Three Tissue Monday

Well, One Tree Hill killed Huey Lewis with no fanfare at all and now they're going to kill Bess Armstrong. Obviously both developments had me crying like a small child last night.

After Hailey's mom showed up in Tree Hill alone, we learned only through exposition that her dad, played back in season two by Huey Lewis, had died a couple of years ago (in show time that is, the show has skipped a total of 5 years in the last 3 seasons so God only knows when the man kicked off). After she'd been there a while and had a few lovely conversations with her daughters and Clay, she up and announced that she's got pancreatic cancer and has decided to forgo treatment in favor of enjoying some of the time she has left without feeling terrible.

All the girls - including me - were weepily sad when this announcement is made but Taylor was downright incensed. She doesn't want to sit around and watch as her mom refuses to fight for her life and essentially commits suicide. There is a part of me that doesn't blame her. There's another part of me that thinks she handled it badly because she almost always handles things badly.

Elsewhere in town, Grubbs is winning over the heart of the frosty record label lady and in turn, she's trying to sway him to record a record with her. I think they're both more interesting to watch than new Brooke so I'm in favor of it all.

New Brooke didn't die a couple of weeks ago like I'd hoped, she merely left town temporarily. She came back last week and now both New Brooke and Old Brooke are living in Tree Hill at the same time so you never know which one will show up in any given scene. Last night Old Brooke was the primary resident - being helpful to Alex and sweet and supportive of Julian as the filming of his movie got underway. Alex, it turns out, can only act when she's either high or staring longingly right into Julian's eyes so you can see this is going to create a problem. Julian, meanwhile, has put every penny he has into this movie which makes me sad because the dialogue is so very bad.

Oh, speaking of bad? There was this scene where Nate brings Jamie to set and runs into Brooke. They have this conversation about how she's doing with the Julian stuff. So we're watching Sophia Bush and James Lafferty - who used to date but now she dates Austin Nichols (Julian) - have a conversation about how tough it is for her to work closely with her ex-boyfriend in her ex-ex-boyfriends house when the feelings are all confusing and he is telling her how he's always there for her and if she needs him for anything, just let him know. It was just like when she was divorcing Chad Michael Murray and they had all those schmoopy girlfriend/boyfriend makeout scenes. So uncomfortable to watch!

Millie continues to struggle with her addiction. She keeps telling everyone she's fine when she clearly isn't. She goes to a 12 Step meeting but doesn't stay because those people have way bigger problems than she does (Alex sweetly and smartly tells her that their problems started out smaller once too), then she assists two of the rudest people in the history of the world at the store and is once again faced with her own issues of self loathing and inadequacy which leads her to very nearly fall off the wagon before she pulls herself together and heads back to the meeting.

And finally, Alex picks Boy Alex up in the bar while doing shots of Pellagrino (I really do love how she deals with her tequila cravings - first by having Millie do the shots while she sucks the limes and now by doing shots of sparkling water and sucking the limes herself. It's cute and funny.) and takes him home because she's been dealing far too well with her emotional problems lately so naturally she needed to backslide into some of her old, bad habits and start indiscriminately fucking boys to distract herself from her pain. Why does she not recognize that that is one of her addictions too? Poor, sad, messed up Alex.

Life Unexpected was pretty good last night. Easing up ever-so-slightly on the too-heavy emphasis on Baze and Cate and allowing some of the other cast members to interact this week. Cate accidentally facilitated the outing of Lux as a lying orphan at school and because Lux can't seem to help herself, she naturally blamed the whole thing on Cate as if the new mother lies awake at night devising plans for how to ruin her daughters life. In retaliation - because nothing says teenage girl like a massive over-reaction of meanness - she outs Cate and Ryan as being engaged to each other thereby possibly putting their morning show, and their careers, in jeopardy.

This prompts Cate to have a very good talk with Lux where, for the first time, she doesn't just beg Lux to accept and forgive her but instead lays some hard truth on her - there are only so many times a person can apologize for something that happened 16 years ago and while Cate wants to do the right thing and wants them to be a family and have a chance, she can't undo the past and she can't do everything just the way Lux would want. So if Lux can't accept that Cate is going to make some mistakes but they'll all be in the service of loving and wanting whats best for Lux, then they'll probably need to go to the social worker and make some other arrangements for her.

Meanwhile, Baze is feeling inadequate because his bar is a bit of a failure and he owes his kid money and after reading PART of a letter that Lux wrote to Santa 10 years ago, he thinks that she is disappointed with him because he's a loser and that she sees Ryan as the perfect father. Apparently he's failed to notice that the writers have barely even let Lux acknowledge Ryan exists...oh, and that Lux thinks he's totally the shit. In a scene that I almost loved, Ryan schools Baze by telling him he's a complete idiot if he can't see that Cate tries so freaking hard she's nearly given herself an ulcer while Baze does NOTHING and still Lux thinks the sun rises and sets in his ass so what the fuck is he worried about Ryan for? The thing that would have made me love that scene more? If the two of them would be friends instead of needlessly adversarial.

The best part of the episode was at the end when Math and Lux had a truly fantastic scene together. He confided in her that he wanted to ask Cate to the big dance their junior year in high school but some other dorky guy beat him to it and then ditched her at the dance. That's how she ended up losing her virginity to Baze in the parking lot that same night so it turns out that great things - like Lux - sometimes come from crappy situations. Then he gets her bong lamp back for her and helps her realize on her own that she needs to give Cate a real chance. Math totally made me cry.