May 11, 2010

The Awesome, The Crazy, And The Filler

That's what we learned last night on One Tree Hill - there are three kinds of people on the show: those that are awesome, those that are crazy, and those that are there to pad the running time.

Miranda: Crazy. She loves Gubbs but she's being all weird and mental about it so she won't marry him and when he decides that if she's not going to stay in the US, he'll go to England with her, she totally lies and tells him she doesn't want him to.

Grubbs: A fairly awesome guy to have as a boyfriend I suspect but also, maybe just a little bit filler because while I find Grubbs sweet enough, he's not part of the core group and therefore maybe it isn't entirely necessary to spend so much time watching him get his heart stomped on?

Julian: Very cute filler. I mean, he's awesome most of the time, but last night he had nothing to do but whine about whether or not his "film" is going to be accepted to some fictional film festival that's totally supposed to be Sundance. And after all that whining? He gets the acceptance call 30 seconds before the credits roll because...duh!

Brooke: Vaguely awesome filler. Now that Old Brooke is back she's definitely more tolerable so it's fine that she doesn't have a lot to do other than be a reassuring girlfriend, and a supportive friend (to both Haley and Nathan and I still really love it when Brooke and Nathan have friendly moments), and a loving daughter who teases her mom sweetly about how Boy Alex is falling in love with her. And that botox joke was worth every second of her filler time. Oh yeah, she also lets Boy Alex run Clothes For Bros so long as he reports to Victoria (awkward!) and Millie is his second in command. I think she should have listened to her mother and put Millie in charge of it and just kept him as the designer, but either way this show is not very interesting when it talks about business so let's move on.

Dead Ringer - Capital K - Krazy! She stole Dead Wife's diary and is all trying to convince Clay that she actually IS Dead Wife. Then when he doesn't believe her, she threatens to jump off a pier and the police call him and he pretends he believes her long enough to the cops to snatch her then tells her that she's Dead Ringer and that he loves Quinn but the nice men with the hand cuffs will help her get all better.

Clay - Made to look crazy by bad writing. When he gets to the pier and the cop asks if he knows the woman he says "she's my wife" and then we DUN to commercial. Then he climbs all out there talking about how they can be together and blah blah blah but then they pull the switcheroo where he knows she's not Dead Wife which makes it completely stupid for him to have said she was to the cop when the cops were presumably in on his "capture the nut" plan to have snatched her at precisely the right moment.

Boy Alex: Crazy - in love!


Girl Alex: Padding the episode with her whining about how much she hates being the fake girlfriend of a compete douche. Also flirting with Chase, being a terrible bartender and pep-talking Julian.

Chase: SO much filler. Did you remember he was on the show and dating Mia Catalano (Kate Voegel)? Well don't bother thinking back on it now because Mia dumped him via a series of text messages and he's been pouting about it ever since.

Mia: This episode must have clocked in at a whopping 14 minutes before they threw all these random bit players at us! Mia pops in to fill up even more time by...look, I have no idea. She broke up with Chase via text because they never knew when they were going to be able to see each other and then she promptly came back to Tree Hill? She couldn't have waited a week and broken up with him in person? Whatever, she's here to "run" Red Bedroom while Haley is banoodles and Miranda is deported.

Haley: Fuckin' nuts! But like, in a really irritating way where she knows she's acting like a loon and a bitch but she doesn't care enough to stop. She snaps at Jamie who she's now making take care of himself. She treats Nathan like a steaming pile of shit. She is rude to Victoria who...well I'll get to that in a minute. She spends the majority of the episode thinking about jumping in the pool and staying under water for ever and also leaving long, crazy messages on her mother's cell phone.

Quinn: Awesome. Since her little sister was so upset over the death of a parent that she can no longer BE a parent, Quinn steps in to help Jamie be a kid. First, she watches the Goonies with him (awesome) then she "finds" a clue that may lead to a hidden treasure and takes him on a scavenger hunt for same (deeply awesome! Where was she when I was a kid?).

Jamie: A short-stack of awesome. Upon finding the treasure, he decides to put it, and all the clues back so that another kid can have the same adventure and then thanks his aunt for creating it all for him in the first place. Then he draws a picture with the message "Mama, you're our treasure" and leaves it on her pillow with a gold star.

Nathan: Way more awesome than Haley deserves at the moment. He tries his hardest to give her space or be there for her or talk to her or whatever she needs from him but she's rude and thoughtless to him instead. He doesn't complain. He does the laundry, gets the car towed, tells her he loves her. Then he finds several calls on the phone bill that indicate his wife is calling a dead woman. So he and Quinn listen to all the messages that she's left for her dead mom and are sad.

Victoria: Too much awesome to be contained. She's still a bitch, but now she's a bitch in this kind-of nice way that is so genius it gives me goose bumps. When Haley stops in to COB Victoria sits her down for a talking to. She's all "I know you don't want to hear it, but I don't really give a shit. You need to pull it together honey because the way you're acting now is like spitting in the face of your mother's memory. She did not raise you to be a crappy mother and she would not appreciate you using her as an excuse to be a psycho bitch. So you get your ass in gear and buck the fuck up or I will beat you senseless!" Some of that might have been more implied than said out-right but that was totally the gist of it. It remains to be seen whether she got through to Haley because it seemed like the timeline of the Haley parts of the episode were completely off. She also had a wonderful mother-daughter moment with Brooke. She was the very best part of this episode which is probably why the only pictures the CW bothered to make available for the ep were of her.

Next week: The entire town of Tree Hill goes to Utah because Julian's movie is in a film festival there, and that is one of the things we have to love about this show.

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