Serial Drama

The Fosters: Collateral Damage

I bailed on covering The Fosters for a while because I was just enjoying sinking into the couch to watch a show like it's a big hug. But I noticed a lot of sites stopped reviewing it completely, so I figured I should at least give this week's mid-season finale a little bit of lip service!

Naturally, the most important thing that happened in this episode is that Brandon actually suffered real consequences for doing a shitty thing! First, he got accepted into Juilliard, of course, but then it actually got taken away from him because he took the S.A.T.'s for another dude and got caught. No Juilliard for Brandon. No college at all? Who knows. It was really sad.

I know, I know Brandon. I'm heartbroken that you'll still be on the show too!

(In the interest of being not a total asshole, I'll say that David Lambert was good in that scene. I'm not sure any actor has the talent to make me actually like Brandon, but my aversion is not actor-related.)

In other news, Callie (being Callie) made a series of maddening, reckless, destructive choices. A.J. called out Aaron for constantly flirting with Callie, WHICH IS FAIR.

The dude seriously is coming onto her constantly. It got ugly and Aaron took off and the very first thing Callie did to "defend" him was to out him to A.J. as trans. What the hell, Callie? That is so utterly out of line! That is not your right to disclose!! But of course this is the "Callie Is Hero" show, so immediately A.J. was calmed by this news since he now doesn't see Aaron as a real threat. Callie explained how offensive that was, which is true, but the show seriously seemed to be positioning her as the good guy in that scenario. No. Not at all. Way out of line, Callie. But they turned A.J. into the bad guy so fast here that they left her crap move completely accepted and even broke up Callie and A.J. (which I hate, I really liked them together). So then later when Callie is worried about Sophia, the first thing she does is get into a car with a strange man who just chastised her for looking into that whole murder storyline (I keep forgetting the names of the people involved). Well, go figure.

Turns out he probably murdered his own grandmother. Good job, Callie.

The show finally utilized the uncanny resemblance between Maia Mitchell (Callie) and Bailee Madison (Sophia) by having the creeper whose house Callie broke into (another in the Litany of Callie's Decisions That Ruin Everyone's Lives) mistake Sophia for Callie and confront her.

 

I mean, it's not wrong to try to find out why a teenage girl broke into your home and stole your toothbrush.

Quick Survey!

Literally one question: https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/8KSJWMX

It's anonymous and you can pick more than one thing! Feel free to expand on it in the comments here -- if you picked Web Soaps, do you have favorites? If you picked 90210, what are your favorite seasons? Etc!

Edited to add: I want to clarify one thing. I'm probably not going to cover the best new shows on television. Or the best old shows. If I can't have a little fun at the show's expense, for the most part, you can find lots of much more high-profile commentary on just about everything. I'm not here to recap Friday Night Lights or The Wire. I even dropped The Fosters because I like it and other places covered it well (Previously TV, Autostraddle, etc) but I noticed some sites dropped them so, hey, low-coverage shows are more likely to happen here if they're worth it. Maybe I'll pick it back up.

This is kind of stream-of-consciousness, but I just wanted to offer up a sense of what's behind the thinking here! 

 

The Fosters: Mixed Messages

Hey, Fosters viewers (and Serial Drama readers who don't watch the show but just like reading TV blogs!), I think I'll skip doing the beat-by-beat recap this time because it does get a little dull. I'm going to shake it up a tiny bit. I AM LIVING ON THE EDGE, PEOPLE. Here we go!

Wait, so this is the car Brandon drives?

Somebody's going to have to refresh my memory. That can't be his car, right? Is that the one that Callie's bio-dad bought for her? It has to be, doesn't it? Anyway, just more of Brandon's horrible life, just having to drive around in a sweet ride like that. Pretty sure that car could pay for a year at Juilliard, but if it's Callie's, they better not let her sell it FOR LOVE or whatever. (Okay but seriously, is it Brandon's?)

Basically the A-storyline starts when Jude is reading Romeo and Juliet for school and quotes a passage, asking what it means. Dream-teen heartthrob Brandon knows! "It means Romeo wants to bang his sister," he says. Or really something about how hard it is being apart from the person you love, and he and Callie exchange gross incestuous looks. If this show is trying to sell some crap about Callie and Brandon being like Romeo and Juliet, I suggest someone on that team re-read that play and realize that Romeo and Juliet did not have a great love story but in fact were total idiots (okay, that part is an awful lot like Brandon and Callie) whose adolescent obsession with each other left them AND MANY OTHERS dead forever. Families ruined. Souls destroyed. And they were kept from dating (and probably breaking up after not too long) because of a hateful, horrible, foolish, deadly ANCIENT GRUDGE. You know, NOT BECAUSE THEY WERE SIBLINGS. (Oops, I got a little wound up. I have a long history of overreacting when pop culture tries to parallel contemporary stories with R&J because they always treat it as if it was a great love story with a sad ending instead of one of the more brilliantly and astonishingly devastating tragedies of all time.) Anyway, they closed it out with Jude being all, "Tell me about it," and let's hope that he and Connor are no more like Romeo and Juliet than any other healthy, breathing humans with parents who are not dangerously insane. But really, they don't even let up. Later, Brandon tells that new chick about the whole thing and she refers to Brandon and Callie as "star-crossed lovers" and I almost puke and actually wish she would finish out the sentence with the original "take their life" (I'm just kidding, show, please no suicides!). 

Does the R&J nonsense end there? It does not. Brandon, in fact, is writing a new song that he plays for Mat and the lyrics to the song are just the effing prologue to Romeo and Juliet. I'm going to need an apothecary myself. Any second now. Oh, he decides it's going to be a rock opera. Is this R&J musical adaptation (that is not West Side Story, by the by) going to be an extended storyline, continuing to imply some nonsense parallel to Brandon and Callie? WHAT, HO! APOTHECARY! BRING ME SOME MORTAL POISON PLS.

(Can confirm. Upside? Corbin Bleu from One Life to Live will be Mercutio! Because he's still playing high school students? And it's also an actual musical written by Bradley Bredeweg called Romeo and Juliet: Love Is A Battlefield, which kind of sounds like cheesy hilariousness. Horrible downside? Again, hideously implied parallels to Brandon and Callie.)

Worried Callie is worried.

This means that Callie has to tell Brandon that she told Daphne about their sibling sex, but (as someone smartly suggested in the comments last week) Daphne thinks the "sex with your foster brother" might refer to Liam. All is well! Later Callie gets gussied up for a Fost and Found photo shoot and looks super-slick.

And then Brandon brandons it up by telling her she doesn't look like her and there is a god because she fully calls him out for that bullshit. But then what's the first thing she does? Scrubs it all off. Is this impostor syndrome, or is this really all just guilt about that terrible choice she made with Brandon?

The Fosters: First Impressions

The Fosters is back! The Fosters is back! 

Okay, I don't actually know if I'm excited about this, because at the mid-season break I was so grossed out that I was pretty damn ready to give this show up for good. I guess I should be grateful that Brandon didn't have sex with his little sister after the adoption went through moving them from foster siblings to actual complete and total forever siblings? But I didn't feel very grateful, since these events were only separated by one episode and I'm still working on scrubbing my brain of the image. And I don't hold out hope that the adoption means they'll permanently drop "Brallie" (vom) and just go on telling the other lovely stories that they tell. But I do hold out hope that there will be other stories that are good enough to watch that I can... overlook the grossness? We'll see. But I'm not ready to say goodbye to Stef and Lena. Or Mariana. Or, for the love of all that is holy, Jude. I am not willing to let go of Jude. Yet.

So here I am.

For now.

The "previouslies" are already hurting my brain. So much stuff I don't remember the details of (particularly the hit-and-run). Anyway, we're starting with the performance of Brandon's composition at Disney Hall. They pan across the family (including New Jesus!) and... oh for fuck's sake, they get to Callie and she has brother/sister sex flashbacks. THEY DIDN'T WASTE A SECOND TO TORTURE US.

Opening credits. I'm weak, you guys! The opening always suckers me right back in, even when I'm disgusted. No fair!

Naturally, based on that Disney Hall performance, Brandon has been invited to final callbacks for Juilliard. Of course he has. But because Brandon has just the worst life ever, Juilliard still charges tuition! Poor Brandon! All the worst things happen to him!

AJ and his brother are huggy and sad because their grandmother died.

Mike's helping to load up the car with her stuff and a picture of the boys breaks. He looks at it significantly, and calls work to tell them not to bother running the prints on that pen he got from AJ's brother (I'll remember his name at some point, I'm sure).

Brandon overhears his moms worrying about money, so he walks away with his standard Brandon hangdog look. But Annie Potts is there! (aka Sharon, Stef's mom) Sharon is very displeased about what the insurance will or will not cover in terms of Stef's health situation. Monte shows up to apologize to both Stef and Lena. Lord, this is awkward. She offers to resign from Anchor Beach. That's a bit extreme, Monte!

Emma is over at the house trying to help Mariana put together her campaign for junior class president. I'd vote for Mariana! Jesus is a dick about it, so I guess the actor replacement hasn't really changed the nature of the character. So far. But holy crap this guy is tall! Lexi shows up from being deported. Somehow her family magically all got visas. Seems likely. Brandon walks in and see Emma and Lexi and actually says something funny for once!

Brandon: It's like an ex-girlfriend convention in here. Want me to call Hayley, maybe she can come over? 

Sound the trumpets, Brandon made a funny!

Some extremely tightly-wound bespectacled boy is yelling at Callie about privatized foster homes after she gives a speech about her website. A foster care advocate (played by a very familiar actress... I'll figure it out) wants to invest $50,000 in Callie (or more likely her website).

Lena tells Monte she should stay on at the school but needs to get her act together and look up the word "boundaries." Not in those exact words, but let's face it, that was the gist.

Connor is packing up to move away forever and ever and Jude's perfect little heart is breaking. "My dad will never change," Connor tells him. I don't know, his dad spent last Father's Day with a yard full of queermos and he lived through it, I feel like there's some wiggle room. 

Well, darn it all, the lab ran that fingerprint test after all and they do match Ty's (AJ's brother). Mike explains the whole thing to Stef, who is livid.

I think Mike should probably point out that if Brandon had basically murdered a town full of children Stef would try to cover it up.

Lexi and Jesus flirt with each other. In the bathroom.

I know nothing gets me hotter than a bathroom shared by 23 adolescents. It probably smells amazing. Then Lexi pushes Mariana to go as sexy as possible with her presidential campaign (ugh, take note, Bernie Sanders, time to sex it up a bit!) but naturally Emma overreacts about how girls can be fun-and-smart-sexy and not just in-your-face-sexy and decides she shouldn't be running this campaign and needs to go home. That was fast! Regardless, Mariana levels with Lexi that she doesn't want her help with the campaign. "No hard feelings," they allege. Seems likely.

The foster care advocate talks to Callie and Stef and Lena, and Callie tries to talk to her about Jack (the aforementioned bespectacled kid). The lady promises to "make some calls." I'm sure nothing bad will happen. The second she's out of earshot, she makes a bitchy phone call trying to find out where that kid has been placed. From here on out I will be referring to this character as Miss Hannigan. You know who she lives to exploit? ORPHANS, that's who! (This is just a wild guess.)

The Fosters: Lucky

I'll be brief but I thought I should at least acknowledge the season finale of The Fosters. Or the mid-season finale? Summer finale? I still can't quite figure out how it works.

I was kind of dreading sitting down for the episode after I flipped right out last week when Callie and Brandon "finally" had sex, and this week we were treated to rationalizations like "We didn't do anything wrong, we weren't even technically fostering you at the time!" (that gem via Brandon, naturally)

It is perhaps a little odd that Brandon considers himself to be part of the unit that was fostering Callie, as if sibling-fostering is a specific action verb, and he feels himself to be a fosterer of this teenage girl, maybe -- JUST MAYBE -- it's still gross that he boned her. And now he did literally bone his sister.

I guess? Because this being The Fosters, the big adoption celebration at the end could completely explode in the first episode of Season 3B because somebody somewhere forgot to cross a T or because it actually turns out Callie's bio-mom is alive. Really, what would this show's throughline be if not "a new wrench in Callie's adoption!"? I don't believe for a second that the show is going to abandon the creepy sexual tension between Brandon and Callie, so I imagine we'll have awkward scenes of Brandon getting an eyeful of his little sister in her skivvies, or super-sexy brushing-up-against-each-other moments in the family mini-van. And so help me if Callie ended up with an oopsie pregnancy... SO HELP ME. Well, I don't know what I'd do, since anything I would do is pretty much irrelevant to the storytelling and, also, these people aren't real. I think? 

Let it not be said that my heebie-jeebies precluded a sense of humor! The look on Callie's face when she post-coitally walked into the kitchen and found out the adoption was going through after all because MAYBE POTENTIAL OUTCOMES ARE CALLED POTENTIAL AND NOT ABSOLUTE FOR A REASON (and should not lead one to sibling-sex)... well, it was hysterical.

I was delighted that she felt like an idiot for her behavior because, hey, her behavior was idiotic. Brandon barely registered an expression other than "hangdog" for the entire episode, but I'm not entirely sure how that distinguishes it from other episodes. 

In other news, the show threatened to take Connor away from Jude as it seems he's moving to L.A. to live with his mother, who apparently gives him less pushback on the whole gay thing. I appreciated that they made it clear his father wasn't kicking him out -- as a parent struggling to accept his son's sexuality, he really is not that bad. He spent Father's Day at his son's boyfriend's house (with his son's boyfriend's lesbian parents), after all. Dude is making an effort! That's a lot more than plenty of LGBT kids can say about their parents, many of whom never move out of "denial" or "complete rejection."

Taking away #Jonnor, though? Cruelty!

Cruelty to the audience!

Who else do we need to check in on? Mariana! Mariana, after a heart-to-heart with her grandfather, decided she should tell Mat that she's not going to grovel or beg for his forgiveness anymore, because she's managed to forgive herself. I'm sure that made Mat feel a lot better! I don't actually recall any begging or groveling, so this didn't exactly feel like the cathartic, triumphant moment they were playing it as. But at least now Mat can sleep better at night knowing that Mariana no longer feels bad about cheating on him! Anyway, he kind of fabulously told her, "Okay cool, we're never getting back together but good for your emotional health" and walked out. Ouch! (But seriously, that's about the best she could expect after "Just letting you know I forgive myself for what I did to you, so let's reunite!")

Self-acceptance is a beautiful thing, Mariana, but maybe the people you've hurt aren't going to be as moved by your announcement of it as you think they are! "You're welcome, I forgive me!"

The Fosters: Idyllwild

Otherwise known as: THE ONE IN WHICH I HAVE TO SCRUB MY BRAIN WITH STEEL WOOL BECAUSE I WILL NEVER BE ABLE TO UNSEE THAT.

Sweet mercy.

In case you missed it, basically on last night's episode Brandon got rewarded for being a self-pitying egomaniac by winning a big competition he should have been disqualified from and then immediately got to fuck his little sister. 

But let's put a pin in that for just a second so my eyes can stop bleeding and review a couple of other enjoyable, dramatic, and not-revolting or infuriating things that happened in the episode. Because as hard as it is to remember, those things did happen, too. 

- I kind of lost the thread of the hit-and-run subplot because the show did, too, for much of the half-season, so I couldn't really tell what was going on with that at first. But ultimately, Mike figured out that Ty's friend (by the way, Ty is AJ's brother, for those of us having trouble keeping track of the only-sometimes stories) was the dude in the surveillance video that had something to do with the hit-and-run, which also means that Ty could have been involved. Mike swiped Ty's prints from a pen at the nursing home where his grandmother just had a stroke, so I'm sure AJ and Mike will do great together after this!

- Jude was not in this episode. So that sucks, as always. There seemed to be even less of an explanation than usual. I think at this point the subtext is, "Listen, audience, you know this is just TV and Hayden Byerly is just not going to work his childhood away so that you people can swoon over him and Connor and call him Judicorn, okay?" FINE, SHOW. I'll go with that. But something tells me you're about to lose all my good faith. Okay no, no, I'm not going to talk about that yet.

- Mat turned back up and he and Mariana started to get romantic. He confessed that he had staved off sexytimes with her because he's actually a virgin and he wants their first time to be special. Because Mariana does have a conscience and a pretty big-hearted one at that, she realized she had to come clean to him that she's not a virgin. And she did. And told him she cheated on him. Poor Mat.

- Lena and Stef and Jenna and Monte planned a weekend away together (what could go wrong?) since Jenna's friend conveniently has a cabin right near Idyllwild, where everyone's going to go see Brandon get rewarded for his woe-is-me, special-snowflake complex...

...and of course Jenna and Stef had emergencies back home and Monte and Lena had to have a wine dinner while sitting next to a crackling fireplace in the middle of the summer with romantic piano music in the background.

No big deal, right? During their intimate fireside wine chat (though major props to the props: both of them brought an actual six-pack of wine!) we learn that Monte loves having ladysex and is all about the lesbians, just not that particular lesbian. She later breaks up with Jenna (because that's a polite thing to do under the circumstances...like, she couldn't wait till they were back home??) and even tells her about the kiss with Lena. Jenna later breaks this bit of news to Stef, which, ouch.

That, too, couldn't have waited till everyone was back from their weekend away? Timing, people! But of course all this drama served mostly to turn a full cabin into an almost-empty cabin save for one sadly sleeping Mariana and two horny de facto siblings BUT WE'LL GET TO THAT. Back at home, Stef confronts Lena, who of course denies everything until confronted with the kiss, which she admits to, but admits only to be a victim of. That kiss was nothing, Lena insists.

Stef: If it was nothing I think you would've told me.

Oof. I'd be really sad and engaged in all of this if I thought I'd continue being a viewer of this show. Because I love Stef and Lena.

The Fosters: Faith, Hope, Love

Classic-style recap!

Previously on The Fosters: Brandon was a spectacular douche, Stef saw AJ and Callie smooching.

AJ has created a "Super Callie" character, which I suppose is as good a way as any to court a teenage girl. AJ's brother Ty appears.

The actor looks familiar, but I can't quite place him. Ty is under the impression that he and AJ are leaving.

Mariana and Callie buy the car they agreed on last week. Callie's pretty prickly toward Mariana, but it turns out they bought a car for no good reason since they can't drive it without insurance and they haven't told their mothers yet. 

Stef and Lena invited Rita over to talk about the big, scandalous AJ/Callie kiss.

Rita says the two of them have to live separately because otherwise this could affect Callie's adoption. Well, breathing can affect Callie's adopt so I don't really see how this is news.

Credits!

Brandon is back at music camp. Shrug.

Mike comes over to tell AJ ....something? That he's getting bumped from the foster home? The show then awkwardly cuts to a family dinner where they announce this to the whole gang. Oh, I see, he's going to go live with Rita for a while. Stef and Lena pretend like it's because they're too busy to do the work involved in their foster license renewal.

Mariana announces that she's going to be godmother to Ana's baby, and also that she's going to be baptized herself. In the Catholic church. Stef gives her a hard no. 

Rita basically tells Callie that dating her foster brothers has become an unfortunate habit (by telling her a story about how she ate a whole cake that she didn't even enjoy because of old bad habits). Who doesn't know someone with an unfortunate addiction to dating their foster siblings! Poor AJ thinks this is great news because now he and Callie can date, but she shuts that down but fast.

Mariana wants to know why she can't get baptized, especially because Brandon did. My sound went out, but Stef's lips look like they're saying, "Yes, but that was for my father." Stef and Lena tell Mariana that they don't believe in Heaven or Hell, and Mariana asks, "Do we even believe in God?" It's such an innocent moment that a 15-year-old asks "Do we believe" instead of talking about what she believes because on every end of this she's just trying to please someone else and looking for ways to find her identity. Lena answers, but my sound went out again. I missed the first part but then caught, "And in a higher power that lives within all things, one that inspires us to be kind and compassionate to each other."

And because Stef is Stef, she cannot let that gentle approach lie, so she throws in a, "What we don't believe in is an angry old man up in the sky threatening to send us to Hell if we don't do as he says." For good measure!

Mariana gets that her mothers are big old liberals and that's going to be a problem with the Catholic Church's stance on gay marriage, abortion, and birth control. But she's not planning on converting, she just wants to do this so she can be Isabella's godmother. I'm no expert, but isn't that exactly not how this works?

Brandon and Callie catch up while brushing their teeth the way Brandon and Brenda used to do, and Brandon and Brenda had more palpable sexual tension. 

The Fosters: Going South

The title of the episode is in no way a euphemism for any bedroom acts between Stef and Lena this week, y'all. In fact, things couldn't be worse in that department, but we'll get to that later.

A lot of last night's show felt like fan service, didn't it? As if we hadn't already realized that before they helpfully displayed a #BrallieAdventure hashtag. So let's get this out of the way: Callie scooped Brandon up in the middle of the night and they dashed off to Mexico for some illegal skydiving. Brandon filled her in on what happened back at music camp with Kat, and then dropped this gem:

Brandon: At least i don't have to deal with any crazy dramatic women anymore!

Oh Brando, starting the misogyny so early.

Anyway, I guess it's a good sign that Callie called him her best friend instead of her brother-lover but the whole thing seemed meant to fan the flames. For shippers or whoever these people are who think these siblings should date.

So they almost got arrested, but Brandon paid off the police with his fancy keyboard, which I'm sure will go for a lot on the Mexican black market. Miraculously this works. Also because they are idiots, it didn't occur to them they might need passports to return to the US. After all, they didn't need passports to leave the US! Come on kids, this is just like how it's completely free to go through a tunnel or over a bridge from NYC to New Jersey, but you have to pay an assload to get back in! (I AM KIDDING I LOVE NEW JERSEY IT IS WONDERFUL.)

Callie's going to buy Brandon another keyboard, she insists, which I doubt he'll hold her to. Though he does get an opportunity to return to music camp, so he sure will need one.

Oh wait! Allow me to also share his other gem: 

Brandon: You ever feel like the whole world is conspiring against you?

Callie: Yeah, I'm pretty familiar with that concept. 

Again, Brando, you basically have the cushiest life on the planet and you have the nerve to say something like that to Callie, whose life is calamity personified. But she pretty brilliantly read him the riot act about how everything bad in his own life is because he makes really dumb-ass choices, so at least we got that. They got busted for their adventure, and Stef pretends that eventually there are actually going to be consequences for their behavior, but we all know that's not true. Nobody on this show ever gets punished, Stef! We're paying attention!

This exchange, however, was a particular delight:

Lena: How'd you get back into the country with no passports?

Callie: We just played dumb.

Stef: Well, that couldn't have been hard.

Meanwhile, in Adult Land, Stef got in trouble with Lena for going ahead and hiring a contractor to fix their leak. Oscar showed up early!

Oops. This led to a series of arguments between the two of them about communication and how Lena really wants them to go to couples counseling. Methinks this is because she'd sure like a mediator there when she 'fesses up to her kiss with Monte. And sure enough, later, when Oscar himself has the contractor's wisdom to know that a married couple separating in the middle of a job means the purse strings situation gets crazy and his paycheck may get put off forever, Stef wised up and realized if the contractor is giving you marriage counseling, it's time to go to a pro.

This also led to Stef coming across an empty pregnancy test box in the piles of garbage the raccoons had attacked.

Stumbling across a trashed pregnancy test is one of the oldest tropes in the televised book, but I have to give them credit here for two twists: it was in the outdoor garbage, rather than just visible to the naked eye at the top of the bathroom wastebasket the way it usually is, so Mariana had the foresight to dispose of the damn thing outside of the house. Also, Stef found the box, not the test itself, so she didn't even know the result of it. Yet.

The Fosters: More Than Words

Just try convincing me that the episode title doesn't make you think of the Extreme ballad that, let's face it, was pretty much about how if his ladylove didn't start giving him more BJ's instead of just telling him she loved him, she was out the door.

Where was I? The Fosters!

It was a delight to see that instead of rehiring a child molester or quietly ignoring the permanent absence of Lena's father, they hired a replacement! With this and the Jesus recast, it's refreshing to know that this isn't a show that changes course due to actor departures and is willing to go ahead and replace someone if the story demands the character. And even better: he was replaced by Bruce Davison! (Coincidentally, the last time I saw Davison on stage he was playing a child molester.) And Bruce Davison is wonderful. And is not a child molester.

It also meant the return of Lorraine Toussaint as Lena's mother, which I'm sure triggered PTSD for any Fosters viewers who also watch Orange is the New Black. (Which I assume has to be almost all of them? Well, all of the adults anyway.) Vee was terrifying, y'all. But it really spoke to Toussaint's talent that Dana is basically Vee's polar opposite.

Can you imagine if someone had spat a racial slur at Vee?

They'd be dead by morning. Nate would have been the toast served at breakfast.

Instead, the show seemed to imply that Stewart Adams will literally never speak to his son again. I'm not sure if that's the case, really, a lot of people say "I'll never forgive so-and-so" and then a year later everything changes. But I do know one thing: Nate's car ride home with his black girlfriend is going to be ugly! And there she was probably thinking, "Look at this, I'm in a room full of exclusively interracial couples! We totally get each other!" Oops.

Also, I really enjoyed Stef sticking up for Lena to Dana. That was a nice little touch.

So, what else happened? Oh, Brandon got kicked out of music camp because he plagiarized a Bach piece to make Kat look bad. It worked on one level, in that she looked like a fool for criticizing the piece (thinking it was Brandon's) and eventually she got ousted from camp, but so did he. Good work, Brando, you continue to be an effing genius. I find this whole thing really disappointing because that means his big storyline will move back into everyone else's, which likely means he's going to be spending a lot of time feeling jealous about his sister and his brother flirting with each other. (THAT'S STILL A REAL THING HAPPENING ON THIS SHOW, YOU GUYS.)

It could also, however, mean that Mat's news that the band is going back out on tour will send Brandon away for a while! 

Oh who am I kidding. We can't be that lucky. I can't wait for the sibling love triangle.

Admittedly I don't understand the kids these days, but I
 cannot look at that face and see "dreamboat."

Speaking of poor Mat, Mariana dumped him because she cheated on him and couldn't live with it. Which, okay, but the poor guy is now wondering what he did wrong.

I'd also like to point out that she seems to be chatting with Wyatt on the reg these days, and I'm in no way ready for her to move on to him as her next love interest. It doesn't seem like that's where it's headed because she's the mayor of Guiltville right now, but he sure is pursuing it. Please don't turn Wyatt into a weird stalker. Don't damage his hair's reputation like that!

The Fosters: Déjà Vu

I can't be the only one today who was pretty amused by several headlines like, "The Fosters has found Jesus!" Well, infantile sense of humor or not, I'm curious to see how the new Jesus works out. 

A.J. is staying with the Adams Fosters, because of course he is. A.J. gets really confused about the unconventionality of this family. Brandon turns up and finds out that his father is planning to foster A.J., you know, at dinner in front of everyone which is always the best way. Let's face it, though, I don't really care about how Brandon feels.

Credits! Warm fuzzies!

All the grownups have a Feelings Meeting with Brandon.

Mike would like Brandon's support! He pretends he's okay with it. No one has wondered if Mike's brand new sobriety in addition to the fact that his last girlfriend statutory-raped his son might put a damper on approval for the foster license. I'm going out on a limb here to say that these are not great credentials.

Stef is going out for a girls' night! Stef has friends? 

Jude and Connor are having an adorable date in which Connor plays a video game on the TV and Jude plays one on his smartphone.

Jude finds the TV shoot-em-up game to be way too loud and would like for these damn kids to get off his lawn!

A.J. rifles through Brandon's stuff. 

A.J.: So the real kid gets his own room?

Callie: Well, we're all real.

Brandon walks in on Callie and A.J. standing way too close to each other. He is immediately jealous that his sister is flirting with his new brother. That's a real sentence.

Stef's friend Jenna is checking out women at the bar. They're at one of these only-on-television lesbian bars that are massive and upscale and pleasant and quiet and where there are always hordes of middle-aged women drinking martinis. Have we met Jenna before? I do remember them having lesbian-couple friends in the very beginning but I feel like we haven't heard of any since. Anyway, Jenna spots a super-hottie at the bar, and guess who it is? Monte! Looks like she's exploring her bicuriosity a little more aggressively! Stef insists that Jenna's barking up the wrong tree, since Monte's straight. Jenna astutely points out that Monte having been married to a man means nothing about her sexual orientation since Stef, too, was once married to a man.

Callie tells Mariana that she got fired from the drop-in center job. She divulges no details.

A.J. asks Lena if he's the first black kid she's fostered. He thinks his race makes it harder to find a foster family. Jude comes in and warns A.J. that he sometimes grinds his teeth in the night, because Jude is thoughtful and careful and perfect.

This dude Carl is there to fix the ceiling and asks if Lena and Stef are sisters. Ha! They do look a lot alike, you know. (Okay, okay, there are actual sisters in that house of different races, so I shouldn't even laugh. Love makes a family, not blood, yay!) Stef fills Lena in on the night before and is very curious about how much Lena knew about Monte's sudden interest in women. Turns out Monte was actually there on an online date, so this curiosity is very legit! Jenna wants Lena to set her up with Monte. Jenna calls and Lena and Stef both talk to her on video phone, which is super-awkward. Do people do this? Have group videophone talks on a smartphone? Anyway, Jenna makes the very ancient "lesbians bring a U-Haul to a second date" joke (that they waited till the third season to use that joke shows tremendous restraint), and our ladies agree to have her and Monte over for dinner.