*Relationship spoilers from episode 5.*
An “eh” episode for me. I’ve liked the Hope stuff up to date, but now it feels like they’re going too far with it. On the plus side, we make up for the limited Ncuti Gatwa last week with lots of Eric today.
When Hope learns that the school is at risk of losing funding over its repeated scandals, she cracks down with a new punishment method that horrifies the students. Lily is one of the kids caught in the crossfire, after she submits one of her tentacle erotica stories to a contest for the local paper and an article is published about how “depraved” it is. Maeve is hit with compounding crises, but Otis and Isaac are both too busy trying to one-up each other to actually help. In Nigeria, Eric learns about family secrets, is reluctantly on his best behavior in front of his relatives, and get a dose of culture he wasn’t expecting.
We’ll start with Hope, who’s moved on from the Umbridge comparisons and has evidently decided to go full Mr. Brocklehurst. At this rate, I wouldn’t be surprised if she’s channeling Miss Trunchbull by the finale. And it’s just too much. The way her new punishments are designed to shame students are far too public. She’s not subtle enough for me to believe none of this is being told to the parents, most of whom I can’t imagine would be remotely okay with this. She’s just gone too far into mustache-twirling territory, and it’s stopped working for me.
The students’ reactions to her latest campaign continue to be pretty good, though. Cal makes an astute observation about how Hope tends to pit marginalized students against each other to divide them. For instance, she uses another nonbinary student named Layla to frame Cal as willful/unreasonable for not complying to uniform regulations, and she’s driven a wedge between Jackson and Viv by taking Jackson’s head boy duties and giving them to the ambitious Viv.
The whole Otis/Maeve/Isaac thing is a mess right now. On the school trip, Maeve and Otis wound up kissing, so Otis now thinks he has a shot to get back in with her. But when Maeve receives some upsetting news, his attempts to be there for her quickly devolves into an unhelpful dick-swinging contest with Isaac. Both boys are insufferable, and yet the plot somehow culminates with Maeve having to beg for Isaac’s forgiveness. It all just leaves a bad taste in my mouth.
And then we’ve got Eric, still in Nigeria for a family wedding. Even though his mom has repeatedly drilled into him that he can’t let anyone know he’s gay, because of both its illegality in Nigeria and his grandmother’s sensibilities, he still manages to enjoy himself a lot, which makes me happy to see. He has to navigate some uncomfortable “When are you getting married, Eric?” questions from his grandma, but he also gets to wear fabulous clothes for the wedding (where the bride and groom's side are decked out in color-coded outfits,) gossip with his auntie about his mom’s old beau, and stare aghast at the woman who cleans out the reception buffet with her Tupperware containers. He definitely has his sad and tense moments, but he’s also frequently delighted and amused, still his exuberant self—I think Gatwa does a nice job moving through Eric’s shifts in mood.
He also gets an opportunity to see a part of Lagos that he never imagined existed, which is very cool. This experience offers him a lot of peace about himself, a level of confidence and comfort that he’s been reaching for.
A couple quibbles, though. There’s a moment where, when Eric’s grandma asks if he has a girlfriend, one of his sisters starts to say, “Eric has a—” before his mom breaks in to demur that he’s too focused on school to have time for girls. And it’s like, in all her worrying over Eric’s safety in Nigeria, did she never bring it up to her other kids not to mention that he’s gay? Did she put the burden of stepping back into the closet all on him? Not cool, Mrs. Effiong. Also, there’s a confrontation scene between Eric and his mom near the end of the episode that made me think of Trevor Noah’s many jokes about African parents. The general theme of those jokes makes me question whether Eric could speak to his mom like that and live—these English kids, I tell you, no respect.
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