Hey guys! How's it going? I'm doing okay. Today I'm going to be talking about one of the biggest episodes of Degrassi: The Next Generation ever aired in the early days of the show. I'm going to be talking about season 4, episodes 7 and 8, "Time Stands Still". This is a pretty heavy episode so please keep that in mind when you read this. Let's get into it.
If you were watching Degrassi: The Next Generation in 2004, you remember this episode. In fact, I'd say if you were in middle school or high school in 2004, and had friends who were fans of the show, but you'd never seen a single episode, you know this episode. It was a game changer for the show and changed certain characters forever. For good or for bad. It's also one of the hardest episodes for me to watch, because of how badly Rick was bullied leading up to him shooting Jimmy in part 2.
Unlike with alot of other situations on this show, or on any other shows, where I either can't relate to it, or I come down on a particular side, Rick being bullied, and Raditch's dismissal of the situation, which I will get into later, is something I can relate to. When my friends and I were in high school, we weren't exactly the most popular people in the school. In fact, we were at the bottom of the social ladder, unable, and in most cases unwilling, to climb up it further, and for whatever reason, we got picked on alot. And in my later years in high school, we had a principal who refused to do anything about the amount of bullying that was happening. Some of us dealt with it, because it wasn't as bad as it could've been, and most of us were good about reporting it to the vice principal if an incident occurred. However, my friend Sarah, was bullied so much that she transferred to a different school because our principal refused to do anything about it, no matter how many times she went to him about it. So I can relate to Rick both directly, since I was the target of bullying occasionally in both middle school AND high school, and indirectly, since I watched people I cared about, like Sarah, go through it even worse.
However, I cannot imagine being so angry and hurt that I'd take a gun to school and plan to hurt or kill my tormentors. Of course I can't imagine being an abusive boyfriend, which started this entire storyline. Rick Murray was introduced in Season 3, Episode 8, "Whisper to a Scream" where he had a crush on former main character, Terri MacGregor and they begin dating. However, he turns out to be an abusive boyfriend and Terri breaks up with him because of it. But he returns seven episodes later, and they get back together. But, Rick hasn't changed, and he abuses Terri yet again, this time putting her in a coma, resulting in him being expelled from Degrassi. But that wasn't the end of Rick.
The thing about Degrassi is that even when a minor character's storyline is seeingly finished, the writers sometimes find a way to bring them back for another storyline. For example, Kevin Smith and Jason Mewes show up in the fourth season, and then return in season 5 and again in season 8. In the case of Rick, he was brought back in season 4, episode 4 intending to prove that his time away from Degrassi had changed him. But, everyone is still angry at him for what he did to Terri in season 3, that they start bullying him incessantly. The worst offenders being Spinner, Jay and Alex, three characters that I came to adore but they're at their worst this season. Spinner especially.
Spinner was always a jerk right from the very beginning of the series, where he tended to make fun of the younger students, namely Emma, Toby, J.T., Manny and Liberty. But in season 4, he was the absolute worst. I don't know if it's because he'd fallen in with a bad crowd due to his friendship with Jay, or he was just insecure and angry following his breakup with Paige earlier in the season, but this season he was worse than he'd ever been before, though obviously not bad enough for his current girlfriend, Manny, to break up with him.
Watching both parts back to back was a different experience than it was in the mid-2000s when I saw the episode in reruns as I hadn't started watching the show yet when the episode aired. I also didn't know what had happened because nobody I knew watched it, at least not that I knew about. Watching it this time around I knew what was coming, and I was tense watching part 1 and the beginning of part 2.
Rick shooting Jimmy and then pointing the gun at Emma while Sean tries to talk him down, are probably two of the most intense scenes on TV that I have ever seen, outside of many of the fight sequences in the Arrowverse shows and the final sequence in the Star Trek: The Next Generation season 4 premiere, "The Best of Both Worlds Part 2" where Data is trying to get through Locutus to get Picard while the Borg attack the Enterprise. Like you know Rick is angry and hurt after the hell he's endured for weeks, possibly months, since he returned to Degrassi at the beginning of the season, but it's hard to reconcile empathy for what he's going through with the way he chose to handle it. Especially when he intends to kill Emma.
I would also like to talk about Raditch, because like I said, I had a principal like him at my high school, who didn't take bullying seriously despite the fact that our school had a zero tolerance policy. In part 1, Rick goes to see Raditch and ask him to do something about the bullying being done to him by Jimmy, who was just placed on the quiz team to replace the ever elusive Heather Sinclair, older sister to future main character Holly. J Sinclair. Raditch simply sees it as two students not getting along and tells Rick that he has to learn to get along with Jimmy. As Snake (Mr. Simpson) reveals in part 2, Rick and gone to see Raditch several times about the constant harrassment from the other kids like Spinner, Jay and Alex, but Raditch didn't do a thing to stop it. As a teenager I found it difficult to accept this due to my own experiences with Sarah being forced to transfer schools, and with being bullied as well. However, as an adult, I do see that there wasn't really anything Raditch could do. Especially since Jimmy was starting to soften towards Rick as they practiced for the quiz game, and Rick wasn't exactly forthcoming about what Spinner, Jay and Alex were doing to him either. And yet, when Rick continued to come to him because of the bullying, Raditch should've taken it much more seriously than he did.
Also, in the aftermath of the shooting, Raditch called the incident "one kid overreacting to spilled paint". Read that again. He said it was one kid overreacting. Overreacting would be egging someone's house in retaliation. Overreacting would be framing somebody for something you did because you had an argument with them. What Rick did was an extreme response to being ignored by the school's staff, which Snake acknowledged while he and Spike were with Emma at the school after the shooting. Also, did Raditch forget what Rick had done to Terri the previous school year? He knew that Rick's mental and emotional state was fragile, and yet he ignored him.
The shooting had a profound impact on all of the characters going forward. However, the three characters that I feel it impacted the most are Jimmy (for obvious reasons), Emma, and Sean. Jimmy is paralyzed from the waist down and has to use a wheelchair, or crutches, for the rest of his time on the series. I could definitely relate to, since right up until grade 9 I used crutches and a wheelchair, now I just use a walking stick and a wheelchair. The impact it had on Emma and Sean is more psychological. For example, Emma begins to shed her good girl image after this episode, and becomes easier to sway when it comes to breaking the rules and doing things like having parties at her house when her parents aren't home. The typical teenage stuff that she was unwilling to do prior to the trauma she endured from having a gun pointed directly at her. Sean's scars took longer to heal however. He had wrestled with Rick for control of the gun when it went off, resulting in Rick's death. The severity of the situation caused Sean to leave Toronto and Degrassi and return to his parents in Wasaga Beach. He wouldn't come back until the beginning of the sixth season.
There are other characters who were affected by the shooting. Like Toby, who had been friends with Rick before it happened, Spinner, who had inadvertently helped to incite the shooting in the first place, and even Paige was affected, staying with Hazel at the hospital to wait for Jimmy to regain consciousness. Oh and Craig, as he's the one who found Jimmy after Rick shot him.
There's a subplot about Joey Jeremiah, played by the wonderful Pat Mastroianni, selling his house with the help of his ex-girlfriend, Sydney, and his current girlfriend, Caitlin Ryan, played by Stacie Mistysyn, buying it for him. However it's quickly dropped once the shooting and the entire cast converges on the school for the aftermath. It's funny seeing the adult characters on the show, because they were kids on the original shows, Degrassi Junior High and Degrassi High, but they were still relevant on TNG as they were on the shows from the late 80s/early 90s. However this plotline in this episode just didn't work for me. Probably because everything leading to the shooting, the shooting itself and the aftermath were more interesting than whatever was going on with Joey and Caitlin, although it was kind of funny seeing Craig pretend to be sick so he could stay home from school and "help" Joey by getting Sydney involved and then the second time around, probably to get Caitlin to do something about it too. Also, I think part of the problem I have with this storyline is that I watched this episode in a vacuum each time I've seen it with the benefit of having seen earlier episodes leading up to this point with Joey. Or the aftermath, because I don't remember if it's brought up again in later episodes.
I think I've rambled about this episode long enough. I hope you enjoyed this look back at one of the most important episodes of Degrassi: The Next Generation ever produced. I'm hoping to start a complete watch through of Degrassi, from Junior High through to the end of TNG as DHX Media, the company that owns the franchise, has uploaded just about every episode of the franchise, leaving out Degrassi: Next Class since it's on Netflix, and season 2 of Degrassi High (so far) on the official Degrassi YouTube channel, which is pretty awesome, and it's how I watched this two part episode. This is a tough episode to watch for all the reasons I talked about in this review, but at the same time, it's a great episode too. The reason I've always liked Degrassi, besides the fact that it's a Canadian series, is that it realistically portrays all of the issues that people go through when they're teenagers. They don't hold anything back, but they're also careful to make sure the topic is handled well.
Alright guys, that's going to be it for me for today. I'll be back tomorrow for a comic book review and then I'll have a movie review for you on Friday as well. So until then have a great evening and I will talk to you all later. Take care.
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