Whatever it Takes, I know I can make it through (Season 2)

Ironically, after blogging about blogging about too much Degrassi, I’m gonna make a post on… Degrassi!

So anyway, I started this season at Winter Break and I finished it Thursday night. This season was really good, but… I don’t know. It had it’s challenges.

For starters, the Teenick website doesn’t have a lot of the 22 episodes up. The episodes that were missing were

• When Doves Cry, Part 2. It dealt with child abuse, but greatly impacted the storyline. It also had a (14 year old) character have a suicide attempt.
• Careless Whisper. A boy named Marco is confused about his sexuality (By the end of the season, he admits he’s gay to his best friend). I don’t understand why they didn’t have this episode up. I mean, I know why, but so far, there are 2 episodes that have actually showed the 13 and 14 year old cast with condoms. This episode had a nice discussion on being gay with a counselor lady, which had questions teens would ask, like ‘isn’t it a sin?’, or ‘are people born gay?’. For the first question, the lady said ‘isn’t it more of a sin to not be who you are?’ and she said ‘some people say yes, others say no’ for the second question. The only homophobes were the actual kids, but seeing as they’re high school freshmen living in suburbia, I’m not too shocked.
• The 2 part finale, Tears Are Not Enough. It dealt with child abuse, death and dealing with the death of a loved one. It didn’t have anything that bad, although I cringed at the child abuse scenes (And I knew about them in advance! Thanks, spoilers! –_–) .

Some of their decisions bother me, because they chose to play episodes with rape and terrorism as the main plot, but they thought those were suitable for kids. I think it’s because TeenNick became lighter and softer as opposed to TheN, it’s original channel. And Careless Whisper confuses me, because TeenNick had 2 episodes last month about a gay teenage boy who was coming out to his Mom, and those 2 episodes featured make out scenes and whatnot. I’m not saying gay make out scenes are bad or threatening or anything, but apparently it’s not okay to talk about homosexuality but showing actual gay people (Well, characters) show their affection (I can’t word this paragraph without sounding like a homophobe, sorry D: ) is okay? Nick Cannon needs to get his act together.

And because some of the episodes were blocked, I had to go online to find videos elsewhere. I didn’t want to download anything because I know online TV links are shoddy if 900 pop up windows come when you load the page. And I wanted to find legal copies, too. I’m not just saying that to look nice, but SS knows how paranoid I get about those things. When Doves Cry part 2 was easy to find, along with Careless Whisper, but the finale was extremely hard to find. But I found the links eventually. I hope the rest of the seasons are up on TeenNick.com .

And the worst part? Most people became unlikeable this season. It’s time for my like-neutral-dislike chart!

Like

• Paige- The Cheerleader who got raped. She was one of the few characters who wasn’t affected by PISS (Plot induced stupidity syndrome). Intentional acronym.
• Craig- The child abuse victim. He’s into art (Well, photography and music). He’s friends with a lot of the guys, Emma and Manny, and Ashley. I think his actor was really great. Although, I wish he didn’t ruin the dance for Ashley and everyone else.
• Ashley! I still like her after her ‘Goth’ transformation. Her poem in Shout was nice, and I loved Dressed in Black.
• Terri. To be honest, I thought I was gonna dislike her after she left Ashley at the start of the season. And she was slipping down my list throughout the season. But she reclaimed her spot in the like section by comforting Craig after his Dad died.
• Ellie: Although she wasn’t in the main theme song, I really liked her. She was a great friend to Ashley and treated Marco well. And she stood up to Paige in the computer lab.
• Marco- the boy who’s gay. I like how he’s probably the only guy on the show who isn’t stupid or intolerable so far. I just hope all of his plots won’t revolve around his sexuality.

Neutral

• Liberty- Was Sarah unavailable when they shot this season? She was in like 3 episodes. But yeah. She got annoying in Relax. I never even knew Liberty liked sports.
• Emma – She disappeared this season, which was okay because she only was the hippie girl. She’s friends with Ashley, apparently, so that saves her from the Dislike section… for now.
• JT- He grew up from the younger brother to… the class clown. He was okay in the Science Teacher episode. I like how he still went to the Luau dance with Liberty.
• Sean- the drinking episode annoyed me because Sean got mad at Emma’s Mom for offering leftovers and he thought she meant it like he was a welfare case, and he called her judgmental. But he was homophobic to Marco a few episodes before, and he made fun of Ms.Hot Sauce Science Teacher whose name I can’t spell for being attractive. And he crashed Jimmy’s party and got kicked out. Why.
• Toby- He hasn’t seriously pissed me off this season. There’s nothing else I could say about him, besides the fact that him and Kendra are annoying together.

Dislike

• Spinner- annoying character, annoying plots. He looks like the older brother from Home Alone at this point of the show.
• Jimmy- annoying. Drake can’t act. Like, he tries to say everything in a narmy, serious tone, but he can’t pull it off.
• Manny- I try to like Manny. I really do. But she’s annoying. She reminds me of those annoying girls who misread any male communication as ‘he loves me’. She’s just annoying. Ugh. Unfortunately, the actress looks like my cousin at this point, and I heard Manny gets a slutty makeover later on in the show… . It doesn’t help that my cousin is currently 14 and Cassie was/is 2 years younger than everyone else.

Last night’s episode was good, but I’ll recap it once both parts are played, as in next week.