Season 2, Episode 16 - Message in a Bottle

Original Airdate - January 17th, 2003

Sean has Emma over for a homework date. He’s a little embarrassed. His home with Tracker is simple, the chairs at his table are broken, he doesn’t want Emma to feel uncomfortable. Emma is rolling with it. Tracker comes home, arguing on the phone with his boss, and makes it clear that Sean needs to clear out. Sean’s embarrassment deepens.

The thing is, things aren’t going that bad for Sean. Not only is he back with Emma, but he’s become an indispensable part of the basketball team. His teamwork with Jimmy is particularly on point. With urging from Coach Armstrong and Spinner, the pair decides to officially bury the hatchet. Jimmy invites Sean and Emma to a party that night to celebrate the team’s success.

Emma throws a wrench in that plan. She’s already told Christine and Mr. Simpson that they would have dinner at her house, and she’s been waiting until the last minute to tell Sean. She doesn’t want him to freak out, but he is freaking. She assures him it will be fine, and commits to going to the party after dinner.

We’re going to intermix the B story today, because it’s short and there’s a lot of interplay. Jimmy can’t keep his eyes off Ashley lately. She’s so much more grounded than last year, and he really wants her back. He’s afraid to admit it to Ashley, so he invites her to his party through Terri.

Paige and Ellie are out. Paige is going to the spa and Ellie doesn’t think it’ll be her scene. Ashley is unsure she will fit in, or that Jimmy even wants her there, but Terri encourages her to check it out.

Tracker drops a bomb on Sean as he heads out for dinner. Tracker quit his job. It’s all a little familiar. Their dad is constantly bouncing between jobs. Tracker insists this is different. He’s not blowing their savings on booze, and he’s already interviewing for something new. Still, Sean feels the stress of the moment and the echoes of all of the moments before.

He instantly feels awkward at dinner. Christine has made sushi, which he’s not used to. Love the 00s era “sushi is so exotic” moments. They're sitting on the floor, so Sean has to ditch his shoes and has holes in his socks. He struggles with the chopsticks.

Emma primed her parents not to grill Sean, but Christine asks what she thinks are harmless questions to get to know him. Unfortunately, the basics get complicated for Sean, who has to admit he doesn’t live with his parents and that his brother is no longer working. Christine feels bad. She really wasn’t trying to embarrass him. She’s mostly just concerned about the amount of stress he must be under.

Sean excuses himself to give himself a break. He heads into the kitchen for some water, and chugs a glass of white wine to take the edge off. Disgusting. It doesn’t really work. The rest of the dinner is painfully awkward. Sean spills a drink on Emma who heads upstairs to change. Simpson goes to make coffee. Sean and Christine are left alone.

Christine tries to make Sean feel at home. She wants them to have a relationship! She offers to pack him up some leftovers, but that sets Sean off. Christine was acting out of worry, and Sean doesn’t want that worry. He doesn’t want his girlfriend’s mom to see him as a welfare case. He storms off, without even saying goodbye to Emma.

Emma comes down and is mad at Christine. Clearly she said the wrong thing. She heads off to find her man.

Jimmy’s party is in full swing when Terri and Ashley show up. Ashley instantly feels kind of off. This popular kid party just isn’t her scene anymore. Spinner greets them coldly (no Paige? not interested) and Jimmy greets them filled with nerves. He’s pulled away to deal with other guests, and Ashley interprets his nerves as disinterest in having her there.

Sean feels no discomfort when he shows up. He’s ready to party. Craig clocks that he’s drunk, and is concerned, but Sean brushes him off. He greets Jimmy warmly. All is good! Let’s party! Craig asks about Emma and Sean says that’s over. He messed up and she’s never going to forgive him and he doesn’t want to talk about it. He swipes some liquor from Jimmy’s parents.

The party intensifies. Ashley and Terri are miserable. This so isn’t their vibe. A weirdo comes to flirt with them and they decide to leave, but run into Jimmy on their way out. Jimmy admits to Ashley that she is the only person he cares about having at his party. She agrees to hang out a bit.

That’s when Emma arrives. She heads for Sean and instantly takes his side in his conflict with Christine, but then she hears him slur his words. She realizes he’s wasted and tries to get the liquor bottle away from him. He refuses to give it to her and in the tussle, drops and shatters the bottle.

Jimmy is pissed Sean stole his parents’ booze and kicks him out. Emma leads him away. Meanwhile, Ashley helps him clean up the glass. They have a moment, and almost kiss, but Ashley pulls away and heads home.

Sean is extremely “woe is me” outside the party, even as Emma tries to convince him it’s okay. She refuses to validate his narrative and calls Christine to pick them up.

That Monday, Ashley apologizes to Jimmy for rushing away and kisses him. Looks like that’s back on.

Meanwhile, Sean is avoiding Emma, but Emma corners him. She doesn’t care that he messed up and got drunk, she cares that he is constantly pushing her away. She says she likes him. They are on the same team, and he needs to let them be. Sean agrees, happy to have someone on his side.

I’ve written about this before, but Sean Cameron has been a surprise to me during this Degrassi rewatch. I think he is actually the perfect example of what Degrassi does so well in its earliest years. Forgive me those of you who do not care about Degrassi. I’ll see you tomorrow, because today we’re going to do a little media criticism.

The Degrassi cast is largely a collection of tropes - class clown JT, bad boy Sean, cool jock Jimmy, and cool bitch Paige. This is somewhat inevitable when you’re creating an ensemble about teenagers. Teenagers have a tendency to put themselves in boxes or roles at school. Your relatable cast should do the same.

But the individual character’s relationship to these tropes is where Degrassi goes to find story. No one displays that more than Sean. He’s the bad boy from the wrong side of the tracks. He’s held back a year in school. He’s more edgy and less polished than the other boys in the school. What a troublemaker!

Except that, almost right away, we are taught that Sean isn’t really a bad boy at all. He loves animals and astrology. He gets along with almost everyone in his grade. He’s a loverboy with a crush. He’s a big sweet softie! He’s one of the kinder characters in the cast, and despite what his theme song vignette with Raditch implies, he doesn’t actually make trouble. At least not for anyone but himself.

In last season’s big Sean episode, I wrote about how relatable I found this aspect of the character. There is a story he is telling about himself in his head. He’s a failure, so he makes himself fail. In this episode, he takes that further. He has absorbed everyone’s judgment so much that he starts acting like the person they imagine him to be.

This is especially highlighted by Sean’s relationship to his own poverty, the “other side of the tracks” aspect of his biography. Emma does not ever seem to care, even a little bit, that Sean doesn’t come from money. Rich boy Jimmy doesn’t seem to care, he cares that Sean threatens his authority. Christine cares only as much as she wants to show care where she can. But Sean is convinced that everyone sees him as gutter trash. It’s pure projection of his own self-criticism.

My favorite place that manifests this episode is in the way Sean believes that he and Tracker are doomed to become their father. We get a lot of important biography in Sean’s argument with Tracker. His dad was constantly quitting jobs and getting fired, his dad was constantly blowing money on booze.

Sean believes this is their destiny. He assumes Tracker will not find a new job or will quit the next one too. And he chooses to deal with his feelings by turning to his father’s vice. He becomes the bad boy everyone thinks he is, the father he is convinced he will become.

And then he makes assumptions about how everyone will react to this behavior. Surely Emma and Christine will cut him from their lives now! That’s what reasonable people do to bad boys. He resolves this episode by realizing that this mistake doesn’t have to become his identity, and that Emma doesn’t see him that way.

This pattern is all over the show. Terri is the fat friend, right? She assumes that everyone things she’s nice but ugly and disgusting. She is constantly holding herself back because that’s what the fat friend does. Paige thinks she’s a cool girl. She performs maturity and overconfidence, and finds herself in situations where she is way over her head.

Jimmy thinks he cannot face scrutiny or criticism because he is the popular jock, and then pushes people away who dare to challenge his view from the top. Emma believes herself to be such a warrior for justice that she shoves her nose where it doesn’t belong in the name of “helping.”

I think this is Degrassi’s great message in these first few seasons. It understands that the big mistake most teenagers make is rushing to define themselves. They feel extreme pressure to play a role, and then act out of line with their true self to perform that role. And it almost always ends badly.

I think a lot about the advice to be yourself. I think a lot of people interpret this advice as “don’t cave to peer pressure,” but I think it goes beyond that. We must all fight the intention to become a character in a story, one being told to us by other people or one being created in our own heads. We have to embrace the complicated and unique human that is each of us. Failing to do so will always create problems.

I think it’s really elegant to fill your ensemble with “characters in a story,” tropes that add up to “the average high school” and then spend your entire show unpacking those tropes. I think that’s why these first two seasons, very special episodes and all, feel so grounded.