*Episode premise spoilers.*
For me, the penultimate episode of the series is pretty satisfying. Little strings of plots that have been unwinding all season come to a head in important ways, and the last scenes bring the story home well. I’m looking forward to seeing where we go in the finale.
A mock exam at Cavendish is derailed when the lift breaks down—again. Rather than suck it up once more, Isaac takes matters into his own hands, making a major statement about accessibility at the school. (And little does anyone know, Otis and O were both in the lift when it stalled!) Jean invites Maeve over for dinner, but things get off on the wrong foot when 1) Otis doesn’t turn up (again, no one knows he’s stuck in a lift,) and 2) Maeve arrives right when Jean is in the middle of a blow-up with her sister. Cal struggles with their gender dysphoria, Adam spirals after a serious screw-up at his internship, and Viv has a troubling encounter with Beau.
I’m glad the many access issues at Cavendish, both large and small, finally come back to bite them. It gets a bit heavy-handed at times—there are suddenly far more disabled student extras on campus than we’ve ever seen before—but on the whole, it’s well done. Isaac is finally able to force everyone to hear what he has to say, telling them that instead of worrying about his exams like everyone else, “I’m here wasting my time explaining why accessibility is a big deal, when it should be a given.” And when an administrator tries to downplay the recurring issues with the lift, Aisha speaks up to say that insufficient access for disabled students “[isn’t] a misunderstanding, it’s an afterthought.” Snaps for all these kids!
“X and Y get stuck in an elevator” together is one of the oldest tropes in the book, one the show employed at the start of the season with Aimee and Isaac. Otis and O’s scenes together are interesting—the two have been competing all season, Otis is on the verge of a panic attack, and both have understandable reasons to regard the other as their enemy. But inevitably in these types of scenarios, defenses drop as the hours stretch on, and both characters wind up being honest about things that neither probably ever imagined sharing with the other.
The Jean-Maeve stuff is interesting as well. The episode opens on a flashback to Jean and Joanna’s teen years, which addresses some heavy, formative stuff for them and deeply fuels their argument in the middle of the episode. So when Maeve arrives, Jean is completely off-balance, and Maeve isn’t doing much better herself—she’s just had to pick up her mom’s ashes. But as they muddle through together, without Otis as a buffer, they too find their way toward connection.
For a scattershot of the other plots, I’m glad that Cal has Roman as a sounding board for their struggles, but I’m definitely concerned for them. They’ve been documenting their experiences on testosterone, and in today’s recording, they express how overwhelming their gender dysphoria is and say, “I wish I could just go back to being a kid. I think that was the last time I felt like me.” Viv’s plot, to me, feels like it might have escalated a little too fast, but I suppose that’s a byproduct of having so many different ongoing mini-plots throughout the season; there’s only one episode left in the show, so it’s not like there’s much more time to work with. And while I continue to think the show should’ve done a better job to address Adam’s past history as Eric’s bully, I do like how they’ve explored his feelings about his dad this season and the effect his upbringing had on him. There’s a strong scene between him and Mr. Groff, where Adam has a speech that begins, “I messed up at work today, and the first thing that I thought is, ‘I’m gonna disappoint my dad.’”
Oh, and the episode uses Jeff Buckley’s “Last Goodbye” to excellent effect!
Not much Ncuti Gatwa today. No real movement is made on Eric and Otis’s argument in the last episode—there’s one shot of Otis avoiding Eric and another of the boys looking at each other across campus—and only one major scene that addresses his ongoing inner conflict about his relationship with his church. Other than that, we’re pretty light on Eric. Still a couple great moments, though. I love when Eric is getting ready in the morning and tells the picture of Jesus on his bedroom wall, “Stop staring at me. Silly, silly Jesus.” And he’s already stressed about the prospect of taking his mock exam, but he absolutely jumps out of his skin when the fire alarm goes off.
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