The Fosters
“Where the Heart Is”, Season 5 Episode 22
Requested By
What do I know about this series going into it?
The Fosters is the series prior to Good Trouble, whose series finale I reviewed a couple of weeks ago. I know that Good Trouble depicts the lives of adoptive sisters Mariana and Callie, who moved to Los Angeles at the end of The Fosters.
I got to know Mariana very little by watching the Good Trouble series finale; all I know is that she was in love with someone named Evan, who got amnesia, and also at some point drew the attention of a polygamous cult leader named Silas. Those are both presumably still in her future as I watch this episode. I didn’t get to know Callie at all; she barely appeared in the finale, and from what I understand her actress had left the series a year or two before.
Previously On
Eliza and a man are engaged. Jim and Diane have a destination wedding in India, where somebody else has a job offer. Corey isn’t allowed to go to the wedding. Eliza’s fiancée is named Brandon. There’s a gay couple, one of whom turns out not to be gay, disappointing the other. At this point it gets too rapid-fire and I lose track. Another girl still has feelings for Brandon.
Recap
A girl knocks on the door to an apartment in some sort of college dorm. She asks the boy who answers if Jesus (the common Spanish first name) is there.
Another girl knocks on another door and asks the boy who answers that door if he’s still up for “that drink together”. When she comes in there’s an awkward moment, because there’s already a girl in his room, whom I think I recognize as Mariana.
Opening credits.
The two girls in the awkward situation are, in fact, Callie and Mariana. Mariana gets a text message on her phone: Emma is here looking for Jesus. This is shocking for some reason, so Callie shows up at Brandon’s door to keep Emma distracted. She mentions somebody else named Jude. Too many names too quickly, I’m totally lost.
Elsewhere, a couple are in bed after sex. Captions identify the girl as Jayden. There’s a knock on the door: it’s Mariana, so the boy is probably Jesus. Mariana warns the boy that Emma’s here, and gives him an I-told-you-so for cheating on Emma, though she acknowledges that the two have technically broken up. She advises Jesus not to tell Emma what just happened.
Okay, so Emma is the somewhat-redheaded one from the opening scene who wants to know where Jesus is. And she’s also the one taking the job in India. She wants to tell Jesus that taking the job doesn’t mean she doesn’t care about him: he’s her soulmate.
They hug, but Jesus is troubled at what he’s just done behind her back.
The guy whose room this all takes place in, the room that Callie knocked on in the opening, belongs to Brandon from the Previously, and his wedding is in a few hours. And this isn’t an overly fancy college dorm, it’s the resort at which the wedding is taking place. And the resort is not in India.
Callie gives Brandon relationship advice: he did something to hurt his fiancée Eliza, and needs to talk to her because he loves her.
Brandon and Callie hug – and there’s another redheaded girl outside the patio door. She’s brokenhearted. “Why didn’t you tell me about her? Do you still love her?” she asks, possibly talking about Callie but I’m not sure. “Are you having doubts?” – okay, this is Eliza. “Are we still getting married?” she asks twice. Brandon is unable to answer, and Eliza flees.
Two women are sitting on the beach. They express disbelief that Brandon is getting married, unaware that it might no longer be happening. I think they raised him. They discuss selling their house, but one of them is running for the State Assembly and this will complicate matters.
They then run naked into the ocean and make out, so it seems they’re a couple; the Foster family isn’t a Full House/Fuller House situation. While they’re in the ocean, somebody clears their towels from the beach.
In another room in the resort are the two boys from the failed-attempt-at-a-gay-couple, lying in different beds. One of them gets a text and leaves; somebody sinister watches him go.
The two women sneak back into the resort, using leaves to cover their modesty. They take used towels out of the towel-return bin and call the front desk from the poolside phone, but they’ll need to go to the front desk in person to get the key.
Callie and Mariana have returned to their room, and while in bed bicker over how they breathe when they’re asleep. Callie asks Mariana if she was planning on hooking up with Jamie, but she wouldn’t “do that to [Callie]”. Callie denies being interested in Jamie. So does Mariana; she wanted to hook up with Mat.
Ohhhhhhh. Callie is the one who Brandon hooked up with, and about which Eliza is upset. Callie asks Mariana if she’s the one that revealed that relationship to Eliza, because obviously it wasn’t either of them and Mariana is the only other person who knew. Mariana is insulted by the accusation and storms off.
Meanwhile, the two women are in the lobby getting their key when Sinister Guy and his SO show up on their way to the gym. The women try to pretend they weren’t having sex in the ocean but their efforts are clumsy and obvious.
A boy is sitting at the end of a pier. His (I assume) father shows up to meet him.
Ah, this is Brandon, I didn’t recognize him. He’s afraid to marry Eliza: He doesn’t know if she supports him enough, and if he’ll be able to do what he wants to do after they get married. What if her parents force him to get a job?
His father gives him advice: You need to stand up for yourself and stand up to her. And the only way you can get married is if you choose yourself over your fiancée.
Brandon talks to Eliza, and they go talk to Eliza’s parents (Sinister Guy+SO). Aha: it turns out they’re giving the couple a condo, and he doesn’t want to feel like there’s a ticking clock over his head to succeed in his career. He signed something – some sort of prenup? – but not happily. And Eliza does support Brandon against her parents’ pressures, and insists on changing everything about the wedding at the last minute: where in the resort the wedding will be, what dresses the bridesmaids will wear, etc. After which Eliza also tears up the prenup.
So Eliza knew nothing about his history with Callie. This is what she was upset about. Or he was upset about. Or something. I am very lost.
The characters meet at the beach for the wedding, and there’s a fade out. I originally think it’s some bizarre preview for the next episode (which makes no sense, as there is no next episode), but it turns out to be a series of flashbacks like the end of Good Trouble had: it shows the history of Callie and Brandon. Callie was adopted into Brandon’s family, becoming his sister, which is part of the reason they aren’t together anymore.
Back to the wedding. One of Brandon’s mothers gives a speech about love, overlaid on flashbacks between the two women, who I learn are named Lena and Stef. They got married. One of them got shot. One of them had an affair.
Back to the wedding. Lena’s speech continues, overlaid on flashbacks about the history of the Adams foster family. This is, I assume, intended to be nostalgic for longtime viewers but as the third set of flashbacks in as many minutes it’s a bit tedious and generic for a new viewer like me who doesn’t get anything out of it.
After the wedding, during the meal, Callie apologizes to Mariana for suspecting her: turns out Eliza had overheard Callie and Brandon talking, which was how she found out about their relationship. So the relationship actually was part of why Eliza was mad? But we didn’t see Brandon and Eliza resolve it at all.
Mariana goes after Mat – but he’s already with someone else.
Back to the failed-attempt-at-a-gay couple. One tells the other that they can’t be together. Based on the conversation it’s clear that I misunderstood the Previously: they both are gay, but one of them – Carter, Eliza’s brother, both children of Sinister Guy – can’t enter into the relationship because Sinister Guy won’t accept him being gay. (Which is weird, given the parents of Sinister Guy’s son-in-law.)
The girl who was in bed with Jesus, and whose name I can’t remember, confronts him about his cheating and breaks up with him. Moments later Emma does exactly the same thing, even though neither she nor Jesus wants to break up. “We need to figure out who we are without each other,” she says. “And if we find each other again, we’re meant to be together.”
Elsewhere at the meal, the new in-laws are talking. Lena says she’s decided not to run, but Eliza’s parents (who are Republicans) offer her to meet some Democratic donors that they know if she changes her mind.
Callie gets an email on her phone: she got accepted to a clerkship with Judge Engleman, so she’ll be moving to San Francisco. Wait, what? In Good Trouble she lives in LA.
Ah, she’s been offered two clerkships: one with Judge Englemen, a progressive in San Francisco, and one with a conservative judge in LA. The guy she’s in love with recommends she take the LA clerkship, because he lives in LA. So I already know how that decision comes out.
After the wedding everyone in the Adams foster family (except I assume Brandon) comes home. Mariana and Jesus decide to take a trip to Europe together.
They find Cole sleeping in the house. Cole is the kid whose mother refused in the Previously to allow him to fly out of the country for the wedding. While they were gone, he saw his mother, who wants him back; he doesn’t know if he should go back to her or stay here. He’s confused.
That night, another kid – I’ve lost track of who is who – confesses to Lena and Stef that he’s failing two classes and maybe isn’t ready to go out on his own like the other kids are doing. He was afraid to tell them because they have enough on their plate.
Captions identify him as Jude, who I think has been mentioned once or twice so far but hasn’t been important.
It’s the next day. Cole is meeting his mother, Angela. She is promising that this time things will be different, that he will come first, that she loves him. Stef and Lena watch from the window, worried – they don’t want to give Cole up, but they don’t interfere. He accepts, and comes in to break the news; they promise they’ll still be part of his life if he wants them to be, which he does.
The family is sitting around the table at dinner. Cole - whose name is suddenly Corey? - has returned to his mother. Callie has taken the job in LA, to be close to Brandon. But oh no, Mariana took a job in Silicon Valley to be close to Callie’s clerkship in San Francisco! That’s okay, Mariana conveniently also has a job offer in LA that she can take instead.
Lena decides not to run for the State Assembly. But the kids all object and convince her to change her mind, even if it means selling the house (the connection between the two isn’t clear to me).
Denouement: Brandon and Callie talk about having chosen the good of the family over each other. Lena and Stef talk about leaving “Frankie’s tree” behind. They walk back into the house, which has been stripped bare of possessions for the move. There’s a Sold sign out front beside an ad for Lena’s campaign. The family takes one last photo in front of the house and hugs each other goodbye.
Unresolved questions
Will Mariana and Callie be okay, striking out on their own for the first time?
Will Cole (Corey?)’s mother treat him well this time?
Will Lena win the election?
Will Carter and Other Kid be together in the end?
Will Emma and Jesus be together in the end?
How will Eliza’s parents’ relationship with the young couple pan out?
Ratings
Story: 5/10. I’m going to draw a direct contrast between this finale and the finale of its sequel series. In my review of Good Trouble, I praised the way the show advanced each plotline to a conclusion; in contrast, The Fosters merely showed us each subplot’s conclusion.
Part of this, of course, is because of the longer runtime of the Good Trouble finale. But part of it is just having a better story. There wasn’t much of a plot in this episode, in the sense of “a series of events that happen one after the other”. Rather, the episode took the form of going down the list of characters’ romantic entanglements and resolving them one by one (more often than not with a cruel pair of scissors).
But I’m scoring this generously because I’m sure I missed some things – in particular with Callie and Brandon, who were each involved in multiple storylines. Overall, however, I was a bit disappointed.
Writing: 4/10. I rarely watch shows that are entirely based on many-sided love-polygons, so it’s difficult for me to assess the quality of this one versus others of the genre. Very little stood out as particularly good or particularly bad, but the writing just wasn’t that great. The contrived coincidence that led to Eliza’s parents meeting Brandon’s parents in towels was just silly; the wedding speeches were trite and tedious.
There are two other things that I want to address in depth: the undercurrent of politics and the bad relationship advice.
Let’s start with the politics. In my review of Good Trouble I briefly mentioned the oddity of the characters discussing whether anybody would remember them making a difference, even though all of the plotlines save one were about their personal lives. The Fosters does something very similar, in the discussion of which clerkship Callie should take and the political tinge that accompanied each scene with Eliza’s parents. The show wears its politics on its sleeve in a way that’s unusual for small-scale dramas.
My guess is that, when they’re not busy trying to wrap up the series, a big part of both shows – perhaps even their primary purpose – is to use the setting of a racially diverse foster home (and later apartment building) as a vehicle through which the writers can express progressive values, much like the original Star Trek used a spaceship to do so with liberal values.
But Star Trek’s plots were on the galactic scale; fitting politics into the lives of a small family seems like it would be more difficult to pull off. Although “very special episodes” are a thing, it feels like The Fosters weaved the concept into the basic fabric of the series.
That said, I’ve only watched the finales of both shows, in which providing closure is of dominant concern. So I’m really just extrapolating, guessing at what the rest of the series was like. My guess could be completely wrong - so I’m not factoring it into the score, for good or for ill.
What I am factoring in, however, is the bad relationship advice. There are two such cases: Brandon’s father telling him to stand up to his fiancée, and Emma and Jesus breaking up to “figure out who they are without each other”. Let’s take these in order.
In the Brandon and Eliza situation, we need to establish some ground first. I had to rewatch the scenes before writing this, because the first time around I didn’t understand one bit what had happened. And I’m still not sure I understand, because the Eliza/Brandon resolution took place off screen (a massive cop-out)!
But I think it went like this: at some point prior to this episode, Eliza overheard Brandon and Callie talking about their relationship, then in this episode she sees them hugging. She asks him about it, and he can’t even tell her outright that he still wants to marry her, on the morning of the wedding. Eliza believes that it’s because he’s torn between her and Callie, but the real reason turns out to be his fear that 1) his in-laws have too much control over them, and 2) his fiancée won’t support him against her parents. He is so afraid of bringing that up that he’d rather let Eliza think he loves another woman!
And then he sits with his dad and tells him nothing about why Eliza is upset, but rather what his own misgivings are. Which, fair, his own misgivings need to be resolved before he can go back to Eliza – but it means his dad can’t smack him upside the head and tell him how important it is that your fiancée not mistakenly believe you’re cheating on her.
But this isn’t a complaint about Brandon being an idiot; teenagers and young adults are frequently idiots. No, the complaint is about the terrible advice his dad gives him: You can’t get married unless you choose yourself.
No, Brandon’s Dad! That’s the opposite of how relationships work. Relationships are built on compromise. You need to learn, often for the first time in your life, to choose the other person over yourself. Not all the time, of course! Ideally the give and take is as close to 50/50 (by whatever measure you choose to look at it) as you can get it. But to give “choose yourself” as blanket advice is just putting Brandon on a direct road to divorce.
Worse, that’s not actually Brandon’s problem. Brandon’s problem is lack of communication. He clearly never actually sat Eliza down and talked to her about his worries vis a vis her parents. A good marriage – any good relationship – requires that you be comfortable, open, and honest with your spouse.
“So what?” you might say. “Brandon had to talk to her to choose himself, didn’t he? Isn’t that exactly what his father recommended that he do?”
Not necessarily. Brandon could easily declare his position by fiat and damn what Eliza thinks of the matter. God knows there are enough toxic relationships out there where one spouse always gives in to the other and gets nothing in return; I don’t know Eliza well enough to know if she would leave Brandon were he to treat her abusively. Lucky for them both, then, that he made the right choice: talking it out with Eliza, and discovering that she’s on (or willing to take) his side after all. But the connection between that decision and the advice he got from his father is orthogonal at best.
And ultimately The Fosters does its viewers a disservice by including the bad advice scene but cutting the actual resolution out of the episode. We don’t see whether Eliza had been on Brandon’s side all along or whether she needed convincing; if she needed convincing, we don’t see whether Brandon too had to compromise on something. In short, we don’t see the actually important part of relationship-building. And worse, we don’t see how Brandon addressees Eliza’s concerns over his relationship with Callie.
(Caveat: It occurs to me that, if Brandon was raised in the Adams foster family, he wasn’t raised by his father. Which raises the question of what his father did that made him lose custody. For all I know, his father regularly shows up throughout the series to give him bad advice, and the lesson Brandon has learned is to always do the opposite of what his father recommends. In which case, this episode did a great job, and it’s only my not knowing the context that makes me think otherwise.)
A lot simpler – and dumber – is the decision made by Emma, against Jesus’s and her own wishes, to break up with him. Because they need to “figure out who they are without each other”.
This is, sadly, not an uncommon idea. And it is incredibly stupid. To see why, let’s return to the series finale of The Crown, where old Elizabeth is considering abdication. She asks young Elizabeth, “What about the woman I put aside? The life I put aside?” And her younger self responds: “There’s only been one Elizabeth, Queen Elizabeth, for years. Elizabeth Windsor is long gone.”
If Jesus and Emma spend their entire lives together, then who they are with each other is who they are. There would be no Jesus-without-Emma, there would be no Emma-without-Jesus, just as there is no Elizabeth-who-isn’t-the-Queen. Asking about the alternatives (what if I were born in the 16th century, or born to Kim Jung Il, or born on the planet Flargenesh?) can be a fun intellectual exercise, but it’s a terrible principle upon which to make life decisions.
Let us assume, for example, that Emma discovers that she doesn’t like who she is without Jesus, and that she wants to return to him. What if they can’t find each other again? What if Jesus, in the meantime, has settled into a new life that doesn’t have room for her? What if either he or she has been changed by their experiences sufficiently that they no longer fit together? (There is significant sociological evidence that earlier marriages are usually healthier and more successful than later ones, partly because the spouses mold each other to fit well together while they’re still moldable, rather than coming in with ossified behaviors and expectations of what the relationship should be like.) The idea that you should throw away your happiness because you’re sure it’ll come back “if we’re meant to be together” is insane. Most sticks aren’t boomerangs; most sticks are sticks.
The alternative, that Emma does like who she is without Jesus, is also not ideal. She had been happy with him, after all. Throwing that away because maybe the new path will be better – well, there aren’t centiunits and kilounits of happiness. She can’t actually take both paths and compare them with one another. At every step on her new path she’ll find herself asking, maybe the path with Jesus would have been better?
Yes, she’d be having those thoughts even if she stayed with Jesus. She’s human, and humans naturally wonder about the path not taken. But to deliberately not take a path you know is good? That’s a recipe for living a life of regret.
Production: 7/10. Good acting for the most part; I want to single out Eliza, Emma, and Carter for praise in this regard. Some bad directorial choices; the scene where Eliza and Brandon confront her parents has very weird pacing, almost like somebody accidentally cut out the pause between each line of dialogue. The set design was very good, especially the way they showed the house devoid of possessions at the end.
Characterization: 2/10. A bit harsh, I know, but I don’t feel like I learned anything about any of the characters.
Clarity: 4/10. I understood most of the plot, other than the connection between the political campaign and selling the house. But I was far more confused by the characters. I learned most of their names, sure. But I don’t feel like I have a complete list in my head of which characters are Adams foster children and which are friends of theirs. And I get the feeling that I merged several characters (thinking two different people were the same person) and split others (thinking that the same person in two different scenes was two different people). There were at least a few whose names were never mentioned across the whole episode. And even after rewatching the relevant scenes, I don’t have a clue where I got the idea that Corey’s name was Cole.
And the sheer number of relationships that everybody is in! There were at least two per character and I can’t name half of them. Everyone on screen should just start a polyamorous commune and be done with it.
Closure: 7/10. It’s weird to refer to a lot of couples breaking up as “closure”, but if the show was all about their relationships, that’s one way to do it. The show made clear that it considered the house itself to be a character, and provided important closure there (though it would’ve been nice to have a scene where they talk to the new owner about what the house means to them).
I do have a bit of trouble, since I still can’t keep all the characters straight, figuring out which ones did and did not get resolutions in the end. I know there are at least one or two who didn’t.
Do I want to watch the series now?
I’m interested in seeing one or two representative episodes (feel free to send me suggestions) to get a sense of how the show interweaves its political views with these characters’ lives. But overall there’s too much teen relationship drama, which just doesn’t interest me.