Ron Does Stuff

At the end of the last episode, Charlie was just a bundle of optimism, full of probably misplaced optimism as he promised Tori that he’s going to give Nick the positive coming out experience he never had. Good intentions! But as well now, this is what the road to hell is paved with.

This episode opens with…a parent-teacher conference? That’s what it would have been called in the ancient times where I existed but maybe it’s called a different thing now. Anyways, one of Charlie’s teacher tells his parents that his grades are slipping and it’s because he’s distracted by Nick. He’s not even dick-stracted, it’s just plain distracted. And it’s not just this one teacher, it’s teacher after teacher noting how Charlie’s academic performance is not as good as it used to be. Oh I just know this is going to be trouble.

Obviously, this all leads to friction with his parents, who begin noting that all of this might just be connected to Charlie spending all that time with Nick. And they’re just making out! Surely that’s not enough to distract from classes, neither one of you has done below the belt action! Charlie’s mom has had it and bans any visiting between the two of them.

While Nick may be performing well academically, it’s a different situation back at his house, since his brother David is home and I know what happens here because of the books. Nick is already anxious and tells Academy Award winner Olivia Colman not to tell David about Charlie.

Over at Charlie’s house, rather than doing his coursework, Charlie is messaging with Nick, trying to plan an elopement to Paris that, according to my meager knowledge of Europe, might actually be possible since they’ve got a train system and I think the UK was still part of the EU at the time this was happening. I wonder how Brexit is going to affect this relationship?

While the male homosexuals are chatting, Tara, Darcy, and Elle are talking about the Year 11 prom, and we get introduced to Sahar, which is a great decision on the part of this adaptation because in the books she just gets plopped unceremoniously into the story. We also see the start of Elle start distancing herself from Tao because Tao is dense.

The tension in Charlie and Nick’s lives is driven up even further by Ben, who keeps trying to ingratiate himself into Nick’s space and this may be an unpopular opinion but I feel like Ben is attracted to Charlie and Nick? Like someone could make a really toxic fanfic of these three together. And Ben definitely knows how to get under Nick’s skin, telling him that the two of them aren’t any different because nobody else in the school knows that Nick and Charlie are together.

The bad decisions don’t stop there either because rather than do his coursework, Charlie is sneaking out of the house to meet up with Nick in the park like your everyday run-of-the-mill homosexuals this MALICIOUS GAY FAGGOTRY needs to stop!

The only thing that makes this park meet-up respectable is that they do it during the day and not in the middle of the night. They do start making out right in the open and neither one of them is going to succeed academically at this point. Nick makes them sorta Instagram-official though!

While Charlie and Nick engage in homosexuality, Elle is over at an art school she’s considering, where she meets Naomi, a fellow doll. It seems like the perfect place for her and Tao might just lose her forever if he doesn’t act quickly. And he’s aware of it too because he’s stalking Elle on Instagram.

We’ll have to find out about that some other time though, because Nick is taking his Maths GCSEs and it is not starting out well. He gets into a misunderstanding with Imogen about Ben, which makes things worse for him because he’s already unprepared for the test as it is. And I gotta commend the show for how it visualized Nick’s utter anxiety at taking the test because it does genuinely feel like that when you go into a test unprepared and just a mess. And yes, I know it’s been literal decades since I took an academic test.

While the homosexuals try to figure their lives out, Elle and Tao meet up. Or more accurately, Tao shows up and tries to get back into Elle’s life but you’ve wasted your chance, dude. She’s over it. She’s had it.

Back with the homosexuals, things get even worse for Nick and Charlie as David finally discovers that Nick is dating a guy. And I hope the actor who plays David is a nice person in real life because he definitely plays douchebag really well. It results in a big fight between Nick and David so there goes Charlie’s plan of giving Nick the perfect coming out experience.

All of this negative energy obviously gets to Charlie and I actually appreciate how the show has been setting up the eating disorder storyline. And to be fair, from what I remember of the books they did a good job with this as well.

One thing that this adaptation is doing better than the books is how its fleshed out the characters of Tao and Elle. Tao being unable to take a hint may be frustrating at times, but moments like the one he has with his mom here are great and the whole backstory she shares about her and Tao’s dad fills in the character a bit more than in the book, where Tao doesn’t do much besides accidentally outing Charlie to the rest of the school.

Thanks to his mom, Tao finally gets his shit together and realizes that he likes Elle. Now he needs the gang’s help to tell Elle.