Now We're Cooking With Rice

With the pilot and setup out of the way, Life Unexpected gets up and running with the introduction of Lux's friends - BFF and fellow orphan Natasha, and both girls' drop-out boyfriends. Turns out that the girls were planning to emancipate themselves and live with the boys on Lux's savings but now, with Lux getting a family (weird though it may be), Tash is pissed because she's headed back to the girls home.

Tash is a master manipulator, and Lux is a bit of a spineless jellyfish it turns out, and before we know what's happened Lux is ready to run away and put the emancipation and shack-up plan into action, minus the emancipation.

I mean, Tash might not have pulled that off if Lux hadn't heard Cate on the radio totally deny that she ever had a kid, but whatever. (Do not try to figure out why the fuck that was necessary in this day and age, it will give you a headache and adversely effect your ability to enjoy this otherwise good show.)

Meanwhile, without realizing that Lux heard her denial, Cate is busy fretting about the social worker approving she and Baze as foster parents. Which, now that I think about it, I don't really get that either because they were given custody of Lux because they're her ACTUAL parents, why do they need to be approved foster parents? Whatever, again, not looking to closely at the details employed to get this story on it's feet.

So Cate and Ryan are busy making their house a happy home (it ain't that hard because they're a good couple and, for the most part, real grown-ups) but Cate is also busy brow-beating Baze into acting like something that even loosely resembles a grown-up. That's a job of work. She gives him specific instructions to "take the lotion off the night stand and replace the batteries in the smoke detectors" before the home inspection. When the social worker arrives, the smoke detector is chirping like a sonofabitch, someone's got an inflatable sheep sex doll lying around (and probably lotion on the nightstand though we don't see that for sure), and there's a lamp made out of a giant bong.

The social worker witnesses a flailing, childish row out in front of Cate's place between the three of them (Cate, Baze and Lux) and is about to fail them. Then Math (with an assist from Jamie) give Baze the hard truth that only friends are in a position to get him to understand - he's a massive fuck-up and it's time he get his head out of his ass and start acting like the 32-year-old man he is, instead of the 16-year-old boy he wishes he still were. After that Cate and Baze pull it together both separately and as a team and put their best foot forward with the social worker.

Too late though - because Lux told the woman she doesn't want those two boobs to be her parents and that was all she needed to hear to give a recommendation of Not Fit To Parent a Goldfish to the judge.

Cate heads to the boyfriend's hovel looking for Lux and instead finds Tash who schools Cate in the history of Lux and then lets her know she stole her engagement ring. I know it doesn't sound like it, but that was a really sweet moment.

Anyway, that's when Ryan finds Lux packing up to hit the road and lets her know that not only does Cate really want her, but that HE thinks they'll be a great family. Then he shows her how they turned the attic into her room and her heart melts because she's never had a room before.

So they get custody, though Baze isn't allowed to have overnights at his place because - well let's face it, the bachelor pad above the bar isn't the ideal place for a teenager even if the person living there weren't Baze. But he does get to give her rides to school every morning and engage in some nice bonding time. Cate over-reaches and tucks Lux in at night which at first I thought was insane but then it gave me a chance to see that Baze donated his bong lamp to her room and that I found really sweet and adorable. Yeah, there's a sentence I never thought I'd type.

Consider me officially hooked on this one.

(The title of this post is a shout-out to Brenda who said this all the time when we were in Europe and it always made me laugh. Now I say it all the time and think of her whenever I do. Hi, Bren! Love you!)