i'm sure someone has said this before but the love potion plotline could've been a lot less sketchy if they added a throwaway line like "actually you can't force someone to be in love with you BUT you can use a potion to enhance an already existing attraction". ben was implied to be somewhat attracted to mal from the moment they met anyway (even longer if you count him dreaming of her in the books). maybe we could even have mal be able to figure out that he has a crush on her (but he doesn't do anything abt it bcs he obvi doesn't want to break audrey's heart; and then the potion kind of makes him act more impulsively) or something
OR: the core four healing slowly from trauma? i think yes.
mal thinking about how far her mother’s love extended, whether it would immediately be withdrawn and leave her drowning as soon as she revealed she was nothing like the girl her mom wanted her to be.
she comes home after a long day with her hair cut in a shaggy bob, nothing like the clean-cut usual style she wears. she feels the anxiety bubble up inside her, coil around her intestines like a dragon. her friends are surprised but congratulate her, jay clapping her on the back and carlos complimenting the layering. evie giving her a quick kiss and gushing over how good it looks on her. jay makes her a bowl of her favorite soup and they all pile around the couch to watch a movie, interjecting with compliments on her new, authentic hair. she’s okay.
evie meticulously making sure she was pretty but never too pretty, dumb but never too dumb, airheaded and cute enough to attract boys but not enough to upstage her mother, who blamed and projected.
evie dresses up and goes out with her friends for ben’s birthday and quickly rejects some guy who comes up to her, claiming that she’s cute and just right for her, backed up by her friends and her girlfriend. momentarily, she feels ashamed and wrong, the familiar thought of her worth only being determined by how she’s desired and viewed. then she looks over at mal, who sees her just the same when she wakes up in a tank top and sweatpants, hair a rat’s nest, face pillow-creased, and her friends, who love her every which way. she’s okay.
jay wondering which has father cared more about, the things jay stole for their shop or his son himself, and which would be worse to him - if jay came back empty-handed or didn’t come back home at all.
jay shows up to their house later than usual and is met with a worried carlos who gives him a rib-crushing hug and demands to know where he was. evie and mal rush in as well, evie mumbling in relief and mal punching him gently in the shoulder and asking what took him so long. he responds with a confused explanation that he was helping clean out the chemistry lab as he’s led to the kitchen. carlos nestles closer to him with a kiss and tells him they missed him. he’s okay.
carlos puzzling over the fact that cruella was kind and gentle sometimes but the moment he screwed up she would turn cold and furious and if it was his fault, because what mother would treat a child like that.
carlos burns a piece of toast and has to unplug and pour water on the toaster so the smoke doesn’t set off their fire alarm. he feels the familiar fear rise in him and his body start to shake. jay speaks to him gently and tells him it’s okay, they can always get a new toaster and it was on its last legs anyway. evie sits by him, promising none of them are mad and everyone makes mistakes. mal pats his back and makes him a new slice of toast. he’s okay.
one thing about hbo is that when they get a journalist coming up to them and going “man do i have a fucked up story i want to follow” they really do let that person go wild. i’ve mentioned the way the ronan farrow one really moved me emotionally and that’s just because ronan knows how to investigate and tell a story to get you righteously angry for who it is he’s defending. he’s good at his job!
but this one, quiet on the set, has genuinely made my jaw drop a few times, even if i think some of the framing could have been better in the last episode. of course i know about all the rumors about dan schneider and the abuse on set, it’s hard to have been into the teen nick scene and not notice, and it’s pretty easy to figure out which kids were being harmed through too much attention and which were being harmed through not enough attention, and there’s been all sorts of rumors floating around for over a decade!
but the build up to the drake bell reveal was well handled, i thought. i was initially skeptical because i think it’s hard to make a documentary about child sexual abuse without leaning into being exploitative in some way. and at first, where you have the actors who left early, like katrina, or who you remember but weren’t mega famous like giovannie, and they’re all saying “this set was so weird & inappropriate, i knew something was wrong but i didn’t have the experience or vocabulary to say what” it feels a little too schlocky. like, oh we’re just kind of speculating on the inappropriate nature of dan’s “friendship” with amanda bynes for two episodes? yeah it is fucked up that two pedophiles were on that set, but did they hurt anyone on set?
and then drake bell walks into the room dressed like timmy turner and says it was me. he hurt me.
i can’t stop thinking about the choice of clothes here and the way it helps drive home the point of the doc. he’s sitting there in fairly odd parents colors as an adult and can’t describe the sexual trauma he experienced as a child still, has never spoken about it, had his mom lie to his father over it because he was so screwed up. really driving home the point that he was just a kid who had a knack for physical comedy and it got him preyed on by dan, a man who should have protected him, set up and handed over to a monster who traumatized him for months and years.
but when that reporter said she got a judge to let them unseal the court documents because drake bell told her how much support peck had? my jaw dropped, like yeah this is reporting, this is someone who saw this story and finally fucking cared not about the salacious details but about who knew what and why they did nothing to stop this from happening. it’s not about forcing drake bell or katrina jackson or alexa to live through the worst moments of their life - it’s about how so many people knew what was going on and didn’t do a god damn thing to stop it. it’s about how these monsters, these convicted pedophiles, were given access to little kids to hurt and traumatize and everyone knew and didn’t just look the other way, they actively helped cover it up. THATS the story. Not that it was an isolated tragedy but that it was a clinical, purposeful environment built by people who wanted to harm little kids.