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.

But can he still father children with women, because if not, pull the plug.

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.

Jack Daniels, Jude? Really? We’re going to WhiskeyFest next summer. You’ve got a lot to learn.

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.

Is it possible to do a one-for-one trade with Jesus and Callie?

Maybe.

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.

Everything’s cool. There’s room for two Holy Ghosts between us.

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.

Hey girl, let’s dismantle the patriarchy.

And then let’s do some rhetorical analysis of your bedroom.

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.

We’re doing a membership drive for the Society for the Promotion of Elfish Welfare.

Spew?

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.”

Fine, Mike, you can have Jesus.

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.

What Stef finds out is that someone is using Callie’s identity to open credit cards and buy designer handbags with them and then sell the handbags on the black market. I laughed about that. Like really hard. About a handbag black market. And my best friend was like, “Wait, you don’t think that’s real? That’s real. The designer handbag black market is super real. What’s not real is magical parrots who solve mysteries.”

Stef, no. You don’t spell out “hashtag.” It’s just the number sign.

Stef explains to Callie about this “designer handbag black market” that is somehow more of “a real thing” than Tippi the Bird.

Callie spends her afternoon volunteering at the foster kids care center. She’s thrown a little bit when Sara shows up there. You remember Sara. She’s the girls Callie got moved away from the foster home she was living in because her foster brother, Liam, was using and abusing her, a thing Callie knew because he’d done the same to Callie when she was his foster sister. Callie told the truth about Liam raping her, and so Sara got pulled from his house. She hated Callie for it, remember. Raph agrees to deal with Sara so Callie doesn’t have to, and that’s really the least he can do after spending three hours telling Callie about how easy it is for foster kids to end up homeless after their identities are stolen.

But Callie notices that Sara has a designer handbag. There’s no way she could afford such a thing, so Callie pickpockets her designer wallet out of there and opens it up and finds like 20 credit cards with her name on them. Dammit, Sara!

I’ll talk to Connor for you if you’ll give me Mariana’s phone number.

Taylor and Jude hang out for a little while at school and are flawless, as per the usual.

Jude: It’s weird that Connor told his dad it was all my fault that he got shot when it was really all your fault that he got shot.
Taylor: I mean. It was kind of my dad’s fault since he’s the one who opened fire on us.
Jude: Yeah, I guess. I just don’t understand why he won’t text me back.
Taylor: My dad and I are going to see him today to apologize for shooting him. Do you want me to tell him you love him?
Jude: Yes. What? No! Just, uh, tell him I said, “What’s up … bro.”

Instead, Taylor goes to the hospital and gives Connor her phone, and the first thing he does it text Jude. It’s one of my favorite ever coming out scenes on TV because it’s just what the world is like now for so many teenagers. Jude wants to know why Connor pinned the whole getting shot thing on him, and Connor goes, “What? I didn’t. But I told my dad I’m gay.” Just so breezy. Just over text message. Just telling the boy you love that you told your dad that you’re a boy who loves boys. Jude smiles so sweetly and happily, because he doesn’t care about the label; he cares that what Connor is saying is, “I want to be with you.”

:)

:D

:’D

This is such an important storyline. The best eight-year-old boy in my life/the world is getting bullied mercilessly right now in his second grade classroom, and it’s breaking my heart into a zillion pieces. Because he’s working some stuff out in his young little brain. Because he wanted another boy in his class to be his Valentine. Because he also likes fingernail polish. Because he lives in rural Georgia and so many of the brainwashed Baptist kids in his class are horrible. And I’m watching Jude and Connor and I’m wishing the eight-year-old boy in my life was just a few years older, so he could watch them too. And what a world when he only needs to be a few years older than second grade to be able to see something of himself reflected on TV! With the exception of Ellen, I didn’t see my first lesbian character on television until I was in my mid-20s! What a time to be alive, y’all. Bradley Bredeweg and Peter Paige, I just want to hug you and buy you a drink (and hug you again)!

Mariana goes back to the bakery to see her grandparents, and to deliver Anna’s letter, which she has read now. Her grandma recognized her the first time; she looks just like Anna used to look. Mariana explains that she and Jesus have a wonderful home with wonderful moms and she’s a super genius and he’s going on a wrestling scholarship to Testosterone Academy maybe, but there’s a new sister on the way, and maybe her grandparents can adopt it and have a second chance at saving Mariana and Jesus. She thanks them for the Christmas presents. (Remember those signs that were their names that they got for Christmas but they didn’t know who sent them? They were from their grandpa. He has handmade signs of all his grandkids’ names hanging in his bakery.)

I’ll sponsor you to shut up about Spew.

Stef is all femmed up and ready to buy a blackmarket handbag. She meets the seller in a parking lot, and the seller is Liam. Liam does not recognize Stef, but she sure as hell remembers him. She does the deal with the purse and then reveals herself as Callie Jacobs’ mom, and when Liam tries to run for it, Mike pops out from behind a fence with a gun and Liam is going to jail.

I’m not A.

Bullshit.

The next part is so good I was just crying and air-punching the whole time. Part of it was I was still very teary about Mariana and about Connor, and this really just sent me over the emotional edge (but like in a good way; like jumping into a pile of fresh-from-the-dryer towels). So Callie comes to the police station to confront Liam because he was the one behind her identity theft and Sarah was just his pawn. I know this isn’t how real police things work, but I don’t care. Stef lets Callie go into the interrogation room and look her rapist right in the face and explain how she busted him, how she got Sara to turn on him when they showed her that he’d stolen her identity and let another girl use it to do the same thing he was doing to Callie, and she wins and he loses and now he’s going to jail for a long, long time. This show is the antithesis of Glee in every good way. WHO RUN THE WORLD?

I thought a box of dildos might help our communication problems.

That’s a start!

On the way home from the precinct, Stef swings by Anna’s new apartment to drop off her prenatal vitamins. It’s a scary, dangerous place, and so you know exactly what happens: Stef brings Anna home so they can adopt her too.

“The End of the Beginning”

Morning kitchen drama at the Adams Foster house again! If you guys aren’t going to honor such a gorgeous table, you need to give it to me. You can eat off the floor! (Except you, Jude.) (And you, Mariana.)

It’s a season finale. Let’s all just try our best to stay alive today, okay?

Brandon cannot believe that his moms would ask him to sleep on the couch so a nearly homeless pregnant woman who happens to be the birth mother of two of his siblings can sleep in a bed. Like what if he wants to shine his diamond shoes in the middle of the night? Where’s he supposed to do that, huh? The living room?! (Brandon is an entitled wanker a lot of the time, but I actually kind of love that because it’s exactly what the only straight white guy living in this house would act like, especially if he was a teenager. Like truly, completely oblivious to the fact that there are worse things in the world than having to decide which kind of rockstar to be.) Anna doesn’t want scrambled eggs. Lena doesn’t want Anna talking to Mariana about The Way Things Used to Be. Callie doesn’t want to spend the weekend with the Quinns. Stef doesn’t want Callie to tell Robert about her emancipation.

Brandon wants a pony.

Jude uses the commotion to slide on out of there and stare at himself in the mirror and summon the courage to be a hero today. He takes a deep, steadying breath; plucks his lucky blue nail polish out of the pile; and prepares for battle. Next thing you know, he shows up at the hospital with his nails painted blue, and the music is like, “And this is how the patriarchy is slain! On the wings of a unicorn!” He tells the nurse at the check-in desk that he is Connor’s cousin, but when Connor’s dad appears in the hallway, he grows ten feet tall right there in front of him and says, “I want to see my friend, and I’m not leaving until I do.”

And so Connor’s dad lets him in.

2090 called. You’re dead and you wasted your life being a homophobe.

You got an iPhone 7??

Connor smiles like Christmas when Jude walks in, clasps his hands, says, “What’s this?” Jude looks down at his blue fingernails and says, “War paint.” And then he crawls into bed with Connor, and that is how Tumblr died.

You think that’s that, but that is not that, because Connor’s dad will not let it go. He calls Lena and tells her to come get her son and also he’s pulling Connor out of Homo Beach High School like right this second. Lena does go to the hospital, and she’s like, “I mean, you can lock Jude out, fine, but what are you going to do, put Connor in a tower and stand outside with a baseball bat, swinging at any boy who comes his way? And even if you do that, you’ve heard of the internet, right?” Connor’s dad is fine with Lena being gay. Fine with Jude being gay. Fine with Ellen being gay and Neil Patrick Harris being gay and whoever else who isn’t his kid. Michael Sam and Jason Collins and Robin Roberts and Brittney Griner and Portia and Rosie and Anderson Cooper. He’s just not fine with Connor being gay.

What a sad, poignant, very realistic thing.

They said there wouldn’t be any onions on the pizza, but they were chopped up in the sauce!

On the hospital floor.

Lena: I’m so sorry, Jude. Losing friends is the hardest thing.
Jude: He’s not my friend.
Lena: Oh, honey.
Jude: There were no girls in that tent. It was me and Connor in that tent. We kissed then, and we kissed later. We’re not friends.

And then he cries and I cry and you cry and Lena cries and the angels weep a million tears when they realize even they are not as perfect as Jude Adams Foster.

Have there ever been any second generation gay kids on TV? I don’t think so. This whole season of TV is so good I want to frame it and stare at it adoringly every day forever.

I brought you some Skittles, which is almost as good as a baby, right?

The red pack or the blue pack?

Mariana spends the morning back at the bakery, trying to explain to her grandparents how she has changed her mind and they should not adopt Anna’s baby after all, because Stef and Lena want to adopt it. And it’s all good because Stef and Lena are the best and the grandparents can come visit whenever they want and Mariana will teach the baby to code and dance, and Jesus can teach the baby to wrestle and not get tattoos from random men on the street, and Jude can teach it to see the colors of other people’s souls, and Callie can teach it what it means to be a true Gryffindor, and Brandon can bitch about how much space it is taking up. The grandparents give Mariana a thumbs up, but when she leaves, they’re like, “Man, how many of our grandkids are these women going to get?!?” Mike shows up and asks them to sign a White House petition to make President Obama stop letting lesbians have everything they want.

Mariana spends the afternoon getting ready for the dance competition. Rigging up the costumes with glow sticks and working on the program she coded to make the lights in the auditorium go berserk. Anna feels very proud of her and very glad she ended up with Stef and Lena. And then Mariana trips on Jesus’ skateboard and the whole day goes to shit. Luckily, Emma arrives just as Mariana is falling, so Jesus gets a double hate-glare from the two of them. Emma and Mariana worry about how they’re only going to have five dancers because Mariana’s foot is broken or sprained or something. Whatever is happening, she can’t walk on it.

Will you go to Homecoming with me?

I kind of told Tia I’d go with her.

And then! Her grandparents show up at the door looking for Anna.

Good grief, talk about a Callie-kind-of-day!

Speaking of which, Callie is at Robert’s house, and so is everyone else in Robert’s family. Sophia is home, and she has been diagnosed with a personality disorder. She is so shy and so sweet around Callie. She’s wearing the hair thing Callie bought for her, and explaining about her chemical imbalance and how therapy and meds are going to help her, and she’s right. Callie is actually really glad to see her, because Callie is good at forgiving people, which is one of the best traits you can have as a human being in this world.

The plan for the day at Stately Quinn Manor is to hang out with Robert’s dad, Robert Quinn Sr., who is played by Patrick Duffy who is most famous for being Bobby Ewing on Dallas and that is just a perfect piece of casting. I’m sorry if you were born in the ’90s and do not understand how amazing this is. Robert Sr. loves Sophia more than anything on this earth, and definitely more than he loves Robert Jr.

#WhoShotJR would have been the most popular hashtag ever.

OMG, grandpa. Stop embarrassing me in front of my sister-wife.

Robert Sr.: These mint juleps are delicious. Also, why is Callie here?
Robert Jr.: Because she is my child.
Robert Sr.: Well, Sophia is your main child and maybe if you’d spent less time stalking this one and paying attention to that one, Sophia wouldn’t have walked in front of a bus.
Sophia: Um, that’s not how chemical imbalances work? They don’t go away with attention?
Robert Sr.: Shh, hush, precious. Robert, you’re the worst.
Robert Jr.: No, YOU’RE the worst! Maybe if you hadn’t made me leave Callie’s mom, none of this would have ever happened!
Sophia: Well, I sure wouldn’t have happened.
Robert Sr.: I said hush, Sophia!
Sophia: Super glad I got out of the mental hospital for this.
Robert Sr.: Look, all I’m saying is you’ve got one kid who clearly needs you and one kid who absolutely does not, so why are you focusing all your energy on ruining the life of the one who is just fine without you?

Valid, Bobby Ewing. Valid.

After dinner, Robert finds Callie in the back garden staring out over his kingdom. He tells her he’s sorry about his dad, and she tells him it’s cool and they he should remember that she loves him, no matter what happens. Robert doesn’t find this ominous in any way because people who own actual yachts hear things differently than the rest of humanity, and so he is bamboozled beyond belief when his lawyer calls a few minutes later and tells him Callie is trying to get emancipated. Robert loads her up in his Mercedes and drives her home and won’t even talk to her because he’s a giant baby and a cautionary tale for Brandon.

I wanted a black pony and he bought me a brown one!

I almost threw my life away to date the teenage you.

When Robert drops off Callie and Callie explains that he found out about the thing, Stef is like, “I’ll fix this too, all by myself!” And Lena is like, “I’ll just go text with Monty then, I guess!”

Because here’s what’s happening there: Monty and Lena are getting super, duper close. They’re good at being a team, which is a thing Stef is shutting Lena out of being with her of right now. They make each other laugh, which is a thing Stef and Lena are definitely not doing right now. And Lena is telling way too much of her off-limits business to Monty, which is one of the trickiest things about being a gay lady with other gay lady friends. Because lady-lady friendships are super intimate because ladies are the best. And from Monty’s angle, I mean, what person on earth is not going to fall in love with Lena Adams Foster? She’s a human marvel.

MONA’S ALIVE!??

YAAAAAAAAASSSSSS.

The problem — well, one of the problems — with falling for your buddies is that buddy relationships aren’t tethered to the same responsibilities as romantic relationships, so you’re falling for a mirage. I also wish pizza didn’t have calories, but that’s not real life. Are you listening to me, Lena?

Lena and Monty spend all day hanging out and doing work and talking about their lives and their insecurities and and their fears and winning grants to keep their school going strong, and when Lena finally breaks down about how worried she is about the one zillion stressors in her life, Monty hugs her (fine), keeps hugging her (less fine), puts a hand in her hair (mostly not fine), puts a hand on her cheek (not fine), and kisses her (super not fine). It lasts a nanosecond before Lena jerks away, and they’re both shocked. You never think you’re going to do the thing you always knew you were going to do! They grab their shit and launch themselves in different directions toward the same auditorium.

You have scrambled eggs in your hair.

With one hundred kids in the house, I never get to use a mirror.

Because it is dance-off time. Caitlin’s stupid team stole Mariana’s dystopian robot theme, but who even cares because Emma and Mariana have tag-teamed to code an army of CGI Storm Troopers who perform in the dark with glowing hearts to the absolute mania of the crowd. No one notices that they only have five real dancers! Rules are not for people with adrenalized hyperreality!

While Mariana is dancing, Brandon is playing his self-composed contemporary piano piece for one of the people from classical music summer camp. It’s very good.

And while Brandon is still playing, Mariana and Jesus and Anna are driving home from the dance competition. And Anna goes into labor.

I don’t give a fuck what your anaconda wants tbh.

And while Anna is going into labor, the custody judge calls Stef and Lena and they meet in his chambers and Robert signs over his parental rights to Callie. And so Stef and Lena can really finally adopt her.

It’s a good day. Jude calls Connor his boyfriend, right out loud. Callie gets to come home and be home. Brandon is a phenomenal musician. Mariana won her dance competition. And now everyone is getting a new baby! Except for no they’re not because on the way to the hospital, Anna and Jesus and Mariana get smashed by another car.

I’m not trying to be a butt hole, Anna, but no pregnant lady should ever drive a car in a season finale. Nothing good is ever going to come from that.

As Stef gets ready to speed off to the car crash that she doesn’t know her kids were involved in, but that the police scanner says includes one confirmed fatality, Lena is like, “Hey, I love you.” And Stef is like, “Yeah, I love you too.”

We gave Jesus to Mike.

So can Connor move into my bedroom?

And I love you. (Yes, you. I mean Stef and Lena, but I also mean you, Dear Reader. You’re my favorite dystopian robot theme.)

Next season: Lena tells Stef about the nano-smooch with Monty and they both take responsibility for letting their relationship slide into dangerous territory and make up with affirmative soul-scissoring. Monty starts dating this girl I know. Jude and Connor come out at school and everyone is chill about it and they spend most afternoons canoodling and playing video games, after they finish their homework. Mariana and Emma admit their feelings for each other and start dating, which isn’t really weird now that Jesus is away at Testosterone Academy. Anna moves in with her parents and they help her stay sober and raise her baby. Callie tattoos her adoption certificate onto her torso. And Brandon sells his copy of Detective Comics #27 for one hundred billion dollars and sets off on a world tour with Someone’s Little Sister in his own blimp.

Pages: 1 2 3 4See entire article on one page

Before you go! Autostraddle runs on the reader support of our AF+ Members. If this article meant something to you today — if it informed you or made you smile or feel seen, will you consider joining AF and supporting the people who make this queer media site possible?

Join AF+!