Episode Report Card Jacob Clifton: A+ | 3 USERS: A+ YOU GRADE IT Challenged A
By Jacob Clifton | Season 2 | Episode 19 | Aired on 02.06.2012
Ashley: "Emily, I noticed you once again took two giant steps. You juicin' again?"
Emily, verbatim: "One step is not enough! It's not safe! Or welcoming! For some of us, it gets worse every day!"
Ashley: "In the three-ring binder they sent us, it says the overdramatic lesbian's not supposed to crack until like 11 AM. It's still first period, sweetie."
Emily: "I AM NO LONGER ON THE SWIM TEAM!"
Everybody: "Oh my God, we know."
Tamborelli: "Fields. Come here so I can dress you down in front of everybody, subverting the point this entire exercise in such a grotesque and flagrant way I should probably be fired."
Emily: "But I..."
Staring Mona: Who could ever predict what that girl is thinking.
Tamborelli, and get this shit: "If you're feeling unsafe and unwelcome, maybe it's because your behavior has made your teammates and other students at this school feel the same way. Now, you're not helping your cause by attacking me..."
Emily: "I totally wasn't doing that? This is not about you?"
Tamborelli, scary: "You're no saint, Emily. Maybe it's time you take a look at what got you to this point."
Which, valid. I mean, not the shovel part, but the college fraud and the HGH stuff? Maybe she didn't mean to do about one and a half of those things, true, but you take your lumps. It's not this guy's fault that A arranged things in such a tremendously unhelpful way -- it's kind of A's thing -- and Emily's pointing the finger at this guy because the plot demands it, rather than because it makes sense for her (or anybody, but especially Emily) to do so.
On the other hand, he's kind of a cocksucker and he is ruining Challenge Day, so fuck him.
OH AND
There's a nice shot here where Mona considers Emily, and vice versa, while Ashley's voice can be heard reading:
"This exercise is about discovery. Discovering yourselves, and discovering your classmates..."
I love how so many of the milestones these girls have set for them has to do with making amends to Ali's victims. I mean, they were Alison's victims too, of a certain stripe, but part of cleaving to Ali was making sure that she didn't come after them, and the shit kept rolling downhill. They were de facto quislings about a lot of that shit. (Where it came from, above Ali on that inclined plane of rolling shit, we have yet to learn. I've got some ideas. This show's allowed to do a lot worse stuff to Ali than it can to the main four, if you think about it, and they've taken a fair amount of pretty horrible abuse already.)