you clearly don't watch enough television.

Gretchen: Get off the counter, banana. You fancy now.

The floating timeline (dragging out a "school year" over multiple seasons to hold onto actors as long as possible) has done the show more harm than good at some points. I've been marathon-rewatching the show from the beginning, and it's really struck me that the worst seasons of the show tend to be the ones that were the last gasp of a group of graduating seniors. They run out of good story ideas for the characters and basically just run them into the ground so that it feels like a good thing when they finally graduate. It started with Emma and Manny's class. Most of their storylines in their last high school season were terrible - Purple Dragon, Manny and Jay's engagement (I liked them together but the fake engagement was stupid and the stuff about the plane tickets to Malta was even worse), Jimmy and Ashley fighting over music and breaking up again, Liberty hooking up with Emma's boyfriend, etc. Spinner was the only one of the graduating seniors who actually got a decent storyline that season. The last season of Holly J, Anya and Sav's class also really dragged - Anya dating her mother's doctor and then becoming a coke fiend, Holly J's attempts to buy a kidney from her birth mother, Sav dating Ms. Oh, breaking up Riley and Zane just to give them something to do. It was the same thing with the most recent season. The mountain of bad stuff that happened to Clare by the time she finally graduated was ridiculous - her parents got divorced, her ex-boyfriend crashed his car on purpose when she broke up with him, her next boyfriend became her step-brother, she ran away from home and was taken in by drug dealers, her co-op advisor sexually assaulted her and then got her fired, she got cancer, her boyfriend cheated on her, she got pregnant and didn't know who the father was, and then she had a miscarriage. Did I miss anything? Drew's list would probably be just as long. They couldn't even come up with anything for Ali, Jenna and Connor to do in their final season. It was long past time for them all to graduate.

I just saw Ming-Na Wen's appearance on Hollywood Game Night. I'm not sure what was the least May-like thing about it - that she was laughing and smiling the entire time, or that she was terrible at all of the games.

This was mostly a good farewell to this crop of graduates. I think it was time for them to go, as they ran out of storyline ideas for most of them a while ago. I'm surprised so many of the couples were still together at graduation. This show is usually pretty brutal about that, although when I was that age it was way more common for couples to try to stay together after going away to university but then end up doing the turkey dump (break-up over Thanksgiving weekend). With everything they've been through, I can see Clare and Eli making a go of it, but I don't really believe that Ali and Dallas or Jenna and Conor will survive long distance relationships for very long. While I never particularly liked Jack and was glad that Imogen finally realized she was kind of awful and pretentious, it does bug me that the LGBT couples are never endgame. I choose to believe Riley and Zane got back together in university. And speaking of university, add me to the camp that finds it ridiculous how many of the kids on this show go to American schools. I miss the days when all the kids went to made-up Canadian schools like Banting, Toronto U., Smithdale, and Eastern.

I'm pretty sure I just saw Eli's dad, Bullfrog, in a Best Buy commercial.

Wow, that was pretty bad. The plucky kids solved the mystery with science! So cringeworthy. You just know that while they'll carry forward the romantic plot lines from this into next season, there's going to be zero lasting emotional fallout for Maya over the kidnapping. This is a girl who's been struggling with anxiety since Cam, but five minutes after being rescued she's somehow laughing and telling Zig she's fine. I like Frankie but she was kind of an idiot here, and I really don't care about her relationship with Winston at all. I have mixed feelings about Zoe and Grace. They're kind of an intriguing pairing, and it's nice to see Grace getting more to do. At the same time, it feels like the showrunners suddenly realized they needed new lesbians now that Imogen and Jack have graduated and just ran through the current crop of girls to decide who to pair up. Why did they even bother setting up a Zoe and Miles reunion if they were going to drop it as quickly as they dropped Zoe and Zig? I'm also hoping that the focus solely on Zoe's perspective was just to create a cliffhanger at the end and we'll see more of where Grace is coming from next season. I seem to recall she told Maya at one point that she's not gay, but who knows. Can Tristan suddenly become a genius and graduate a couple of years early please? Or maybe just disappear to wherever they're keeping Dave and Wesley? I just can't with him.

There was one episode where he did a cleanse to lose weight and also went overboard with exercise and ended up passing out or something. I don't think it was shown as an ongoing issue after that episode though. Between seasons the actor lost a lot of weight. It was weird because when he came back skinny it was at the beginning of the "summer in Paris" season so in show time it was supposed to be fairly soon after the end of the previous season. There was no plausible explanation for the character dropping so much weight in the short period of time that would have elapsed in the show, so they basically just ignored it. The following "school year" he joined the basketball team.

They did once. Liberty and Damian tied for highest marks, so they had a vote and Liberty won.

Samantha Munro (Anya) is playing Shannen Doherty in Lifetime's movie about Beverly Hills 90210.

MTV Canada has been showing old episodes of Degrassi: The Next Generation. There was a guy who had a bit part in a few episodes that I thought looked really familiar but couldn't place, so I looked him up and it turns out it was Leith.

I don't really understand the outrage around Denys. An audition is basically a job interview. Applying and competing for a job does not create a moral obligation to accept the job if offered it. It's not uncommon to apply for a job in good faith and then realize at some point in the process that it's not quite what you thought it was, or maybe isn't a good fit for you or isn't as good as other opportunities available to you. I doubt it was clear the extent of the short shrift ballroom was getting this season until late into Vegas week, and the week is so intense than the dancers hardly have a moment to think and reflect until the last round is over (i.e., right around the point where Denys started to express doubt). Denys is not responsible for the decisions that Nigel and the judges made about other ballroom dancers. They chose not to leave themselves a back-up plan, and it blew up in their faces. I'm glad they went with Jaja over Marie Poppins, who I just don't get. Every time they showed Marie Poppins in a montage of "Team Street ladies killing it at choreography" I thought she looked clumsy and awkward. When Asaf started talking back after his solo, Paula was trying to smooth thing over but Nigel said "let him talk". I think Nigel had tired of Asaf a while before that but was getting outvoted, so he figured this was his opportunity to give him enough rope to hang himself. I keep watching, but I'm not really excited about this season at all.

Photos from the set of the retrospective special that will air before the finale: http://tvline.com/2015/06/30/degrassi-reunion-photos-original-cast-series-finale-special/ I know they're all making funny faces in that one shot, but it took me a minute to realize that was Miriam.

Stana Katic was in a Bond movie (Quantum of Solace), so "shaken, stirred" could easily be a clue pointing to Castle.