Degrassi Next Class Season 4 Talk

Warning- spoilers

A few months ago a little show called 13 Reason Why was released on Netflix and boy did it divide opinions. Some say it rightly brought awareness to suicide while others thought it glorified it. Trying to bring awareness to a sensitive issue such as suicide is super tricky, you don’t want to depict it in a way that might encourage people who are on the edge yet you don’t want to water down the portrayal of the internal struggles that people go through that cause them to take drastic actions.

Man, this is getting heavy, shall we move on to something lighter? Degrassi, yes Season 4 of Degrassi Next Class is now on Netflix. Except they also had a plot related to suicide, along with that there was also stuff on terrorism, gender identity, threesomes and the most insane thing- a talent show episode where the winner was a symphony of farts. Yeah, I guess that deserved to win.

In the first episode Yael is worried about going on a bouncy castle. I first assumed this is because she was worried about her wig coming off, but she actually was worried about a different body part. She is going through a growth spurt and REALLY does not like it and starts wearing a binder, which I have a no idea how that could be comfortable, and I’m a pancake. Yael becomes less attached to being a specific gender, so they stop shaving and get a makeover to look not completely like a dude but not a girl.  Good for Yael. Of course, this confuses Hunter, who is probably gonna become alt-right by the next season.

Hey, you (yes, this pronoun still applies)

Esme gets into Havard, somehow. But it’s all downhill from there. Clearly still troubled over finding Maya on the roof, she becomes erratic. She tries to keep Zig away from Maya by stripping for Saad to make him jealous. Then she invites Frankie the Nutjob for a three way. Then she pretends to be dying, and then calls in a fake bomb threat. Not finished, after all that she tries to win Zig back with a motorcyle. Prior to that she had pushed him into a ditch.

So it’s gonna be forever, or it’s gonna go down in flames

Miles has an interesting story line where he is considered for some writing programme, but for a diversity spot. Miles. Rich, male,white, maybe bi Miles. Encouraged by his black teacher. Hey, it’s a nice subversion.

Poor Saad, ousted from his country by terrorists to come to Canada to then be accused of being a terrorist, one of the accusers being Hunter. You know, the guy who brought a gun to school to shoot up the feminist club. At least he gets a friend in Lola. Goldi also is affected from fallout of a terror attack in Belgium, but at least she gets a friend in… Winston? Okay, I will admit they are pretty cute together.

We say goodbye to Maya, Zig, Tiny, Miles, Grace, Winston, Zoe, Goldi and Jonah as they graduate and then are beamed up to a spaceship ready to be disassembled and reassembled into new characters. Kidding, they’re just going to university and then get in to debt. Or maybe not, I have no idea what tuition fees are like in Canada.

Degrassi Next Class: Season 3 talk

Beware for SPOILERS

It’s two weeks in 2017 and I ponder what the remaining 50 weeks will bring us. Soon Donald Trump will be inaugurated as president of the USA. Yup.

America be like “Whatever it takes, I know I can make it through!”

While we’re on the topic of politics, the first episode of Degrassi’s newest season had the school welcoming Syrian refugees, touching on the crisis of people fleeing the Syrian war, giving us two new characters Rasha and Saad. Well, I guess Degrassi is slightly less f-ed up than Syria.

Things got serious for Lola. The show has always portrayed her as a dumb blonde. She isn’t actually blonde, at the moment her hair is Squirtle-coloured or something. She got dumped by Tiny for her best friend Shay, and is so not over it. This leads her into the arms of Miles, who himself is also on the rebound because Tristan is in a coma. Not cheating if he’s in a coma right? The drama intensified when Lola becomes pregnant because she was taking her pills wrong.

I thought the relationship between Yael and Hunter was mildly interesting, as Hunter no longer sees her as a friend but his girlfriend, so they can’t laugh about boners anymore. Frankie and Jonah also have troubles, but it’s one sided as Frankie is overcome by jealousy and paranoia that she hacks into Jonah’s inbox. Zoe finds new love with refugee student Rasha but things get difficult as they try to sneak around Goldi and Zoe’s mother thinks Zoe dresses too straight to be gay. But all of these end up somewhat okay in the end, except Frankie and Jonah, because Franks is a nutjob.

Esme was a joy, and by joy I mean kind of a cold-hearted monster, just crushing people with harsh insults but looking sweet and angelic as she does it. She is with Zig and opens up about her tragic past and Maya’s actions in the last episode affect her quite deeply so she might get some Zoe-esque redemption, but like, the bitchiness is very entertaining so hope that she doesn’t completely change.

And, what on earth happened to Maya? I mean yes, she was in a freaking bus crash, but so were several of the other students and they seemed to move on fine, except for poor Tristan that is, he can’t actually move. Maya seemed to develop a fetish for death, and finds a kindred spirit in Saad who came from a place with so much death, they were quite the match. Watching Maya go into this dark phase was pretty terrifying, she was obviously going to self-destruct in the last episode.

Maybe the glasses were the source of her niceness

This season was I guess better than the last, but that’s not saying much.

Degrassi Next Class: Season 2 talk

Wow. Netflix has delivered possibly the best show of 2016. Seriously, this show had it all, suspense, scares, uh-mazing acting, it made me nostalgic for the 80’s even though I didn’t exist back then.

Wait a second. I’ve made a mistake. This post isn’t about Stranger Things, it’s for Degrassi. How embarrassing. Well, Stranger Things was fantastic and I plan to make a full post all about it, but I might forget, like the show forgot about Barb.

Anyway, back to my Canadian guilty pleasure. Degrassi Next Class returned with it’s second season on Netflix.

#ImNotRacistBut

The biggest storyline of this season was the racism plot where Frankie leads an unfortunate revenge prank against a rival volleyball team. She could have done anything, like put laxatives in their food, or TP their houses. But she decided to draw a big banner portraying a a team made up of mostly black girls as animals, one of them as a monkey. Eek. At first, Frankie doesn’t understand how the banner was offensive and desperately tries to diffuse the situation but only digs a bigger hole for herself. Race is still a pretty touchy subject in the world and I’m not sure a show like Degrassi has the nuance to handle it, but it wasn’t overly cringey.

Poor(?) Zoe

The writers of this show are throwing every kind of personal struggle at this one character. First she was sexually assaulted, then rejected by Grace, now she’s self-harming herself. What next, cancer? On top of that, she just doesn’t seem to have any friends, except maybe Tristan but even he gets mad at her. I feel we are supposed to sympathise with Zoe, but she’s still kind of an a-hole, but hopefully now that she’s came out to Winston, things might look up for her in the next season.

Oh yeah, there was a reunion

Major characters from the previous seasons were on the show  including Emma, Spinner, and Paige but it wasn’t very exciting, they were kind of just there and revealed little snippets of what their up to, and to look at the new characters in horror thinking, “Geez, we’re getting old”. Drake couldn’t make it, he’s got too much work work work work work work

Other stuff

Hunter went off the deep end in the last season. Miles, the surprising voice of reason does the right thing and tells their mother about the gun and Hunter is put into a mental facility. Naturally, he does not take it well but over time accepts that he has a problem, he even gets a girlfriend at end.

Maya rightly does not take Zig back, which leaves the door open for Grace, but Zig clearly does not feel the same. Take that as a compliment, Grace.

Shay is becoming a favourite character of mine, she is the most level headed and has ambitions beyond boyfriends and updating her Hastygram (this name gets me). Poor Ariana Mini Lola however, afraid that Tiny will dump her flirts with other guys for pizza, only for him to develop feelings for Shay a few episodes later.

#PrayForDegrassi

The last episode ends on a downer as a bus containing many of the students crashes and their fate hangs in the air. Overall, a passable season.

Degrass: Next Class more talk

#MajorSpoilers

I finished watching all ten episodes of the new series on Degrassi on Netflix. It was the same old same old with angst and heartbreak but my opinions on the characters has changed a lot over the course of the episodes.

The dull stuff

Frankie’s love life was so tedious, as she considers getting back together with Winston but then develops feeling for Jonah so quite cruelly dumps Winston on the night of the ball. Too bad, they’re both so annoying, they belong together.

Poor Grace

After much speculation, we finally found out Grace’s deep dark secret. No, not about her being gay, but that she has cystic fibrosis. Oh, but she also revealed that she is in fact Not Gay effectively destroying her and Zoe’s fling and probably their friendship. I like that the show didn’t give into making Grace a stereotype.

Love triangles everywhere!

I’ve already mentioned Frankie, Winston and Jonah but there were even more love geometry with Shay, Tiny, and Ariana (okay, I believe her name is actually Lola) and two intertwining triangles with Zoe, Grace, Maya, Zig, and Jonah. Remember when I said Zoey and Zig are a good couple? Yeah, Zig is a jealous cheat and Zoe is a terrible friend, screw this couple.

Misogyny everywhere!

A huge theme was feminism where Maya joined a feminist club after facing some sketchy treatment from men at a gig. There was discussion on consent and sexualisation of women in video games. Maya receives online harassment in the form of rape threats and doxxing and I can’t help but draw parallels to a certain movement that has exposed some pretty ugly behaviour from gamers.

Hey hey, this is not okay

 

#WTFHollingsworth  

This family is crazy. Frankie we’ve mentioned, Miles fresh from being disqualified as school president meets new girl Esme who gets him into taking drugs to help with his anxiety as his father looks set to come back into his life. I actually started to feel sorry for him, at least he manages to redeem himself by the end.

Worst looking made-up game ever (please tell me it’s made-up)

The big bad was Hunter whose angry white boy meltdown was pretty gripping. It started off well as he mangaes to start a competitive gamer club (why didn’t this exist when I was in school?) which is taken down by the feminist club. I thought the feminist club was being unreasonable but that didn’t excuse him sending online threats to Maya and saying some pretty ignorant stuff about Goldi’s headscarf. After violently lashing out at Yael, he goes all Light Yagami and writes the name of his enemies in a notebook. What looked like a potential school shooting was avoided but that dude needs some serious therapy.

Verdict

This series wasn’t too bad and I think the change to Netflix was a good move. There was a case of new characters that were underdeveloped so hopefully they get more storylines in future episodes.

Degrassi: Next Class talk- Episode 1

#SpoilerAlert

A dream of mine is to one day visit America’s nice cousin, Canada. It makes sense, a lot of things I love hail from Canada: Simple Plan, Ryan Reynolds,  Superwoman (the Youtuber), and then there’s Degrassi. This is a long running teen show that has now found a new platform on Netflix which is so great because I can watch them in good quality instead of watching on YouTube. I’m probably getting too old to watch this, but it’s SO watchable and touches upon heavy themes from bullying, STDs, drug use, sexuality, harassment, basically any bad thing that happens to young people.

The nomenclature of the episodes has changed, before they would use song names but now they use hashtags. I dread the day hashtags transition from the internet into human conversation.

Episode 1 is called #BootyCall and straight off we get a Drake reference. Drake, one of the biggest stars in mainstream hip-hop, started off as an actor on Degrassi though he never will admit it.

Ever since I left Degrassi YOU, you and me we just don’t get along…

I actually really like the Degrassi theme song, it’s a corny optimistic song about making it through and the being the best that we can be. It has gone through several rearrangements throughout the seasons, the new one doesn’t sound too great.

As always, there are three plots in the episode, one concerning Shay and her new crush Tiny. Unfortunately, Ariana Grande informs Shay that Tiny likes big butts and he cannot lie and this sends Shay spiralling into a pit of insecurity. I hope Shay becomes more confident because she uttered the line, “No boy is worthy of my room” in an earlier episode which was awesome.

Elsewhere, Maya and Zig are having relationship troubles as Maya wants to focus on her music career but Zig is worried she will leave him behind. Honestly, any way this couple can break up is welcomed, I much preferred Zig and Zoe and it’s a shame their relationship was cut so short.

The biggest plot was the president election where Miles and Tristan were competing against each other. They kiss at Mile’s pool party and to no one’s surprise, Miles is already flirting with some other girl the very next day. This leads to a pretty funny debate scene which didn’t seem too far from televised political debates in real life.

In the end, Maya and Zig sort of reconcile, Shay realises Tiny likes her because she’s smart and Miles gets what he deserved for cheating and being a general scumbag.

There were a few new faces in this episode, one being Goldi who was also running in the election. It will be interesting to see what they do with this character considering that we Muslims aren’t getting the best rep out there.

I have a long weekend so I may binge watch the rest of the episodes and post more, I’m sure there will be more insane drama to make fun of.