Hey there, spider monkeys! Below are two recaps of The Fosters to close out a dang remarkable second season. Thanks for your patience as I’ve been juggling all these zillion recaps this year.
“Not that Kind of Girl”
Previously on The Fosters, Jude and Connor decided the best way to make out with each other was to sneak out of their houses in the middle of the night, meet up with some girls, break into one of the girls’ kitchens, steal some liquor, drink the liquor, and have a foursome. Obviously their plan ended in someone getting shot. Stef had a similarly unassaible plan for getting Callie adopted, which was: Make her go to school full time, work full time, volunteer full time, save enough money to live on her own, get off probation, get a judge to grant her emancipation from Robert Warbucks, and then they’d adopt her. No one got shot because of Stef’s plan, though. Well. This time.
It was Connor who was shot! But luckily, he was only shot in the foot and it’s not going to ruin his major league baseball career, which is his dad’s main worry about Connor’s life after the whole gay thing. But Connor refuses to ease his dad’s mind; he straight up says he only went to such extremes because he wanted to see Jude and his dad won’t let him see Jude, especially at night time when there’s no lights on or parents around. So, Connor’s dad pokes his head out to the waiting room, where Lena and Stef and Jude hanging out, to tell Lena that Connor told him that it was Jude’s idea for Connor to get shot.
Breakfast is the most important meal of the day because you haven’t eaten or gotten passive aggressive with your wife in ten hours. Lena has some eggs and snipes at Stef about how two can keep a secret if one of them is dead and so go ahead and figure out how to get Callie adopted all by herself, she guesses. But Stef doesn’t have time to hear that. She’s got to arrange driving lessons for Mariana and Jesus, and get Mariana a ride to the dentist, and keep everyone from being monsters to Jude just because he committed one tiny crime.
Brandon: I do not have time to take my sister to the doctor, okay? I have really important and emotionally exhausting things to do like maybe sell another piece of sports equipment on Ebay.
Mariana: It’s cool. I don’t really need lessons anyway.
Jesus: You failed your written test!
Mariana: The answers were too obvious. Only an simpleton would pass that test on the first try.
It’s a rough morning for Callie. For one thing, Jude has exactly zero time and patience for her lectures about not doing dumb stuff just because the people around you are doing dumb stuff. Kidnapping, is one example, just off the top of my head, of why Callie should not be giving advice on this subject. And then Callie meets with the lawyer Stef and Lena hired and finds out someone has stolen her identity and racked up a zillion dollars worth of credit card charges. That sucks, no matter what, but it super-sucks when you’ve only got one single afternoon to get yourself emancipated. What can they do? Nothing. No one can do anything. Stef’s got it all under control and she’ll handle it all by herself and so no one talk to her or try to help shoulder her burdens because she’s got this and it’s all good and she’ll fix everything and no one needs to worry and she’ll just take care of every single detail on her very own and it’s just fine.
Oh, Stef. I feel you, but STOP.
At school, Lena and Monty are best friends. Dangerously so. They laugh when one of the science teachers brings Monty some coffee, because no one ever brings Lena some coffee, and Monty says, “Aren’t you a tea-drinker?” Which is code for something gay, and ooooh, y’all better be careful! Y’all need to take a time out! Y’all need to work over Skype for a while! (Monty, though, I have a friend I want to hook you up with. You guys would be perfect for each other. It’s not like there’s a road block on your path toward inevitable lesbianism, but Lena is a wrong turn! Sometimes the obvious answers are the right ones!)
Mariana and Tia’s dance team is the shiz. Their dystopian robot theme is unstoppable! And Emma is super feeling it until the wrestling team arrives in the gym and start talking whatever League Of Their Own male gaze malarkey about who knew Emma was a girl?! That hurts Emma’s feelings, but it also freaks her out, because those dudes don’t objectify her when she’s wearing a singlet and beating their asses, but the slippery slope of men taking away her agency starts with men viewing her as their own personal spectacle. And the horror of that reality starts choking her even harder when she and Mariana get relegated to the marketing team for the upcoming STEM competition, even though she’s hands-down the best coder in the whole club.
Emma finally cracks when Mariana tells her to do more sexy hip stuff when she dances. She says she doesn’t want to do more sexy hip stuff because she doesn’t want to be objectified because she doesn’t want to spend her life fetching coffee when she’s smart enough to be a neurosurgeon. And so she quits. But you know Mariana talks her right back onto the team, like, “We are the future. We exist on a TV show with a married interracial lesbian couple and the youngest gay guy couple in history. Yeah, in some ways it’s still a Peggy Olson world, but we’re Beyonce girls. Come on now, girl. Who run the world?”
(This is a good story! This season of The Fosters is remarkably unapologetic with its feminism!)
After school, Brandon does take Mariana driving. She freaks him out because she’s like ZOOOOM! BREAKS! ZOOOOOM! BREAKS! He finally tells her they need to go home so he can take a Xanax and lie down, but she says she only even asked him to give her the driving lesson so she could coerce him into taking her to the bakery her grandparents own so she can meet them and deliver Anna’s letter to them.
Her grandpa — who also was Betty Suarez’s grandpa on Ugly Betty; I’d recognize those enviable eyelashes anywhere! — knows who Mariana is right away, but he doesn’t want to talk to her and he doesn’t want to read Anna’s letter and he certainly doesn’t want Mariana to meet his wife. But she comes scooting out of the kitchen anyway, and Mariana’s grandpa is like, “Um, these riff-raff who are no relation to us were looking for jobs but I told them to scram.” Marian’s grandma tells them to come back in the winter, when people in California actually eat carbs.
When Mariana gets home, Jesus accosts her about going driving without him and she’s like, “Don’t be a Brandon, dude. I had actual traumatic shit to do today.”
Stef spends her whole day trying to crack Callie’s identity theft case, calling all sorts of credit card companies and yelling about the time-sensitive nature of her “investigation” and how she’s going to set someone on fire if they don’t send her what she needs right goddamn now. The whole time she’s hollering on the phone, Mike’s lurking around in the background like a regular old Buster Bluth with this bottle of prenatal vitamins he wants Stef to take to Anna at her new apartment because she moved out of Mike’s apartment because Mike wouldn’t stop whining about how he never gets to have anyone’s extra babies.
