Ep46: The Big Loss [5.16.2007]

[milowent]

Ep46: The Big Loss

Description: Chad loses something special.

Recap: A very special Prom Queen. Seriously though, it was somewhat unexpected. The mystery of the pink phone revealed.

[hookedonmonics]

awwwww sweet.

i'm having a hard time reconciling this sweet side of chad with the guy who cheats on his girlfriend. I'm trying really hard not to like him. the writers did a good job keeping him from being one dimensional, disjointed as it may be.

[oweniscool]

Hmm, I'm confused. So pink phone girlie is not green ring girlie. That leaves me wondering whether the game day BJ is also something different than what it seemed. That's still unlikely though.
The sick girl's name is Ally (saw that in the credits). He didn't explicitly say so, but if I had to guess I'd say it's his little sister. Where are their parents though? There is such a total lack of parents in this series:
Ben and Sadie - dad's in Iraq, we've heard nothing about mom
Nikki - parents are always jaunting around the world or something
Josh - lives alone in a motel
Lauren - has a psycho, drunk, drug-abusing mother
Danica - is thousands of miles away from her parents
Courtney - is running a porn site... I'm guessing her parents don't know... but that would be really interesting if they did
Nolan - sells drugs... maybe takes after daddy?
Michele and Brett - well, we know nothing about them anyway

This reminds me of an article I read a long time ago about how prevalent the "lack of parents" (in some fashion) is in movies and other fiction. I think the article said something to the effect that "parents are the anti-adventure", and thus it's a pain to write around them. Ok, kind of OT, but I just had to make the observation.

[hookedonmonics]

courtney's mom is dead.

I want dibs on the idea that lauren's biological father has something to do with josh's stepdad.
If i claim all the most out-there theories, one of them will be right. right? right?

[hookedonmonics]

oweniscool said:

That leaves me wondering whether the game day BJ is also something different than what it seemed. That's still unlikely though.

i have dibs on that idea too. i posted it as more of a question though: how do we KNOW that GDR is a bj? or somethign like that

[elixir]

Aww... that was quite touching, really. Maybe Chad is an all right guy, but he was driven to cheat on Nikki because she is, well, pretty much a psycho. After she got hold of his pink phone, he probably realised it was time to break up with her.

At first I thought GRG was either Lauren or Jill, but now I'm thinking GRG might be either Michelle or Courtney, and maybe Chad pays for the "service"... Courtney might have a drug addiction and that's why she does the porn thing as well. As for Michelle, well all I've seen from her is parading around in skank shoes and bikinis, being desperate for a boyfriend/someone to take her to Prom... oh yes and bad spelling. She has no other real purpose in this, so I think she is a good candidate for GRG.

[hookedonmonics]

elixir said:

maybe Chad pays for the "service"....

maybe, but if he was worried about paying for cancer treatments, he probably wouldn't spend money on a bj.
although, if itmakes him play well enough to go pro, he could consider it an investment

[oweniscool]

hookedonmonics said:

courtney's mom is dead.

How do I keep missing this stuff?

Anyway, back to the lack of parents line, PQ is similar to LG in this respect.
Bree - parents went missing, notDad was killed, notMom was killed, biological parents? no clue.
Jonas - parents were "lost at sea", might be held captive by Order
Daniel - he had parents for a little while there, until they started to get in the way of the story. Remember that parents are the anti-adventure? Well no way can Daniel be gone from home for months at a time with PARENTS in the picture, so the c's set off to write them out. First they weren't the "hands-on" type. Then they were alcoholics and neglectful.
Taylor and Sarah - Dad left (apparently)
Jules - still with parents, but she's not going on any adventures yet, she's just hanging with Lucy.

[jayhenry]

I think I disagree with ya, OIC, we know a reasonable bit about their parents given that we've got 12 characters and we're only an hour into the show.

And in fact, I would contend that it would be highly unrealistic for a show about prom to prominently feature parents. The appearance of the parents in movies like "She's All That" or "Bring It On" does not add to the story or the realism at all.

These are kids with cars, their parents are only a minimal part of their social lives. And besides, if you're only got 80 episodes, 120 minutes to tell me a story, spare me the part about "mom had a bad day at her job as a manager at Applebee's" or "My dad sells long-term care nursing home insurance to people who are at high-risk for heart attack because they're unlikely to collect the premiums for long in a retirement home."

[oweniscool]

I think you might be missing my point, Jay. I didn't mean to say that the parents should be a bigger part of the story. I was just pointing out that they kinda don't exist in these kids lives. They're either dead, missing, or just not there. Not ONE of those kids has a full set of parents. Sure, this isn't Leave It To Beaver, but it's just kinda cheap that everyone and their grandma is seemingly parent-less.
Such serious family problems can't be that common. We've got Josh (who probably killed his stepfather and we don't know who his dad is anyway), Lauren (who shares CANDY with her mother), Chad (who is seemingly tending to his sick little sister singlehandedly), and let's not even get into Bree's and Jonas's parents mysterious disappearances (and death). I'm not saying let's hear more about the middle class parents' woes, I'm saying maybe they should cut back a little on the mommy and daddy issues, it's just so out of proportion.

[hookedonmonics]

Bree's notmom was killed? I missed that one.

[oweniscool]

hookedonmonics said:

Bree's notmom was killed? I missed that one.

Not that I know of... but I wouldn't put it past the c's to throw that in so they don't have to ever explain what she's been up to these past few months.