We reconvene with our girls on their first day of classes, or as Kimberly calls it, “Happy F.D.O.C.†which stands for “First Day of Classes,†which seems to fall on a Thursday. (Didn’t think that one through, did you, Essex College?) Most of the episode trudges on, with each girl dealing with a tropey problem: Kimberly struggles through class because of her middle-class background, Leighton excels in class but struggles to make friends because she’s rich and mean, respectively, Whitney goes to a soccer party, and Bela goes to a naked party. The setup is a little formulaic and so is the execution. You probably won’t leave this episode feeling like you know the characters any more deeply than when you met them, but let’s get into it anyway.
Whitney ended up going through with her one-night stand, which Bela deems the “sexiest fucking thing†she has heard in her 18 years. (When I was 18, we had One Direction kidnapping fan fiction, but to each their own). As Bela, Kimberly, and Whitney debate the fruitfulness of meaningless sex, Leigh wanders in with an overnight bag, her lesbian hotel moment also, presumably, a success. We later watch as she blocks poor Jillian, 34, who had a great time, on her dating app of choice. Brutal, but I’m skeptical of any 34-year-old who knowingly has sex with a 19-year-old, so block away!
It turns out that Leigh’s random roommates are annoyingly the kind that care if you live or die, so her nonchalant, all-night radio silence doesn’t sit well with them. She reminds everyone that they literally met that week, she doesn’t even remember their last names, and that they aren’t entitled to each other’s lives, which, true. But Kimberly takes this as a personal attack and reminds us that her last name is Finkle (of course it is) and that she’s a human-trafficking truther, worried all night about whether Leigh got kidnapped.
Honestly, I wouldn’t have minded a little Law & Order crossover. This episode was tearfully boring, especially for an episode centered around a bunch of weird teens seeing each other’s nipples at a naked party for the first time. But it’s only the F.D.O.C., so hopefully we’re only going up from here.
There’s something brewing between Kimberly and Naughty Nico, who’s been demoted from a Chilling Adventures of Sabrina pure-sex heartthrob to a Nutri-Grain bar. He wears a lot of flannel. Sadly, we get no Canaan time this episode. Instead, we are forced to witness what is presumably meant to be a flirtatious conversation between Kimberly and Nico, wherein we discover that Kim is taking a French class that Nico has taken. He says that Kimberly must “really like French,†and she’s like, hehe, yeah I do :) These two could not have less chemistry, but they’re easier to root for than literally any of the other romantic pairs thus far, so I’ll take my scraps and go.
Kimberly does “really like French,†but her tragic, disgusting public-school education tragically and disgustingly does not prepare her for the class, which is populated by a French translator for the Tokyo Olympics and a girl who tells the class Nancy Pelosi posted a picture with her on Twitter. Kimberly struggles to keep up with her classmates’ French, especially since, unlike them, she spent the summer working at a dog-grooming store called Groomingdales (love!), but nevertheless, she French-sisted. Her red-lipsticked teacher tells her to drop the class, but Kimberly is a nasty femme and wants to break the Emmanuel Macron ceiling, and yeah, yeah, you get it.
While Kimberly suffers in class, Whitney and Leighton suffer … in love? Whitney fails to get on fellow soccer superstar Jena’s (Maya Rose) good side, not helping herself when she hurls a soccer ball at coach Dalton’s stupid cheating head. In his defense, his name is Dalton. What do you expect him to do, be faithful to his wife? He can’t; Mindy Kaling named him Dalton.
Whitney ends up being the only girl on the team not invited to Jena’s party that night, which I find a little uncalled for. I don’t really understand why Jena hates Whitney just for having a senator mom when, as we can see in every Kimberly scene, Essex College is a place where rich kids walk around being rich and annoying and translators for the Tokyo Olympics. Maybe the soccer team is only for people who are upper-middle class.
In any case, Whitney ends up sneaking into Jena’s party, bringing a plastic-wrapped bath set as a sort of … bargaining chip? Does Jena love Bath & Body Works? Could Whitney not have brought cocaine like a normal politician’s daughter?
Almost immediately, Whitney witnesses Jena’s age-appropriate boyfriend break up with her at her own party, fed up with the intensity of her soccer schedule. Whitney finally wins Jena over after assuring her there are plenty of soccer-tolerant boys in the sea, but Jena warns Whitney that boys their age can’t handle “girls like us, so good luck finding one.†Whitney takes this to heart, deciding to patch things up with married Dalton instead of just changing her Raya age range to 20 to 26.
Equally misguided, Leighton gets the highest score on her class’s math-placement test, something she sees as an opportunity to stick it to her ex-high-school friend, whose opinion of Leigh I’m sure is forever changed by a test score. Or if not the score itself, then by Leigh coercing her professor to announce her accomplishment to the class in a speech praising her alleged charm and being “hashtag onto bigger and better things.†Yes, hashtag.
Somewhat deservedly, that’s where Leigh’s Friday wins end. When a dating app MILF assures Leigh that she should come out to her classmates and embrace the totality of who she is, much like fellow queer blonde icon JoJo Siwa, we learn that hashtag privileged Leigh is terrified of being othered. She cites high-school popularity as something she would have lost if she had already come out (which seems misguided — hasn’t Leigh seen Love, Simon?) and continues to push away everyone who shows her a shred of care, including her hot Luna bar brother.
Instead, she deals with her inner turmoil by getting drunk, alone and angry, triggering a cute campus-security chase scene after she chucks her glass bottle at a statue. Of course, life can be difficult for everyone regardless of how well it has otherwise treated them. Still, since Leigh’s literal only problem is being afraid to come out to her supportive network, that whole plotline feels shallow. Man, it is hard being a wealthy, conventionally attractive, thin white woman with a university building named after you.
Bela and Kimberly have a slightly more enriching Friday night at their naked party, freeing their respective nipples, witnessing a partygoer’s giant penis, and drinking a bunch of cheap wine from plastic cups. There’s some chuckling and implied bonding through alcohol, which is tremendous and boring for them. Yes, if you didn’t already know, naked parties aren’t nearly as salacious as they sound. The only thing that makes them different from a regular party is being naked, and you get used to seeing a bunch of balls once a few have passed you the chip bowl. In a show about college girls discovering themselves and their sexuality, though, it would have been nice to see the girls more deeply engaging with the idea of nakedness as a liberating equalizer, especially for body and sex-obsessed Bela (she literally spray-paints a ten-pack of abs in preparation for her big night). But we get no revelations or real progress of any kind, sexual or emotional, nothing to keep us truly invested in watching two girls hang out and drink. Maybe next weekend they’ll go to an orgy.