What’s particularly rough about “Dream a Little Dream” (Feb. 7) — even for an episode of “The Fosters,”which hits hard and often — is the show’s unusually pragmatic and harsh assessment of the ways our pasts can be weaponized against us. It’s real, and “The Fosters” isn’t afraid of real, but — as with a lot of Callie’s (Maia Mitchell) stories in particular — it knows when to leaven its unflinching sociology with surprise grace and humorous luck, and when to play it straight.
So just as it seems like Jesus ( Noah Centineo) is maaaaaybe coming out of the woods… Callie and Mariana (Cierra Ramirez) stumble farther off the path into separate, sticky briar patches, by the looks of things. And just like Mama Stef (Teri Polo), who is slowly coming to realize the web of corruption that’s been gathering around her for quite a while, the price they’re paying is for events they had little to no control over.
And there is very little in the real world, much less this show’s world of family, of trauma, of amazing women, that is quite so ugly as that, or so terrifying.
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Jesus spends the episode zipping around in a nightmarish sequence of coma dreams, a particularly nasty case of “It’s A Wonderful Life”-in-reverse, as his damaged opinion of himself runs riot in his subconscious: He imagines his family has indeed sold the house and left him behind, he sees Emma (Amanda Leighton) choose Brandon (David Lambert) over himself because of his intellectual gifts, and worst of all: Nick (Louis Hunter) on a shooting spree in a Santa suit, leaving Mariana dead because Jesus just couldn’t cut it in the savior department.
Mercifully, Jesus has at least regained consciousness by hour’s end, which is something to cling to (desperately) in an otherwise tough episode — Can we talk about Lena’s (Sherri Saum) ghostly visitor from the beyond while in the ICU at Jesus’s side? Goosebumps much? — but there have been a few red flags this season that he won’t be “our” Jesus anymore, and certainly we were introduced to some of the darker parts of Jesus this week — unfamiliar but unsurprising, let’s say, and certainly presented with intent.
And while Jesus is blameless here, it’s easier to swallow a chaotic medical event because there’s no malice or agenda behind it. Things happen to your body, you cry and deal and hopefully can move on, or change shape into someone new.
But in stark contrast, we’re witnessing Callie paying twice for her troubled past here, railroaded by some cops into taking a not insignificant amount of the blame for Troy’s (Levi Fiehler) accident. It works out pretty well for these grown-ass men that they can question this young woman with no lawyer or parent present — and Detective Gray (Alex Skuby), oozing testosterone and resentment, his gotten up to speed on Callie’s past. If he’s going to use her against her mother — and sweep the murder back under the rug — he’s going to need all the info. It’s as gross to watch as it sounds, and it just keeps going.
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Of course Troy has since shown up at the station, having already lawyered up — and of course Gray declares Troy “squeaky clean,” despite his serial killer face and affect. For a while, it’s looking like Detective Bruckner might be playing “good” cop in their good cop/bad cop tag team approach in dealing with Callie… Until he asks, “Would you say this was your fault, getting in his car?”
Fault is a narrative red flag because it’s a real life red flag: A handy weapon brandished against a lot of girls and women who are the object of someone else’s bad intentions. Retroactively applying morality to a decision that could have easily let to any number of less heinous outcomes is the last stance of a person on their way to silencing you.
So just like that, we’ve got the girl with a past finding her future in jeopardy — and whose good intentions led her here, of course. While we have applauded the purity and gameplan of Callie’s self-destructive maneuvers in the past, on occasion, we’re talking about Season 4 Callie: The girl who sees danger sign #1 and immediately (and politely) asks to be let out of the car. Cool under pressure, aware of her boundaries and limitations, and trying to be a superhero anyway, because it’s who she is.
While Callie’s the one who called 911 after the accident, Troy’s call to his lawyer proved to be a much shrewder use of his minutes. Whatever Troy’s interest in the case, it’s Callie’s determination to save Kyle (Adam Irigoyen) from a false murder charge that’s dropping her in the muck now: Even if Gray weren’t rigging the entire thing, Troy would still have the upper hand, because that is the world.
Sorry, Callie — it’s only the jerk swaddled safely in his “squeaky clean” bubble wrap who gets to ignore, rather than face, the music. The guy who actually ran from the scene of an accident, whose mischaracterization of the accident clearly strays from “Rashomon” territory early on and into calculated (and frankly, chilling). Girls like you have to pay the piper, with interest. Society says so, that’s who. The judge’s final say does compassionately weigh all of these factors, and when he ultimately comes down on the side of leaving her in juvie for now, he’s clear that it’s only because of a fairly recent choice by Callie (running away last season). Which sucks, but at least he arrives there by thinking of her as a person, rather than a weapon — or a piece of refuse — like the other guys involved. Not the history of things that have happened to her, but the history of things she’s done: He’s good enough to understand those are two very different things.
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Meanwhile, we’ve got Mariana still melting down, now that she knows Callie and Jesus are both in major, life-changing trouble because of her own stuff: Even in her grief over her brother’s state and recovering from her Adderall slump, that brilliant mind kicks into gear and she puts the correct sequence of events together based on very little information. She hallucinated Nick (understandable, considering he is a full-on stalker and would-be active shooter), called brother Brandon, Brandon roughed up Nick, and Nick came looking to smooth things over — at which point, Jesus went on the hunt for them, and Callie with Troy.
While her mistakes were more major, we still see someone (in this case Mariana herself) bringing a retroactive negativity to a situation that would have been nothing more than a positive wake-up call… But just happened to have ruined everyone’s lives, rather than the altogether delightful consequences of Jude (Hayden Byerly) doing basically the same thing — ditching the fair, getting high to deal with his problems. We’re not sure where to place Jude’s nastiness with Brandon, on the scale of his development, but he sure does turn it around the second Brandon calls him on it. (And we’re inclined to give Jude a pass anyway, even if Brandon weren’t a lot to deal with, because… He is Jude.)
Mariana gets a moment’s reprieve when Mat (Jordan Rodrigues) shows up to provide some much-needed support and a shoulder (and soon enough, some other parts) to cry on and distract herself with. But she can’t enjoy the intimacy for long, and even in Mat’s arms, she’s having PTSD flashbacks about Nick. Becoming entangled with a stalker is another one of those things that young women don’t generally look forward to or volunteer for. By another tough roll of the dice, various people providing that stability and love have been caught in the crossfire of her misfortune. You can bet she’ll be chin-deep in self-recrimination for a long time to come, all the same — and we hate it.
Mariana’s measured transformation into the preternaturally competent Miss Thing — the most powerful, intelligent, self-assured young woman in all of California — is one of the show’s greatest triumphs: It plays to Ramirez’s strengths, it provides a unique and intense focal point and role model for
every damn person on earth
young women; it even gives us a sort of nature/nurture view of how easily Callie could have become the woman that she is becoming, without all that needless pain and fear.
She took down an active shooter, okay — and when they asked her how she did it she literally didn’t understand the question. “What do you mean? I took care of it. I don’t. Know how. I do. The things I do.”
And the best part of her is that she’s realistic: She’s like what happens if “Hidden Figures” never needed to be made — because women and POC were just people, the whole time. She’s ultimately the perfect composite of a teenager, the ones they don’t know the rest of us can see: Human, funny, needlessly cruel, obsessed with popularity and nailing down her own identity… And so magical she doesn’t even know it.
But the downside of Miss Thing is that she’s so exemplary she can’t feel realistic forever, not with Callie and Brandon up to their egregious teen behavior, and she’s so wonderful there’s not a lot of places to go, narratively. So we understand the need to take chunks out of her self-image, if that’s what it takes to watch her grow again.
…And of course, we’ll take whatever postpones the “addiction is hereditary” storyline we all see coming down the track, because that seems like a nightmare. Do we know Ana’s [Alexandra Barreto] drug of choice? It doesn’t really matter, but if she were into amphetamines… Wouldn’t that be a punch in the gut?
“The Fosters” airs Tuesdays at 8 p.m. ET/PT on Freeform.