Ok I caught up with wtfock s3 because well, it felt weird to leave unfinished (except a few clips i just didn’t want to watch, like the attack one). here’s what worked and didn’t for me (i’m pretty critical so don’t read if that sort of thing upsets you or you’re not in the mood) because i still think having this story remade so often is an unprecendented storytelling experiment worth thinking about even when it doesn’t entirely work (and i think argumented criticism is good, but if you post hate about the actors/fans etc you really suck tbh) :
- to start with positives : like many said, the acting was pretty damn good. overall wtfock has a really solid cast. the willems have succeeded in creating an onscreen queer intimacy that feels very believable, no holds barred and no awkwardness, and they have to be commended for that. there’s a lot of chemistry and tension at first between them, which then turns into something very soft and sweet and puppy-love-like. it was nice seeing Robbe evolve and the sweet bean energy that emanates from how the actor plays him is very very powerful. i also loved the warmth of the flatshare, and as a Dutchie I just adored the Sinterklaas bits, it was so funny and i loved the found family vibes. warmth is just something they do really well, esp with the last clips, perfume shopping, playing board games, the party at the end. They use the Christmassy vibes really well. the cinematography has its moments too, contrasts between warm and cold, the episode at the beach is gorgeous, the sequence in the tunnel, the light on their faces when they are in that classroom surrounded by drawings. wtfock as a whole is also good at creating some very lovable secondary characters, be it Milan, Yasmina, Noor, or especially king Senne. So, I do understand that there are things to love about this remake, which is probably why my disappointment feels so strong. I really wanted to care about these characters in their journey.
- on to the controversial : i don’t necessarily fault them for wanting to show a more prononced aspect of homophobia. i think the debate about this often lacks nuance. on one hand, this is the sixth remake, and homophobia is something that is still often prevalent, and having one remake show that out of six is not in itself a problem. on the other, yes, happy fluffy stories are important, but sometimes people who have gone through stuff like this also need to see their experiences represented. the power of skam is that it shows difficult experiences BUT ALSO a happy ending. that can be very healing, i think, compared to other stories which focus only on the drama. the trouble is, i don’t think they dealt with it very well, or put any effort into processing the consequences of these harrowing things. and if you don’t, it feels cheap.
- on to my main gripe : the writing. previsible, i know. but to me, essential. and this is not about them ‘changing things’ - i like when remakes change stuff, when they do it well. the thing is, i have been burned too many times before. and when i sense that the writing is being wack, it makes it automatically much harder for me to invest emotionally in the characters. and simply put there were signs early on that made me distrust the writers. for starters, the first two episodes gave me a feeling that they didn’t have their priorities in order. the POV-immersion and depth is one of the most powerful aspects of skam, and it was lost. too many early clips felt out of Robbe’s perspective, and when it was him it was about Noor ; a few clips to show his discomfort were on point, but there were too many of them, and there were repetitive, losing time on what isn’t really an essential part of Robbe’s journey. and while they were spending time on clips that felt like misery flavored filler, they decided several times to condense original clips focused on Isak and Even, together ; like their first meeting and then their first hangout, or later in the series OHN and the minute by minute talk. and i think their story suffered from that. i think because they don’t have a real discussion early on, the buildup of their relationship feels mostly based on physical attraction. and while it certainly is a thing that happens, it just isn’t my fave love story thing. i missed the sweet pining from afar and tension that makes later drama believable. it felt like they brought the drama comparatively too fast without enough character work to make it worthwhile. Also there is just too much time spent on Zoenne drama, and their breakup seems like it foreshadows the dreaded s4 love triangle, which, yikes. the focus is all over the place, the rythm felt incoherent.
- what’s more, they decided to introduce pretty grave elements of plot, like Robbe using slurs against Sander, the homophobic attack, the suicidal urges on both their sides, Sander kissing Britt while he was still saying I love you to Robbe in the morning, without either proper build up or resolution. It made it all feel cheap, jarring, and unearned, especially when they didn’t put trigger warnings or made jokes about it on insta or waited forever to give news about the characters being ok. it felt like drama for the sake of drama, and definitely not written with a vulnerable audience of queer teens in mind. and at the same time, when it came to the ‘big scenes’ of their relationship, like the first kiss or the universes talk or sander’s episode, it felt more or less lifted from OG without a lot of effort made to adapt it to them. i actually quit live watching/blogging after the first kiss scene, because of how similar it was, and how uninspired it felt, and lukewarm. it felt like a lack of imagination. when it came to OHN, the scene in itself was lovely, but the weird time gap, random timing and people seemingly doing nothing after a suicidal Sander disappeared, sort of broke it for me. In the OG the combo of buildup, longing, realisation, fear, release works so well in a sequence, and splitting it over time really diluted it, to me. Similarly the quickly thrown out ‘life is now’ at the ending felt sort of out of nowhere, while in OG it was such a lovely bookend, him apologizing to Eva and reflecting on his growth. The symbolism, which ties everything so beautifully together in themes of rebirth, salvation, baptism, union, faith, deciding your own narrative in OG, here feels inconsistent. There is an attempt I see, something about wasteland vs. warmth/family, but it’s often absent of main clips. It’s nowhere near as coherent as it could be.
- all of this builds up to the main problem for me, of the season. which is, i didn’t really get into Robbe and Sander’s relationship. Or their individual arcs for that matter. When it comes to Robbe, I guess he just isn’t my type of character. I feel like he is missing the fire of an Isak. A lot of the time he just felt too passive, like he let other characters make his decisions. I was waiting for him to stand up for himself more than he did. And there are too many scenes of another character doing his coming out for him. And then Sander ; I have to say I don’t understand all the love his character gets. Maybe because that’s because he sort of gives me Dutch fuckboi vibes...but there were several times he just came accross as a flat out asshole. I found him intriguing in his intro clip, chaotic and charming, but that never really went where i expected it to. i didn’t get his passion, what drew him to art. the symbolism around his character - basically Bowie, and drawing Robbe, and Chernobyl (which is a bit tasteless imho, turning a tragedy like that into a cutesy romantic thing), feels ...disjointed, and shallow to me. Like I never really got into it. And maybe some people did and noticed deeper links but to me, I got stuck at the surface. I saw a lot of interesting theories with what was going on with him but in the end they just copied OG. And I’m sad to say, but he ended up feeling like a manic pixie dream boy cliché to me, and i just didn’t understand what drew them to each other so strongly. Yes, Robbe is caring and Sander is in need of care, but that feels like a very reductive reproduction of OG. Beyond that...i don’t know. Certain complexities of the OG i loved just...were sanded away, like Isak being ignorant about MI and learning compassion. This just...didn’t feel like it had the same depth, and often felt like soapy teenage drama, leaning too hard and too lazily on the actors’ chemistry. i like my romances wordy and solidly enmeshed in character development, and this was not it. It never felt like they had a real conversation about things, esp after the drama.
- i think this is the first remake that made me actually angry for reasons not related to problematic cast shit, and so i’m trying to analyze that emotion. for me it comes down to too much drama, too heavy handed. Too much of the boy squad being shitty to Robbe, too much Noor, too much filler clips without any deeper meaning, too much things distracting from getting to know the main characters and going into their issues in depth. They changed stuff, but didn’t have the guts to actually follow through. They broke the mold but only in ways that ended up feeling shallow and unconsequential. Like I would have loved seeing Robbe go to therapy ! see his mom ! Zoe and Robbe go to the police together ! Sander have a complicated home situation ! or doing a Bowie related art installation to express his feelings of alienation ! seeing more of the underground graffiti scene ! or just...something, idk. And them also removing the faith-related themes also felt disappointing. and the ohn clip taking place in the place where sander draws feels very....basic to me, even if it was pretty. very ‘oh he’s an artist, here is his safe place’....hm, okay. I didn’t like that they made Britt into such a villain, I didn’t like how the boy squad showed no care for Robbe whatsoever for weeks until the plot said it was time for them to be redeemed in a way that felt too jarring, and I didn’t like that they made Moyo so horrible but redeemed him so easily. I actually thought they would show that it’s okay to separate yourself from friends who are that bigoted, because it just shows they are not willing to care for people. And him suddenly saying those sweet and mature things felt too out of characters and a ahah ‘gotcha’ rather than depth . I didn’t like that Robbe, too, was made so virulent by his internalized homophobia but got over it so quickly. I think what disappointed me most, in the end, was that I kept picking up potential and the show kept doing absolutely nothing with it, or confirming my fears, and it made me feel stupid and out of tune with whatever they were doing. And it’s, to me, symptomatic in modern storytelling of a trend to privilege shocks and twists over inner coherence and build up. And it makes for...Very underwhelming stuff, in the end.
- all in all, i think this remake illustrates why s3 of OG is not as easy to remake as it sounds. it’s very intricate machinery, with a pitch perfect rhythm (and an extremely passionate nitpicky fanbase lmao). and if you don’t get all the parts of why it’s so great, you’re going to lose a lot of it. (and all the remakes ended losing up stuff in translation ; more or less compensated by inventivity and charm of their own.) so many mainstream press articles praise the real time/social media format and the ‘real talk about teen issues’ which, yeah, is part of the success, but doesn’t explain the devotion on its own. there’s the way the story uses real time to build up a storytelling rythm that feels organic and makes sense as if it was part of the lives of the viewer. There’s foreshadowing and aftershocks. Wtfock often feels like they wrote the clip numbers on darts and randomly threw them at a week planner. If an episode of a regular series ends on a cliffhanger, we can be thrilled and frustrated and put it aside for next week. but if you end an episode with a character shown to be suicidal, or you don’t show them being okay after a beating, for hours or days, that’s the emotion you leave your viewers with, because skam is a continuous experience. and remakes who pile on drama moments without respite (looking at you too skamfr s4) don’t get how tiring and disengaging this can be, in this format. skam worked so well because of how benevolent it was, on the whole. and also, cheeky, with that ‘don’t take it too seriously’ deflating humor. grumpy isak in ‘hate me now’ mode getting bumped into. this lightness and comedy often feels missing here. also my god the social media is absolutely terrible. plus...there is too much filler. honestly, them having more time, on the whole...ended up being a bad thing. Plus Wtfock feels like it has so much more unadressed plot points, like...why did Sander change his mind exactly and kiss Britt again ? How did Robbe’s mom react ? Who did the attack ? What is happening w Senne now ? etc. And it feels like they just missed the fact that OG, however subtly, did adress those things.
- now, don’t get me wrong, i’m happy it’s popular in Belgium. On the whole it’s still a beautiful story of love and acceptance. and that people found something in it that spoke to them. but as a remake, it’s probably one of the most disappointing yet, to me. and i sort of...don’t get the hype. and i don’t want to be too ‘oh cute boys kissing’ cynical about it. but i think this illustrates why in the end, this is also very subjective. there are probably things i missed because i didn’t feel the need to examine it in depth or do the extra emotional work that comes with being a devoted fan of something. and some of their choices made me angry, and i’m not forgiving when it comes to these things. i still wish them success for s4 and whatever else, but i don’t think i will watch live, at least unless it gets really rave reviews about their treatment of Yasmina’s season. i mean they got s2 right, who knows?
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i would love to hear a s3 rant tbh
i started writing this a few months after s3 came out, because i needed that long to sort of soak up all the feelings and changes that came along with it. now i’m used to it enough that i don’t find myself thinking too hard about s3 when i get to it in rewatches–it’s a shift, but one i’m adjusted to. and now it’s premiere day for s4! so i’m finally done writing the rest of it.
it is a shift, though, and i think that’s why so many of us in the fandom had mixed feelings about it–we still loved it, but we didn’t come away from s3 with the same lingering mood that we did after s2. for me, s3 was the first season that ended on a truly happy note. there was no heartbroken elena at her quinces, there was no distraught family hoping lydia would wake up.
s3 left pretty much all the characters in a good, hopeful place, so why did we find ourselves more inclined to pick it apart? why did it feel different, when all the individual character arcs and plot points were in the same world we love, and clearly handled with the same amount of effort and care as we expect?
the following giant analysis is my attempt to articulate an answer to that, as a fan who has watched the whole show….so many times. so many times, guys. just so much. i don’t even have a number anymore.
to give you an idea of what you’re in for, here’s the categories you’ll find behind the cut:
each season’s focus was different
brothers and other strangers
dr. b’s inclusion minimizing other relationships
schneider being more isolated from the family
schneider’s sobriety
schneider & avery
avery + other characters
penelope & mateo
misc other gripes
feel free to reply to this and/or send me asks, i spent way too long on it. :)
each season’s focus was different:
obviously, odaat is an ensemble show. every character gets moments of their own, and most have larger arcs. but because the show needs a focus, each season arguably belongs more to some of the characters than others.
the stars of s1 are penelope and elena.
penelope is our anchor to the family and the story, the one that everything else orbits around. we’re watching her live through the end of her marriage and become more settled in her new role as the primary parent to her kids. elena is figuring out who she is, then dealing with the fallout from sharing her truth with the people who matter to her. her quinces is the topic of debate in 1.01 and closes out the season in 1.13.
lydia steals scenes a lot, but she doesn’t really have a larger arc in s1. at the end of the season, she’s the same person she was at the beginning, just changed by her involvement in elena and penelope’s stories. same goes for alex–he has stories, but they’re a lot smaller and more contained. and schneider and leslie are only involved in the season because of their friendships with lydia and penelope, then in schneider’s case, his dynamic with alex later on.
the stars of s2 are penelope and lydia.
penelope goes back to school, has her first serious relationship post-divorce, and finally deals more seriously with her mental health struggles. lydia decides to become a u.s. citizen, struggles with her feelings toward leslie, and ends the season triumphant after a major health scare.
elena plays a major role in s2, but a lot of her story is a continuation from s1, with the return of victor and her first romantic relationship, and developments like her new job as a handyma’am are awesome but not the central focus of the season. alex gets to be the star of a few episodes, more than in s1, but they’re not really tied in to an overarching arc. his first job, his anti-immigrant bullying, and his time at the movies with penelope are all standalone plots.
schneider has a larger, more serious role in s2, going from ‘you guys are like family’ during quinces in s1 to ‘now, you’re my family’ to lydia in not yet. but he’s still on the outside, looking in. and leslie’s role remains one that supports penelope at work and lydia in friendship, rather than giving him his own plot.
the stars of s3 are alex and schneider.
in s3, penelope’s story is more settled, because so is she. her job is secure, her schoolwork is coming to a close, and her kids are growing up. she has a romance, but mateo is less important to her than max was, and the plot reflects that, with mateo barely around until penelope’s neglect of him becomes part of the joke. pen’s reacting to what’s going on around her more, whether that’s alex’s drug use or elena’s anxiety and secret hotel room or schneider’s sobriety.
that’s not a bad thing! justina kills it in every episode, penelope’s still funny and a tearjerker and strong as hell while flawed…but s3 is the first season that doesn’t completely revolve around her, storywise.
elena’s story is also more settled, on some levels. victor’s return gives her a much-deserved coda, evidence that her life couldn’t be neatly tied up in a bow after a year and that emotional scars do real damage. but even that plot, like her first time with syd and her driving lessons, are part of larger episodes involving other stories rather than the main focus of all of them. victor’s wedding, the finale episode, tries to move forward five of our six main characters, compared to elena’s quinces, which was almost exclusively her show.
lydia’s s3 plot includes her fabulous bouquet list, ideas about aging and motherhood and family. but she’s back to being a scene-stealer–even her bouquet list exists as a subplot in other people’s episodes.
having focused the most on the alvarez women in s1 and s2, the show finally gives alex more room to shine in s3, a development that surprised me but pleasantly so because it turns out that the more they give him to do, the better marcel is at it. s3 shows us an alex growing up, making dumb choices and learning from them, but also being there for his family in bigger and more mature ways, schneider included.
and schneider…gosh. schneider’s arc in s3 is so important that it’s the one they foreshadowed ominously before the season was even on netflix:
he did step into the spotlight as promised, and by the end of the season, he was a full-fledged canon member of the family. not that we needed them to tell us that, even if schneider did. :)
to start with, though, that’s part of why s3 feels different: because it is. the focus widens to different characters, and the ones we’re used to following more closely have more contained arcs.
brothers and other strangers
s3 also decided to introduce new family members. a LOT of new family members. and while they all added to the story, some fit in better than others. the funeral did this well, finally giving lydia’s estranged sister a face to go with the name, and giving us more of a glimpse at the big family penelope grew up around before the military and parenting narrowed her everyday focus.
but the show’s decision to anchor an episode on brothers gave us what felt like a lot of consistency issues. they explained pen’s sudden s3 brother, tito, by making his absence during lydia’s coma a topic of discussion. they couldn’t actually include a never before mentioned sibling for penelope without creating bigger confusion, though. it just wasn’t possible.
tito is apparently the older brother that lydia idolizes, but until 3.04 she’s never mentioned him in conversation once? when she’s in a coma reflecting on her family and how they’ll go on without her, her beloved son isn’t worth a mention? i can forgive the show for deciding to give pen a brother three years in, but i can’t pretend it wasn’t jarring when odaat treated her like an only child before that.
and this is a much smaller issue, but also in s3 suddenly syd has a younger brother? who is homeschooled too? when they were telling elena their only classmate was their chinchilla the year before? like i said, a relatively small thing but it still bugs me because it’s so random.
schneider now has sibling(s) too, apparently, but his comment about not being his father’s favorite child was the first time that came up, in three years of him talking about his parents and household staff and childhood stressors. i have so many questions. hopefully future seasons will clarify some things.
anyway, hermanos was a deeply confusing episode for me because tito came out of nowhere and schneider’s conversation with leslie, while lovely, was the first time we heard schneider (or anyone actually) label his relationship with penelope a sibling-ish one. it was clear during lydia’s coma that he considered lydia a friend who was also somewhat a maternal figure in his life, but it wasn’t until s3 that the show extended that dynamic, from ‘lydia is like his mom’ to ‘therefore he and pen are both her kids.’
i’ll get into this later, but i honestly think that was meant more to tie into the episode’s theme than because it was supposed to shift his friendship with penelope into new territory. we’re watching penelope deal with tito, and elena deal with alex, and schneider makes the one comment during an important scene with leslie. it’s still jarring though.
the very fact that schneider wasn’t with the family during their vacation felt like an inconsistency to a lot of us, whose two-seasons-worth of headcanons about schneider make ‘he secretly books the room next to theirs and crashes their vacation’ more believable than him staying home alone.
it was done in service to the season’s goals of adding tito to the mix and folding leslie in more, and both goals were accomplished…it just felt a little strange.
dr b’s greater inclusion minimizing other relationships
speaking of leslie, s3 for him was what s2 gave schneider–more ties to more characters, and the first real subplots we’ve seen him have about serious subjects. for good or bad, a lot of what stood out to me in s3 as different was related to the show making more room for leslie.
schneider not being with the alvarezes on their vacation, even though he’s at every family event including funerals now? penelope made it happen by ‘entrusting’ schneider with the care of her house(plant), but really it played out that way so we could see schneider and leslie bond.
elena’s driving lessons being handled by leslie? it’s fair enough that penelope isn’t the one doing it, since she’s busy and it stresses her out, but if you want me to believe that schneider wouldn’t have jumped at the opportunity, even with avery in his life now, you’re crazy. there’s no believable canon reason in s1 or s2 why leslie would be the one doing that, but it played out that way so we could see elena and leslie bond.
even alex gets to know leslie better because he’s more involved with elena, meaning that after s3 leslie finally has connections to the whole family (which schneider accomplished in s2 once he was mentoring elena in building repairs).
by the season finale, leslie is attending victor’s wedding, mistakenly butting in on elena’s time with her dad, and finally traveling to cuba with lydia while he shares his practice with penelope.
however you feel about s3 in general, the show had to change its usual dynamic in order to include leslie more in situations like driving lessons and weddings. it just wouldn’t have worked otherwise. for example, the funeral at the beginning of s3 doesn’t involve him at all, because why would it? unlike schneider, he hasn’t spent a ton of time bonding with the extended alvarez family prior to s3. he’s involved in big moments because he’s close to lydia or penelope.
s3 is the first time we really see him get involved in the story just on his own merits. and that required less schneider in family moments, which paired nicely with the season’s other visible difference.
schneider being more isolated from the family
the schneider we know and love from s2 would have offered to take over elena’s driving lessons as soon as he realized they were stressing pen out. he would have found an excuse to join them on vacation, and he would have been present when penelope realized elena was sneaking off to a hotel room with syd.
schneider prior to s3 was always around that way, witnessing threesome porn on alex’s laptop and picking up strangers at the airport for the quinces, making it easier for penelope to go to him when she needed advice or a hug. in s1, she may have started out getting his help as a last resort, but by late s2, she was often turning to him instead of her own family, or her support group. pen was reluctantly aware of his many hookups because she was at his apartment so much.
once avery’s in the picture, though, we see less of schneider in the family orbit, and it’s really not explained. penelope pulls him (literally) into alex’s drug storyline, but after that he’s mainly in other people’s storylines, like lydia wanting to teach penelope to cook, or alex spending too much on shoes.
even in anxiety, schneider’s status as penelope’s most trusted person is one scene in an episode that shows how she interacts with everyone in her life, rather than the climax of it–the way his time with her is in hello penelope.
beyond individual episodes, it’s the relationships that matter, and we just see a lot less of that with schneider and the family in s3. in s1 we saw him bonding with alex all the time, and in s2 schneider became more important to elena. but in s3…where is he?
alex goes to his apartment because penelope ordered him to, to get a lecture about reckless spending, and that’s the only one-on-one time we see them have before the laundry room in drinking and driving. are they still close? i’m assuming they are, because alex clearly still cares about him and vice versa, but whether it’s because alex is growing up or because schneider’s busier with his first real girlfriend, they’ve stopped hanging out.
i feel the same way about schneider and elena. her support of him when he relapses (how amazing is it that elena is the first alvarez to use the word ‘love’ with schneider, when he’s been closer to lydia and penelope longer? i adore one gay cuban teenager) makes it clear that he’s still important to her, but even her building maintenance seems to be done alone now. the only solo conversations they even have are at the funeral, in the very beginning of the season.
and while schneider and penelope remain friends in s3, the nature of their friendship has changed in a lot of ways. she’s at his apartment less, he’s at hers mostly when the whole family is around, and until his father’s visit they’re less close physically along with everything else.
schneider’s absence in big moments like elena learning to drive or smaller ones like a rare family vacation can be explained as storytelling choices, but they also make it easier to understand how he started drinking again, and how it was possible for him to keep it hidden (along with his avery breakup) before victor noticed.
when penelope went off her meds, schneider was the first person to confront her about her unusual behavior, but penelope doesn’t see the change in him until she’s looking for it. some of that is the show arguing that alcoholics are really good at covering their secrets up, but it also only works because though schneider is making appearances at meals and still involved with family, he’s around a lot less than he used to be.
schneider’s sobriety
deciding to dive into schneider’s sobriety was the defining choice of s3, in my opinion, that made it feel so different. if i had to pick just one, that would be it, because so much else spiderwebs out from it.
finally seeing more of the world schneider comes from, in the arrival of his father? a major relapse trigger for him.
penelope telling him that choosing his father over his tenants means he’s not part of their family? seemingly the last thing she said to him before he drank.
his inclusion in the alvarez family museum? a way to show how his sobriety is the most impressive work he’s done in his whole life.
penelope (and the rest of the family, but especially penelope, once they’re alone) doing whatever they can to support him and convince him to keep fighting? the clearest sign we’ve had in three season of how important schneider really is to them.
it’s an amazing story arc for him, and as much as it hurts to watch, i love it.
but boy does it make season three a change from the first two.
after first setting up how proud of him dr b. and lydia are (the closest thing he has to loving parents) for his years of sobriety, we then see him tempted to drink thanks to his father’s actions and just general presence.
but because of how the show handles the reveal, we actually don’t know for sure that he’s drinking again until penelope and lydia confirm it. we can be rightly suspicious–i saw that the dangling tag was no longer on the bottle when he placed it on his coffee table, and assumed then that he’d already opened it–but we can’t know.
which means that for the first time, just like penelope, we don’t know if we can trust schneider. schneider! who has wanted nothing more than to earn and keep the family’s trust this whole time.
it’s so unsettling. as is his visible unraveling once he realizes he’s been caught.
and the thing is, that we’ve seen this before, just like penelope has lived it before–the worst of her fights and fear with victor happened offscreen, but when he comes back we see him lie to her, try to convince her he can handle his own problems and she should leave it alone.
but that…that was season one. that was victor, who moved in and out of the picture often in really hurtful ways, and who we weren’t encouraged to get attached to.
schneider is lovable, and loving, and present. and yet in season three, he also becomes a version of himself who is reactive, and dishonest, and will do whatever it takes to avoid being confronted about his relapse. including trying to hurt and push away the people he loves most.
i think part of why his relapse is so effective as an arc is because it’s as hard for the viewers to expect such a sharp turn from the sweet, laid-back guy we met in s1 as it is for penelope and her family. but that’s also why s3 leaves us shaken.
schneider & avery
oh gosh, schneider and avery. i’ve talked about them a lot before, so i’ll just say here that they brought her in with great potential, then let her stay so far on the sidelines of the show after the valentine’s day episode that it became impossible to know who she was anymore, what role she played in his life, and what their future could possibly look like now that they were reunited at the wedding.
is she the gorgeous nerdy artist who has just enough in common with him to be a good fit long-term? is she rich and more suited to the world he comes from? is she uninterested in his life outside of what they do for fun together, so that she’ll never get to know his chosen family at all?
it seemed to change each time we saw her, and by the end of her involvement in schneider’s s3 storyline, we didn’t even know what had broken them up before we were supposed to be rooting for them to get back together.
my theory continues to be that the people making the show were blinded by the impossible cuteness of real life marrieds todd and india, and forgot to make sure their plot threads on the show made sense.
because avery was never going to get a ton of screen time, she was a minor character–but revolving any part of his story around her kind of gave the show a duty to at least give us a clue of what the heck was going on.
avery + other characters
my other major complaint about avery (who i genuinely adored, at least for her first couple of episodes! my liveblog of her existence in s3 is just a lot of flailing about her being so freaking cute) is that the show keeps her in a totally unprecedented bubble.
penelope’s love interests? always interact with her family. whether it’s ben getting a text from lydia, because he wasn’t around long enough for more, mateo joining an unexpected party, or max spending whatever time he could at her house…we always got to know how her guys related to her family, and that helped us understand them and the relationships better.
syd of course spends a ton of time around elena’s family, and we’re going to see alex’s girlfriend meet the family this season. you could argue that those comparisons are different because schneider’s not one of them, his storylines are less central than say, penelope’s are–and that’s true. but even dr. b’s girlfriend got a long bathroom scene with lydia and we see/know much less about leslie than we do schneider.
mostly though, this bugs me because avery clearly spends time in their home! she’s there for valentine’s day, and penelope also tells schneider to invite her during ‘the man.’ and she works at the kids’ school, so she’s in their orbit on another level. penelope is able to get in touch with her and find out they broke up.
and yet, the first real love interest for schneider that could be a healthy and serious relationship…and onscreen, lydia never meets her. doesn’t try to figure out if she’s good enough for the adopted son lydia has been encouraging to find love for three years. they never interact.
elena, who developed a serious interest in alex’s love life and a taste for gossip in season one, appears to have no interest in the woman schneider’s seeing. alex, i could understand not caring, because he’s generally happier caring about what directly affects him and what he can do to help others…if schneider’s happy, i get why he might stay out of it.
but it just sort of grates on me that none of the women in schneider’s family have a conversation with avery onscreen, beyond the moment when penelope is trying to kick her and schneider out and she pushes back. if avery is in a scene, she’s talking to and focused on schneider, or nikki, or schneider’s father. none of the family. is that because she doesn’t feel like she has to make an effort to know them? or because the show just wasn’t thinking about that? even though we see it with every other love interest brought into the house?
i mean, when you pay attention to that, then of course we don’t have a clear sense of who she is! how can we when there’s no reason to believe that anyone who cares about schneider does either?
penelope & mateo
penelope’s relationship with mateo puzzles me almost as much as schneider and avery–and in some ways, even more. we see their friendship first, we watch them deny interest in more than that with each other. then penelope pushes the issue and they do decide to date, but just like with avery, the show doesn’t have a lot of screentime to offer him.
so what we know about her new boyfriend is that they have some things in common that she really values but maybe too much in common to avoid fighting about it–and then we barely see him again, learning mainly through his absence that she’s just not that into him, until eventually they break up because it turns out he was more into his ex than her anyway.
there’s a karmic sort of humor in that for penelope, but for me it left mateo feeling like a waste of a love interest. we really didn’t get to enjoy their relationship much, especially if they wanted us to miss it when it was gone…so was it worth the time they spent setting it up in the first place?
for me the answer to that was no. especially since as her ‘longtime’ school volunteer buddy, we’d never seen him before. and i feel like it’s not likely we’ll see him again.
penelope & schneider
this is a frustrating one for me because while i have complaints about these two and their relationship in s3 it was also AMAZING and i LOVED it. both are true.
the confusing part is that their dynamic is inconsistent in s3. think some of that is because the show is trying to do so much at once. fully bring schneider into the family, focus their romantic lives on other people, deepen their bond, deny the possibility of a romance between them, keep them each other’s person.
in s1 they’re landlord and tenant but also becoming real friends. in s2 they’re best friends and he’s a honorary part of the family now (though still an outsider).
but in s3 he’s established clearly as her best friend and most trusted person, a guy who’s become deeply important to her and her whole family–so much so that after his relapse, they come together to support him much like they all did lydia in s2.
but penelope treats him dramatically differently from moment to moment and episode to episode in s3. like an annoying brother when he’s getting cooking lessons from her mom, like a life partner when alex’s behavior has her angry and scared, like a bff when she’s considering dating mateo, and even a little like a flirting companion at the wedding.
it’s not completely unprecedented for their dynamic to have multiple layers. his relationship with lydia is complicated too. in past seasons, he flirted with both penelope and her mom–while they also laughed at victor calling them a couple and he told comatose lydia how important her mothering was to him.
but they lean harder into it during lydia’s cooking lessons, while still hitting the beats hard of ‘are you sure you’re not dating?’ during penelope’s support group and schneider’s dad’s visit. the contrasting takes on their friendship is just a lot of whiplash in a single season.
another thing about s3 that’s different is the kinds of physical contact between penelope and schneider. you might not notice unless you’re looking for it, but penelope actually touches schneider more than he does her. lightly, casually, briefly. she makes contact in a friendly, familiar way all the time. schneider is more likely to touch her when it’s important, in big moments, as though he knows that she trusts him and welcomes him in her space but he doesn’t want to abuse the privilege.
i studied it for making gifsets, and she touches him more every season. and while he touches her a lot more in s2 than in s1, s3 is actually about the same amount. penelope grew visibly closer to him this season, but he held himself back from getting any more familiar. he was also the only one of the two of them who compared her to blood family. for now,it’s really up to interpretation if there’s a deeper reasoning behind that.
for both of them, though, more than half of the physical contact they make in s3 happens in just two episodes, both towards the end of the season. not only does schneider’s father’s visit and his relapse bring them closer together, literally and physically, but the season up until that point has them further apart.
they spend time together stalking alex, or with schneider talking her down from her panic, but the casual dinners are less, and she’s going to him less for advice–which means there are less small touches, less moments where schneider sits her down on his couch or she nudges him affectionately.
that makes it all the more intense when they do connect, with penelope holding his hand and them hugging twice all within the same few minutes. and then after his relapse, their conversation alone in the apartment is so tense and so much more separate than they usually are.
the last time she touched him was in the man, the most open and complimentary she’s ever been, and look what happened. this isn’t the man she knows and loves, she needs to reach her best friend who’s still in there somewhere under all the pain and self-loathing, but she tries to do so with honesty first, with bluntness, with tough love, with listening kindly but not without pushing back, and finally with his place in her family–as a role model for the kids.
only once he’s agreeing with her about the course of action and just doubting his ability to survive it does she reach out. once he’s himself again. and then she’s more there for him physically than she ever has been before. this is a new level of intimacy between them, schneider letting her in rather than excusing himself during tough times, her giving rather than just taking support, her being his silent rock the way he always is hers.
it’s just different than the previous seasons, between them. the problem is that while you’re watching it, it’s hard to pin down what message about their relationship the show is trying to send, since they touch less but more deliberately, and they’re family but not in a way that has well-defined boundaries.
misc other gripes
elena’s world shrinking
as of s3, what exactly is elena’s life outside of syd and anxiety? don’t get me wrong, i love her relationship with syd, and the anxiety plot was good–driving lessons too, which were tied to the anxiety somewhat.
but if we’re pulling back to look at the bigger picture, elena in season one was a lonely club leader, figuring out her identity, and navigating disagreements with her family.
elena in season two was experiencing her first relationship, finding her first group of geeky friends to hang out with irl, confronting the fallout of victor’s behavior in s1, and continuing her academic hard work while also adding lots of political engagement.
in comparison, elena in season three exchanges ‘i love yous’ and has sex for the first time, as well as makes up with syd after their first fight. she learns she has anxiety and gets her driver’s license and continues to heal her relationship with victor, but…she has no friends anymore? no mention of josh or carmen or any of the echo park gamers? and she’s studying for testing, it seemed like, but she’s not in clubs anymore or volunteering or protesting? her whole world outside her family isn’t really syd, is it?? because i know first love is amazing, but that’s not healthy.
i said up there that less of the story belongs to elena after s1, and this is a large part of why i feel that way. the show treats her like some of her bigger arcs are settling down, rather than expanding, giving her subplots instead and making room for the other characters. it’s weird to watch though when just a quick comment here and there would have implied that she still spends time with friends or fellow social justice warriors.
lydia’s humor goes dark
when it comes to lydia, season one includes some jokes about her ending up in a home–or to be more specific, the fact that she never will. her comedy in season two revolves a lot around her identity, with her decision to become a citizen.
and then, we go into season three after her coma. though she appears to be in good health, the family is still worried, and elena especially tries to protect her from herself.
whether it’s specifically related to her near-death experience or not, season three involves way more death jokes. things like lydia looking up, and inviting god to reunite her with her husband ‘berto, i am ready,’ she says, then sort of shrugs when death doesn’t arrive.
it’s not unfunny…but it’s a different kind of humor. i can’t say i enjoyed the edge to it, probably because i was elena’s age when my grandmother died, and she was also a deeply religious woman who was awaiting her invitation to heaven.
alex also has no friends anymore? does he still play baseball?
the way that s3 gives alex so much more to do, storywise, is awesome. but just like elena, his world seems to have gotten smaller in terms of socializing. we hear about his girlfriend but don’t meet her, and we never see him interact with friends, either–besides things like instagram.
this one’s really a minor complaint because he has whole important storylines in s3 and at least the show does imply he still has friends…but it’s a little odd for the most popular alvarez teen to spend more time chatting with dr. berkowitz than any friends his own age. especially when he used to be so involved in baseball that we at least saw his teammates.
it’s not clear to me if season three just didn’t overlap with sports season for him this time around, or if he gave baseball up–but if it were the latter, you’d think they would mention that.
scott came back but not lori
i honestly don’t know which of the show’s casting choices are influenced by availability and which are choices they make for plots they want–other than carmen leaving, because i know ariela went to another show.
but while lori hasn’t been around since season one, scott went missing after the second episode of season two…and then appeared in the second episode of season three before never showing up in the rest of the season.
there’s no continuity problem with this or anything–i just don’t like scott and wish that if they were only going to keep one of pen’s coworkers, it would’ve been lori. i know that wouldn’t have let him do what they were able to with scott. but still.
max came back why?
i like max, for the record. he’s been my favorite of all penelope’s love interests so far, and i felt bad for them both when they broke up. but in terms of the finale, it felt really jarring the way they included his little appearance.
in that one scene, the show managed to remind us that they truly loved each other, genuinely supported and cared for each other, had common background and went back a long time as friends–and that out of all the men penelope had been with, he was the one she was still hurting over.
and then he left, as easily as he appeared.
besides reminding us that her major relationship in s2 was with max, what did that scene accomplish? it didn’t feel like closure, because it didn’t add anything to their original breakup. but it also didn’t change anything about how they ended–he remained someone she wasn’t going to be with, even though they loved each other a lot.
the only explanation i can think of is that the show wanted to work with the actor again. because if their goal was to confirm that yes, she and max really were great together even though she wasn’t going to be with him…we didn’t need more confirmation of that. we got the message in s2. ed quinn is great though.
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