S01.E08: And Salt the Earth Behind You

[BigDfromLA]

17 hours ago, thegorgeous said:

I think McKay has a lot of potential I hope they do justice to him in the next season and also to Fezco and Lexi everyone wants to see more of those two. 

14 hours ago, mommalib said:

Mckay is a decent but flawed young man and there is definitely room for progression but I already don't trust the show runners with a black male character so I won't hold my breath.

I was critical of McKay earlier, but I agree that he is a good guy, overall. I would like to see him stay, but he would probably have to either get back together with Cassie or another girl for that to happen. Remember he is in college and not a classmate to everyone else, so he is a little separated in that respect. What about Troy and Roy? They were kind of portrayed in a cartoonish manner this season, but they have potential. It would be good to see them mature some and pursue something with Rue's sister that has some substance. 

[CynicalGirl]

On 8/7/2019 at 9:13 AM, marriedaniac said:

Having Donny Hathaway's "Song For You" was gorgeous.

Ok sorry, but I have to correct you. It's Donny Hathaway's cover (and a lovely version) of the late great Leon Russell's "A Song for You".  : )

[marriedaniac]

15 hours ago, CynicalGirl said:

Ok sorry, but I have to correct you. It's Donny Hathaway's cover (and a lovely version) of the late great Leon Russell's "A Song for You".  : )

True! So, I should've said "having Donny Hathaway's A Song For You as opposed to Leon Russell's A Song For You..." 😉
(And of course Andy Williams did a version.)

I like that a song with that title was immediately followed by a (Zendaya & Labyrinth's) song titled "All For Us".
 

[kelslamu]

On 8/5/2019 at 12:35 PM, Empress1 said:

I think we were meant to see that it was out of character - Cal was clearly rattled by it. It wasn't portrayed like "Oh, Nate's having another one of his spells."

Did anyone find it unrealistic that Cal got the upper hand? Cal and Nate are both big, but Nate has a good 3" on Cal and is 30 years younger and an athlete.

I didn't find it unrealistic.  An older man can take down a younger man a lot more often than the younger one thinks.   I believe it's just life experience.   I did want the beat the heck out of Nate for that damn fit though.

[KateHearts]

On 8/5/2019 at 12:19 PM, heatherchandler said:

Most kids stop having full-body tantrums at age5 or 6... so for a huge teenager to be thrashing around like that, it was weird!

I just shows Nate's immaturity and inability to manage his emotions. Although it was over the top, it was a good depiction of how emotionally immature Nate is, and his realization that he can't just strongarm people into doing what he wants from them.

[buttercupia]

until this episode, I had no idea that Sydney Sweeney (Cassie) also played Eden on the Handmaid's tale.  It took seeing her with no makeup.

[iMonrey]

I'm a little late to this party but I just finished this series on HBO Go. I thought it was starting to improve around the carnival episode but it all went downhill after that. The last fifteen minutes of this finale were especially pretentious and self indulgent. Because of that alone I don't think I could be coaxed into watching another season.

I would argue against the assertion that this show is a typical representation of teenagers today, in general. The diversity alone speaks to the geography of the story: it certainly isn't taking place in all-white Bible Belt schools in the square states. Nor does it represent the whole spectrum of teens at its own school. We aren't seeing the awkward kids with braces and zits who play in the band or are part of the debate team or in the chess club. None of those kids get invited to these parties because they simply aren't popular enough. This is a show about a specific type of teen at a specific school. I know the writer has claimed to have drawn from his/her own experiences, but Dear Lord, I pity them.

That aside, the main problem with the show is that the lead character is the least interesting one. I never cared about Rue one way or another and never felt like I was given a reason to. I don't know that I understand her much either. I thought the better story focused on Jules and Nate and that it gravitated back to Rue at its own detriment.

The shock value of the show was gimmicky. The abundance of gratuitous penis shots abated after the first two episodes, for example. Clearly there was an attempt to gin up publicity through notoriety. It all felt very unnecessary and perfunctory to me. 

There were definitely parts that intrigued me and kept me going but the finale left me unimpressed. I won't be back for more.

[chenoa333]

I'm so bored and annoyed with Zendaya narrating every episode and being the focus of every episode. I have some catching up to do on this series so maybe things have changed. But I'm guessing not.

[LaMatadita]

I am very late to this party because I just finished binge watching this show over 3 days. I had initially watched most of the first episode, but I was so turned off by the lack of character depth and the bizarre hypocrisy of commenting on toxic masculinity and rape culture while simultaneously filming gratuitous sex scenes that encouraged viewers to objectify actors who were supposed to be playing teens that I couldn't bring myself to watch another episode. A friend of mine recently talked to me about the show and said that it does get better, and with so much spare time on my hands, I figured what the hell. While I don't think it ever really overcame those initial issues completely, at least not for me, it did build some character relationships that I invested in, got quite a few tears out of me, and also surprised me with a few other characters.

On 8/5/2019 at 8:24 AM, taragel said:

And add me to the bunch confused by Jules. She's "in love with" Anna after one zonked-out night at a club... where she was fantasizing Anna was Nate?!

On 8/5/2019 at 10:46 AM, SnarkEnthusiast said:

So Anna's older too and now Jules is in love with her after one night? She's a mess.

On 8/4/2019 at 11:25 PM, colorbars said:

She really lost me this episode and she really confused me. She seemed happy in the city to start and clearly more in her element with like minded people, but by the end, it seemed like she realized she preferred what she'd left behind. Yet this episode, she was gushing about the whole experience, unabashedly waxing poetic about Anna and how much she likes her (apparently loves her) to Rue, sneaking off to text her and wanting to go back.

I was confused at first, too, but I think what happened with Anna was the first sexual experience Jules had ever had where the other person actually cared about whether she was getting off too. I can see how that would make her glomp onto that person and want to be around them all the time, sort of like how people think they're falling in love with their therapist (if the therapist is actually good at their job). It was also pretty clear from Jules and Rue's awkward conversation about having sex with Anna and whether Rue liked biting that Rue and Jules really were not doing more than holding hands and kissing. Jules was already much more sexually experienced than Rue to begin with, and now she'd just gone off and essentially had a sexual awakening without Rue. I also think that Jules seeming despondent after the sexual encounter in the city had more to do with her realizing that it would probably never be like this with Rue than with her missing Rue.

I do agree that Jules' behavior toward the end of the episode was extremely selfish and hurtful to Rue, who has always been on her side, but between Jules' newfound realization that she could actually enjoy sex itself and not just the part leading up to it, her discomfort at being Rue's liferaft, and I'm guessing some further discomfort at the way Rue put her on a pedestal, it wasn't completely out of left field for her to have an "I'm tired of worrying about pleasing others and I'm going to worry about myself" kind of moment. However, despite understanding where Jules was coming from, it did really turn me off to the Jules/Rue relationship. They're in very different places in their lives. Jules is ready to get out there and be whatever she thinks is the best version of herself and Rue is still just trying to figure out how to be a functional human being.

As far as Rue, I feel like she's in such an incredibly awkward place developmentally. I think it was made pretty clear that Rue has never really had a fulfilling sexual experience, not even with Jules. I think a lot of people are taking it as a given that being into Jules and having unfulfilling sexual encounters with males means that Rue is a lesbian (hence all of the 'shipping of Rue and Lexi), and maybe she is, but she could also be asexual but not aromantic, or pansexual+demisexual (gender is not a factor, needs an emotional bond in order to enjoy sex). Even with Jules, who seems to be the only romantic relationship Rue has ever had, her attraction to her seemed largely emotional--she was in love with her as a person, which made her more willing to kiss and hold hands sometimes, but I really did not get the sense that she was overwhelmed with sexual attraction, and she even seemed uncomfortable when Jules bit her to see if she "liked it." So far, Rue has come off as being pretty disconnected from her sexuality, and I think doubling down on that could be pretty groundbreaking, and it would also avoid the predictable plotline of her finally having a sexual awakening only to have sex just become another escape/addiction.

Also, maybe it's just misdirection, or maybe his caring is indeed purely based on guilt, but I get the feeling that Fez is in love with Rue. I kind of thought so at the beginning of the season, but then for a while I decided he had just figured out how to be a genuinely good friend to her after years of selling her drugs. Nate asking if they were involved and then further trying to confirm that it was platonic, and Fez not answering, kind of changed my mind again, though. The guy dropped $600 to get her away from Mouse without a second thought and literally threatened to kill Nate for messing with her. He can say that she's "family" as a way of justifying it, but that relationship seems pretty one-sided with Rue using him more often than not, so unless she did something amazing for him in the past that we just don't know about, I don't think guilt alone adds up to the level of loyalty Fez has shown her. Other than maybe Ethan, Fez (somewhat ironically) seems to be the most decent male on the show, and he seems to see Rue for exactly who she is yet would still clearly do anything for her, but I can't really see her ever having romantic feelings for him, and he knows it too. Since he would never make a move on his own, I feel like Nate is going to blurt it out to Rue just to humiliate him at some point. Poor guy. Also, I'm going to be annoyed if the first episode of S2 is devoted to Fez, and then at the end we find out that Mouse offed him. Don't do that to me, show.

On 8/7/2019 at 6:17 AM, mommalib said:

Mckay is a decent but flawed young man and there is definitely room for progression

This is how I saw him as well. For someone as immersed in the culture of toxic masculinity as he was, he was not a hopeless cause. I think I was most disturbed by the fact that he was sexually assaulted in front of his girlfriend, and not only do we not know to what level he was assaulted (I thought he was raped with a dildo or some other foreign object, but it's very unclear), but we barely saw any of the fallout from that--in the end, it was more about Cassie than it was about him. Unless the actor wanted out, I hope he will be back next season, because that kind of trauma can't just be dropped like a hot potato, especially for a) an actor of color, and b) an actor who has already indicated that filming that scene was really hard for him to do. 

And finally, one of the biggest flaws in the show for me is the fact that a lot of these characters don't feel like real people because they have no identities. Are teens obsessed with sex? Of course, but they're also obsessed with music, TV shows and anime, hobbies, video games, food, etc. They have taste and opinions about things besides sex. In that scene where Daniel tells Cassie that all any guy really wants is to fuck her and if he says otherwise he's lying, it was made even more awful by the fact that it was true, because she had no personality other than being a doormat--there was nothing else to like about her, nothing to connect with (though I think it was probably just as true of Daniel, so he can can go fuck himself). I'm not saying this because I hate Cassie or want to shame her, I'm just a little unsure as to whether her lack of identity was deliberate or just bad writing. I hope that depicting her this way was deliberate, and it certainly seems like it was. Her mother's constant praise and emphasis on her looks, combined with the constant positive attention she received from others, did not encourage her to develop any other facets of her personality, and now her experiences with McKay and Daniel helped her realize this and she will be trying to actively develop her identity in the future.

The problem with that being a deliberate storyline for Cassie is that it's true of most of the other characters as well. There were a few characters who escaped this trap--Zendaya and Maude Apatow both have a quirkiness that allows me to at least think their characters have opinions and hobbies offscreen, and Fez was never really sexualized in the first place and seems to have a lot of extremely serious shit going on in his life--but other than that, none of them seem to have opinions or hobbies or even own a PS4. The show seems to base the identity of nearly every character around how they view and participate in sex, and I understand that that is one of the biggest themes of the show, but focusing on that to the exclusion of any other notable facets of their personalities makes a lot of these characters feel flat and empty in a way that doesn't feel authentic. I think Netflix's Sex Education, while a bit idealized and very tonally different from this show, does a much better job of focusing on sex and showing how much it affects the lives and thoughts of teens while still allowing the teens to feel like actual people, and it also showcases a lot more diversity, both culturally and when it comes to sexuality and gender identity. (I think most of Netflix's original shows are ultimately forgettable garbage, but that one is genuinely good.)

Edited April 26, 2020 by LaMatadita

[BigDfromLA]

On 8/30/2019 at 10:11 AM, iMonrey said:

We aren't seeing the awkward kids with braces and zits who play in the band or are part of the debate team or in the chess club.

Lexi is the one character who comes closest to fitting this description. Though she is very attractive, but has absolutely no idea and sees herself as awkward and shy.

When is this show coming back for Season 2? I was hoping for this summer. I just wonder how much of S2 they completed filming before the industry shut down for Covid19. It could be a very long time before this and other shows we expect to see in 2020 and 2021 come back.

[SeanC]

On 5/13/2020 at 2:38 AM, BigDfromLA said:

I just wonder how much of S2 they completed filming before the industry shut down for Covid19.

They basically had just done the table reads (filming was originally supposed to start earlier, but was delayed because Levinson asked for time to rewrite a few scripts he was unsatisfied with).

[ElectricBoogaloo]

I'm glad that Cassie already knows that high school is not the be-all end-all of life. I mean, high school was fine and I'm still friends with people who I was close friends with then, but college was awesome as was my adult life. I look back on high school with fondness but I don't think it was the best time in my life and I have no desire to go back in time and relive my high school years.

The aerial view of what was happening in the various bathroom stalls at prom totally cracked me up.

Maddy channeling Summer Roberts with her "ew" totally cracked me up. I'm glad that she had enough self esteem to tell Nate to get off of her. But that flashback was originally confusing to me because I didn't know that it was a flashback. One minute everyone is at the prom and then Nate and Maddie were having sex in his bedroom so I was like wait, they left the prom to go have sex at his house?

I already felt like Jules and Rue's relationship was unbalanced and that Jules wasn't 100% into it. She clearly liked being around Rue, but once she started texting with Tyler it was obvious that her romantic feelings were reserved for him. So for her to find out that Tyler was Nate and then to hook up with Rue the same night struck me as Jules wanting to feel safe and wanted. She already liked spending time with Rue but I felt like she wasn't as into the romantic aspect of their relationship.

But after the previous episode, I felt bad for Rue because it was obvious that Jules still had feelings for Tyler/Nate. They aren't together because Jules doesn't trust him and Nate isn't ready to admit that he has feelings for Jules, but that doesn't mean her feelings for him are gone. They're still there and they've been there. Her drunken hallucination about Nate in the previous episode really showed her ambivalence and I think she ended up transferring some of her feelings about Nate to Anna. Once again, Rue is left hanging because she can tell that something is going on with Anna (it's not like Jules has been trying to hide it since she flat out told Rue that they hooked up and was texting with Anna while sitting at the table with the other girls at prom).

What made me really sad was Jules blowing off Rue's excuse about needing her meds. I know these are teenagers so their brains aren't fully developed and their have different priorities, but Jules has seen some of Rue's ups and downs. She even expressed concern about Rue doing drugs early in their friendship. If you care about someone, shouldn't you want someone to take their meds so they stay healthy?

I'm glad that Maddy and Nate both finally acknowledged how terrible their relationship is. I'm also glad that Maddy specifically told him that she doesn't like the way he makes her feel most of the time.

In the previous episode, I was afraid that Fez was going to go to jail or that the police would get him to flip on his supplier or that his supplier would kill him. But when I saw Ashtray standing in the doorway actually looking his age, I knew that Fez was sending himself on a suicide mission. He confirmed it when he kissed his grandmother goodbye.

One of my issues with McKay throughout this season has been his attitude toward Cassie. He clearly thinks less of her because of the various videos of her with other guys which is ridiculous for so many reasons. He knew about those videos BEFORE they started dating so it's not like he got blindsided by them. To me, this reminds me of men who date strippers who they met at strip clubs and then complain that their girlfriends are strippers. Fool, you knew that going into the situation so STFU.

And aside from the traditional double standard where it's great that guys are having sex but girls who have sex are dirty whores, McKay seems to have a huge problem with the fact that there are videos. So would it have been okay if she'd had sex with 3-4 other guys before they started dating as long as there weren't any videos of it? I'm just so sick of the slut shaming. You know that no one says anything negative about the guys who had sex with Cassie and posted the videos.

Even though I'm not entirely clear on the timeline of the stuff that happened in this episode that didn't take place the night of the prom, Maddy has known about Nate's dad having sex with Jules but hasn't said anything yet, so that shoe is going to eventually drop. She isn't super close with Jules (although they are in the same social circle) so I wonder how much of her silence so far is because she doesn't want to see Jules get hurt. Maddy can be selfish but she hasn't seemed outright mean (except when she got mad at Kat) so I'm hoping that she has enough of a conscience not to want to blow up Jules' world with that video.

Many years ago, I read a book where this narcissistic psycho was described as the kind of guy who probably masturbated while looking at himself in the mirror, so I was kind of laughing when we saw Nate doing exactly that.

[kieyra]

I made it about halfway through the season, but then increasingly had to fast-forward because a lot of the overly artsy stuff was lost on me. I was invested in the characters, and always wanted more of Jules on the screen, but the directing and editing were at odds with my impatience to just find out what happens. The finale especially, with the fractured timeline and the endless scenes of makeup application, so many lingering ultra tight shots, had me both impatient and confused. It admittedly takes a certain kind of show to wow me with both stylistic and direct narrative storytelling (Legion and Queen’s Gambit are the only two that come to mind), so maybe it’s a deficiency or at least a taste mismatch on my part.

I think I wanted these characters and this story, I just didn’t want to watch them with the acid-trip music-video aesthetic and pacing. To me the whole thing just got in the way of itself.

[kieyra]

Me again, another crack at this show, but it’s just a futile effort on my part. I desperately want a show that is primarily about Rue and Jules and their (significant) past and present traumas. (And not in a bottle episode setting, although I watched both.)

I find nearly everyone else an unpleasant distraction, which cumulatively takes up far more screen time than R/J. 

I didn’t need American Psycho and American Psycho Jr to be in this show at all, but the show certainly treats them as integral while giving lots of screen time. They are (IMO) unnecessary antagonists who leave this sort of American Beauty style dread hanging over everything, when the show has plenty of things to keep us worried about (addiction and other mental health issues, child porn, yet another cycle of girls believing their only value is sexual, etc). 

I like Fez as a character, but it seems like he teleported in from a bad season of True Detective, what with scary tattoo face drug dealer, his weird night ops overlaying the winter formal, etc. 

I don’t know if I’ll watch S2. If they include and want to continue to unpack Nate and Daddy Nate, and Nate continues to get more screentime than R/J, I will probably pass. 

[DrSpaceman73]

I thought this last episode was pretty anticlimactic.  Was expecting more from it.  

Nate's dad may get the most interesting character.  Based on his initial introduction was expecting him to act like his son is the greatest and deny his problems.  But just the opposite.  He sees the problem and doesn't know how to fix it.  And realizes the horrible path his son is headed.  He even knows nate and his GF are headed down a bad path. 

Still bothered by the ease with which nate runs over everyone. I mean metaphorically, not in the football game. 

 

[Scarlett45]

On 3/10/2021 at 8:16 AM, DrSpaceman73 said:

I thought this last episode was pretty anticlimactic.  Was expecting more from it.  

Nate's dad may get the most interesting character.  Based on his initial introduction was expecting him to act like his son is the greatest and deny his problems.  But just the opposite.  He sees the problem and doesn't know how to fix it.  And realizes the horrible path his son is headed.  He even knows nate and his GF are headed down a bad path. 

Still bothered by the ease with which nate runs over everyone. I mean metaphorically, not in the football game. 

I know I’m 3 yrs behind the original airing but I have enjoyed the show and the comments here. Rue relapsing again doesn’t surprise me at all. 

On 12/22/2020 at 11:07 AM, ElectricBoogaloo said:

Many years ago, I read a book where this narcissistic psycho was described as the kind of guy who probably masturbated while looking at himself in the mirror, so I was kind of laughing when we saw Nate doing exactly that.

That didn’t surprise me at all. 

[Kirsty]

Gorgeous show with a solid soundtrack.

Yay for Ethan and Kat being honest and making themselves vulnerable and risking rejection -- and finally getting together!

Jesus, poor Rue. She follows Nate outside to threaten him, and with a few well-chosen words he voices her major fear, causing her to engineer a situation where her fear is realised and she goes back on the drugs.

I'm glad the show went through with the abortion.

I find Maddy very believable.