S04.E15: You Know You Better Watch Out

[circumvent]

Mariana reconsiders her situation-ship with Joaquin

[circumvent]

I guess this show is not so popular anymore. I had time to watch so here it goes:

I hate what they did to Isabella. She arrived as the villain, then she became quite "adorable", now she is the unstable person again. This plot has very little to do with what the premise of the show is about and it annoys me. It is a tired story, unstable girlfriend/boyfriend who messes up the lives of everyone else in the vicinity, while those around her are saints that are just trying to help. Ther are some possible outcomes and all of them have been tried before. Nothing original of remotely interesting. I figured they were going that way when she said that she had never done anything like that before. Hello! She broke a mirror in Mariana's room because of a guy. That would be a big gossip in the coterie, anyone would know about it.

On top of it all, Gael is no longer the free spirit guy he was in season 1. His bisexuality vanished to never be mentioned again and now he is the savior that still doesn't know how to save Isabella.

Same for the cult story and the character that has no appeal at all. He is just there to get Marina some sex scenes and add to the on-again-off-again story with Evan. Run, Evan, run!

Dennis needs to grow up and leave the coterie. It is not realistic that someone who claims to be finding his way would want ot stay in a place where there is little privacy.

The Davia story could be good, if I trusted the writers but they will create too much drama involving the father. 

[gesundheit]

I really love Gael and Dennis's friendship. I was so nervous they were going to drop Dennis from the show since he's older and I'm so relieved that they have stuck with him.

I really, really, really do not want Mariana back with Evan. 

[gesundheit]

Also I have to admit I'm grateful for this turn in Isabella's story. I hated that it appeared they were deploying the "pregnancy softens a bad girl" trope and had hoped they'd always had a long game in mind. 

[circumvent]

15 hours ago, gesundheit said:

I hated that it appeared they were deploying the "pregnancy softens a bad girl" trope

Instead they went for the insane girlfriend trope gets [regnant and creates havoc in the baby father's life 🤷‍♀️

I don't want Mariana back with Evan either. I want Mariana being the tech genius she is supposed to be and not needing a man or partner at all - but I don't want the Bulk Beauty story either.

[gesundheit]

8 minutes ago, circumvent said:

Instead they went for the insane girlfriend trope gets [regnant and creates havoc in the baby father's life 🤷‍♀️

I don't want Mariana back with Evan either. I want Mariana being the tech genius she is supposed to be and not needing a man or partner at all - but I don't want the Bulk Beauty story either.

Given how didactic Good Trouble is and how invested they've been in Isabella's POV for the past year, I suspect what we're watching is a Big!Message! mental health storyline that includes a lot of empathy for Isabella as well as some stilted dialogue teaching us about how the mental health care system in this country fails us all, and how the stigma around mental illness destroys families.

I wonder if anyone's into the Bulk Beauty storyline. They are so committed to it and I'm just stumped every time by its intended appeal, whatever that may be. 

[TVForever]

18 hours ago, gesundheit said:

Also I have to admit I'm grateful for this turn in Isabella's story. I hated that it appeared they were deploying the "pregnancy softens a bad girl" trope and had hoped they'd always had a long game in mind. 

I'm with you on that one. In fact, I actually said out loud " Nice fakeout, Show, you got me" 

Because all along, we ( I doubt I was by myself in this one) were led to believe that Isabella's parents were just awful a-holes. Turns out that they actually had good reason to be afraid for Isabella to parent a baby. I was forced to remember how she originally came into to the show, but even then she was flaky and manipulative, but not violent. Now we're learning some things that led to her estrangement from her parents, and by the time this episode was over, Gael was certainly having that " Oh crap, what am I really dealing with here?" moment.

I don't know how deep Show is going to take us into whatever issues she may have, but her lack of impulse control all by itself is very troubling.

[tennisgurl]

As cliché as the "crazy angry girl who causes all of the drama" characterization is, I can appreciate at least that they are going back to how Isabella was originally written. She came on as this bad girl causing trouble then they gave her a baby and mean parents and she got the sympathetic treatment, but now she's back to where we started, so...confusing character writing or weirdly consistent? Its characterization whiplash. Do the asshole parents have a point after all? Is a person who responds to her boyfriends understandable questions about her past crimes by chucking a box at his head a person you want raising a kid? Even recently, when she has been getting the hero edit, she has certainly been raising red flags. Glad that Gael talked to Dennis, its been awhile since they had scenes together. 

The story with Davia is decent, but I am not looking forward to her hooking up with the dad.  

They are really scraping the bottom of the barrel to give Bulk Beauty a reason to be in every episode. 

[possibilities]

The only thing I can think of for why they keep hammering the Bulk Beauty story is that maybe Cierra likes it and they want to keep her happy, since she's the only link to the original Fosters since Callie is gone. It's so insulting to women, it makes me nauseated every time they drag us through a scene.

I'm all for a mental health story, and they did that somewhat with Malika's mother, but what they are doing with Izabella is also incredibly insulting and tropey. Also, her parents might have a point but they never bothered to actually meet the father, either. It's just 100% being badly handled.

Davia and the father of her student is so inappropriate, I can't stand it. AND it's another trope.

I'm really frustrated with this show. They've taken such a horrific dive into crap writing that it's hard for me to stick with it, and it's really the only show on TV that even vaguely represents a cultural milieu that I identify with, so I really want to stick with it. But the writing is so bad, so insulting, so unbelievably sexist, it's worse in these regards than a lot of other stuff that isn't even trying to be anything different. It wasn't always like this, but it's really bad lately.

[Scarlett45]

On 8/18/2022 at 4:37 PM, tennisgurl said:

As cliché as the "crazy angry girl who causes all of the drama" characterization is, I can appreciate at least that they are going back to how Isabella was originally written. She came on as this bad girl causing trouble then they gave her a baby and mean parents and she got the sympathetic treatment, but now she's back to where we started, so...confusing character writing or weirdly consistent? Its characterization whiplash. Do the asshole parents have a point after all? Is a person who responds to her boyfriends understandable questions about her past crimes by chucking a box at his head a person you want raising a kid? Even recently, when she has been getting the hero edit, she has certainly been raising red flags. Glad that Gael talked to Dennis, its been awhile since they had scenes together. 

The story with Davia is decent, but I am not looking forward to her hooking up with the dad.  

They are really scraping the bottom of the barrel to give Bulk Beauty a reason to be in every episode. 

The impression I got from the writing was that Isabella’s parents weren’t the greatest people, but they weren’t just making things up about her. This wasn’t an instance of “my parents just don’t like my personality”; I figured SOMETHING was up with her- I didn’t know if she had an addiction problem in the past, or had mental health issues. The way she went after her parents car was brutal, but it was a thing, not a person. She lit things on fire?? (Shoplifting as a teen- whatever, that doesn’t mean someone is violent or unfit to raise kids)
 

The fact that she threw something at Gael! If the genders had been reversed and Gael threw something at his pregnant girlfriend and caused her to bleed? What if she hit his eye?? Isabella is wicked impulsive, which Gael is learning, but they haven’t known each other for very long. Good reason not to have babies with people you barely know.