Some observations on the second episode of Adolescence:
• This show rises and falls on the strength of its child actors, and as such it has done nothing but rise. The young performers that casting director Shaheen Baig has assembled here are a hugely impressive group. In the first episode we had Owen Cooper as Jamie, making one of the most auspicious debuts in recent memory as a young teenager in terrified denial of what he’d done. In this episode, set almost entirely at Jamie’s school, detectives Bascombe and Frank meet and talk with several other students, crafted through equally impressive performances.
• The standout is Fatima Bojang as Jade, best friend of the slain student, Katie. Her grief has manifested almost entirely as anger, in large part because she has no one else she feels close to. Her relationship with her mother, she tells a caring teacher named Mrs. Bailey (Hannah Walters), is less than supportive, and in fact actively damaging. She claims she has no other friends. By the end of the episode it looks as though she’s about to walk into traffic; before that she pounds the living shit out of Jamie’s friend Ryan (Kaine Davis), whom she suspects of involvement in Katie’s killing. It falls to Bojang to make all of this look and function like the feelings of a real live emotional teenager, not a character in a Very Special Episode. She doesn’t make it look easy; she makes it look hard, which is the point.
• As Ryan, Kaine Davis impresses as well. He’s the kind of callow, sly teenage boy whose primary face for the world is a comedy mask, a smirking visage more or less welded to his personality and cannot take off. He tries to weasel his way out of talking with the cops with a directness I (a goodie-two-shoes through and through) would have been terrified to even attempt. When Bascombe returns for a second interview, he leaps out the window and makes a run for it. Even when Bascome corners him, it takes some time to get any useful information out of him. He gave the murder weapon to Jamie, believing it would only be used to scare the girl. Isn’t that always the way with people who support murderers? “Oh, he doesn’t really mean to do it,” right up until the point it happens, and sometimes even afterwards.
• Living in the United States of America, the Greatest Nation in the History of the World, it’s rather quaint to see school administrators react with horror at the idea of security guards and metal detectors in schools. It’s charming to see a banner hanging outside a school reading “STOP KNIFE VIOLENCE” because that’s the worst kind of violence that happens in schools. It’s funny watching cops talk shit about Andrew Tate when our woman-hating rapist president acted personally to free this woman-hating rapist influencer and bring him to the United States. Just a real fun situation from top to bottom if you ask me.
• According to DI Bascombe’s son Adam (Amari Bacchus), Tate’s prevailing theory is the 80/20 rule, which holds that 80 percent of women are attracted to only 20% of men. Think about those numbers for a second. Why an 80/20 split, adding up to 100%, when we’re not talking about the same groups of people? The answer is because it’s made up, it’s bullshit, the numbers have been assigned at random by an innumerate piece of shit to slander an entire gender and convince another gender they have to “trick” women into liking them. Obviously to an extent this is comical — walk around a shopping mall sometime and you’ll countless happy couples the male half of whom don’t match the manosphere definition of “alpha male” by any stretch of the imagination — but it’s also horrifying. This kind of completely delusional but forcefully asserted declaration against a targeted population, droolingly cretinous but with predictably horrifying ramifications, is different from Nazi race science only in terms of the group being targeted.
• Adam pulls aside his father — a tall order for the awkward, frequently bullied boy, since they’re not particularly close — to tell him that he and Frank have gotten their investigation all wrong. This whole time, they’ve been acting under the assumption that Katie’s friendly comments on Jamie’s instagram were just that, friendly comments. It takes Adam to educate his father that the emojis the girl used are references to the manosphere concept of incels, “involuntarily celibate” men convinced that women are shallow sacks of shit who must be duped into giving you what you want from them, which is sex and slavish devotion. Katie was accusing Jamie of being this kind of person, dooming him to an adolescence of social opprobrium as a loser who’ll never get laid. This, not some secret friendship or romance gone wrong nor a simple case of stalking as Bascombe seems to have suspected, was likely the motive for the stabbing. It takes Bascombe some time to wrap his head around the idea that an emoji can mean enough to serve as a motive for murder; Bacchus is excellent in conveying Adam’s “Fine, don’t believe me then, old man — good luck with the case” responses before his dad acquiesces to the truth.
• This incel/emoji/manosphere business is indeed the kind of thing cops investigating a crime like this ought to know, especially cops with teenage sons in the same school as the victim and perpetrator. But you’ve heard politicians talk about tech before: They sound like parodies of out-of-touch politicians when they do it. (“Everything’s computer!” Donald Trump exclaimed excitedly when shown the inside of a Tesla, probably the first time he’s looked inside a passenger car in, what, decades?) If you’ve ever had to report cyberstalking to your local police, maybe you’ve gotten lucky and it’s something they’ve dealt with before and take relatively seriously, or maybe you’re left feeling like a crazy person as they tell you tweets can’t hurt you. Tweets are leading to entire swathes of the federal government being destroyed.
• More alarming are the teachers that have no clue. Mrs. Fenumore (Jo Hartley), Bascome and Frank’s guide at the school, had never so much as heard the word “incel”; she recognized Andrew Tate as a person she’s overheard the boys talk about, but clearly she never dug into it any deeper. If you know any educators, it’s harder to blame her than it is to blame politicians or cops: Politicians spend a lot of time deliberately trying to destroy teaching as a profession, policing not so much. These teachers are understaffed, overworked, and outmatched by obnoxious kids determined to hurt the teachers any way they can, pouring their derision upon everything the teachers do, exposing every weakness, however carefully hidden by the teacher. In my experience kids like these aren’t coming to this attitude on their own; they’re learning it from their parents, or from the iPads or phones that substitutes for parents when those parents are, themselves, overworked. (The right wing perpetuates itself by positioning itself to reap the electoral benefits of the economic and social misery their own policies cause. And that’s one to grow on!)
• Complaint time: Too much teal. Too much blue, too much blue-green, too much aquamarine. I understand that complementary colors pop, and that all the blue walls and furniture and clothing and stuff pop against the wooden desks and tan skin tones, but I’m beyond tired of this color palette. There’s no digital tweaking of the image to go along with it that I can perceive, so it’s less egregious than some — I’m just dying to see some reds, some purples, some chartreuses for crying out loud. Color!
• As with the police station in the first episode, an institutional space is the location for the action. It’s a school this time rather than a bunch of holding cells, though Bascome and Frank seem to regard them as both serving the same basic purpose. (I believe she describes the school as smelling like “vomit, sweat, and masturbation,” which is probably how the cells smell too.) This lends itself to the one-take format of the show beautifully, as the main characters and the audience alike are forced to trudge along with the tired students and exhausted educators and tired-out cops as they navigate stairwells and hallways and courtyards and classrooms, always moving from one place to the next, herded like cattle.
• At one point Frank says “All kids really need is one thing that makes them feel okay about themselves.” Considering the lack of autonomy they are afforded in school, it makes sense: They need a place where they can feel free. Unfortunately, the manosphere is going to be that place for some. Making fun of the manosphere kids for being unbelievably unpleasant will be that place for a whole different set of kids. It’s an ugly scenario.
• In the final moments of the episode, the camera soars over the own from the school to the parking lot where Katie was murdered. It’s filling up with flowers left by grieving friends and townsfolk. One of them is Eddie Miller, whose face we linger on in closeup. He seems to have aged ten years in two days as the gravity of what his son has done and what Katie’s family is going through sinks in. It takes a lot out of you, having your hopes crushed.
• As Jade and Mrs. Bailey discuss Jade’s dire situation, cheerful “Hello!” and “Bienvenue!” signs hang in the background. A few minutes after chasing down and arresting a child for conspiracy to commit murder, Bascombe takes his son out for chips and a soda. Yards away from the murder scene, children play on a playground. Everything is terrible, but for our children’s sake we pretend that life goes on.
Sean T. Collins (@theseantcollins) writes about TV for Rolling Stone, Vulture, The New York Times, and anyplace that will have him, really. He and his family live on Long Island.
The post ‘Adolescence’ Episode 2 Recap: Dark Sarcasm in the Classroom appeared first on Decider.
