SEASON 5 EXPLANATIONS
Welcome to the latest round of explanations. Yet another season has passed by and it´s time to let you know why I chose to write things the way I did. To make it a little different this time, I´m gonna use something similar to the same kind of format I did in the season 1 explanations, just more expanded than I did them then. As always, thanks to you loyal readers, you are the best! The series is only a little over 500 views from reaching 25.000 views, way more than I ever thought a series of mine would reach!
Episode 1 (which was named after an at the time deeply misunderstood Stone Temple Pilots song, that some people actually thought was pro-rape, when it was the complete opposite in fact)
Main Subjects: Sexual Maturity. Trying to fit in at a new school.
Reasoning behind the episode: I felt like Darcy had been written as too much of a prude in the last seasons and I wanted to show that she has an adventurous side too to her. Unfortunately this time, she ended up in a bad situation, but one she learned a valuable lesson from all the same. That although a few years might not seem like all that much, when you´re her and Drew´s age, it often ends up feeling like a lot more than that, because you´re not on the same maturity level yet.
The other part of the episode was all about getting Gracie and Jenna introduced as characters and expanding on Alli and Clare as characters, with it then being weaved into the Darcy storyline thanks to Alli getting involved thanks to Gracie. One of the big things I wanted to show this season is how close Gracie and Drew are and this was the beginning of that.
Episode 2 and 3 (named after Nirvana´s mega hit from 1991, that changed rock music forever and Kurt Cobain had no idea that he had accidentally named after a deodorant mainly for teenage girls, until someone told him months after the song was released. He found it very funny.)
Subject: Playing in a band. Having a crush on someone of your own gender, who probably doesn´t have the same sexuality as you do.
Reasoning: It was time to start building Gracie and Jenna as characters too, along with introducing one of my favorite characters in the later seasons, my man Mo. Thinking back to the days of WhisperHug and what is perhaps my favorite scene in all of Degrassi (Imogen´s incredibly funny audition for the band), it only made sense to have her in there and this way with it having three WhisperHug members in the band, it´s got some of the same feeling to it without being exactly the same. I just added the one student that attended Degrassi at that time, that it would perhaps have made most sense to join the band, Jenna. Why she never played in a band in the series, when it was such an obvious thing for her to try, was one of those things that didn´t make much sense to me. Getting it out there that Gracie prefers girls was another important thing I wanted to achieve and her crush on sweet little trailer park girl Jenna here felt like a good way to do that.
The Trailer Park bit to Jenna´s character is an homage to my second favorite Canadian series "Trailer Park Boys" and in particular the late John Dunsworth (that played Jim Lahey in the series), who was one of the greatest overlooked actors there ever has been and an amazing man in his private life on top of it.
I spent many years playing in bands too and the singer Marisol was based on in this one was an actual girl that the drummer in one of my first bands had developed a huge crush on. He convinced us to ler her join the band in the hopes that she would fall for him in the process. Let´s just say that singing was far from this girl´s strong suit, but man did she love every second of it! So much in fact, that none of us had the heart to tell her how bad she was, since she clearly herself thought that she was the next Mariah Carey (and she was really sweet and as nice as they come to begin with). Thankfully, we broke up the band before we played our first gig, but that handful of rehearsals were ... let´s just call them memorable! No money was exchanged in real life, although it perhaps should have been and it didn´t work for our poor drummer, who sadly for him never became more than friends with her.
Episode 4 and 5 (named after what would sadly be the last big hit that the band Alice in Chains (a name that was a refence to Bondage sex) would have before the sad and far too untimely death of their lead singer Layne Staley from a heroin overdose at the age of 34).
Subjects: Accepted and in-grown racism in particular in North American school sports. Being gay and an athlete. Dealing with finding out that your friend is gay.
Reasoning: I´ve been an NFL fan since the mid 90´s and have followed the league pretty closely for the past twenty years, in no short order thanks to me being a rather big Indianapolis Colts fan. In all those years, I don´t think I could come up with the names of five white players, who have been a starting running back for an NFL team. Now try guessing how many African American kickers, I´ve seen in that time playing for an NFL team. The answer is none, not a single one! Quite a coincidence, huh? The worst part is that it starts at a high school level with coaches, who have been so accustomed to believing in this sorting of players by race, that it´s become what is in reality accepted racism at the highest level.
I wanted to involve The Shep (who was Degrassi´s Football coach and principal for a short while, for those of you who might not remember or haven´t seen that far ahead in the series), because the guy who played him was actually very good at playing as unlikeable, as he was meant to be by the writers. His very racist line "I´d sooner put a jew in at quarterback" was also a small joke on how little The Shep must have known about football, since two out of the five best quarterbacks in the NFL over the past fifteen years are Jews, that being Aaron Rodgers from the Green Bay Packers and Ben Roethlisberger from the Pittsburg Steelers.
The other part of the episode focused on getting Riley introduced as a character and starting up his friendship with Drew, that already goes well above just being member of the same team, who hang out sometimes. Drew in season four I didn´t really know what to do with yet, I´ll be the first to confess. But the way I´ve gotten him built up more this season thanks to his close friendships with his sister and Riley, who are both homosexual characters, has in my own opinion helped a lot with making him a much more likable character compared to what he was before the season began.
Episode 7 (Named after a song by the band Hole from their album "Celebrity Skin")
Subjects: Preconceived opinions and how others might see things differently when looking with a set of fresh eyes. Feeling like a fish out of water.
Reasoning: I knew from the start of the season, that Imogen was going to find love, before the season was over. I´ve mentioned it before I´m sure, but she was one of my absolute favorite characters in the Degrassi Universe and is without a doubt one of my favorite characters to write as well. Enter Fiona, straight from New York and with a world of emotional baggage brought with her to her new school. I mentioned earlier that Drew was the character I didn´t know what to do with in season four and that was for a large part true for Holly J in this season, but she did at least get a pretty good storyline here, I thought. The ending of the episode then began to set the stage for the romance between Imogen and Fiona, that was to come later, once they´d had some time to bond as friends first and it served as a nice little moment for Fiona and Bianca to get their friendship started on top of it, with a scene that was meant to be slightly reminiscent of the cool little pep talk that Bianca gave to Cam in the real DNG without copying it, of course.
Episodes 8 and 9 (Named after a Pearl Jam hit, that was about what a slightly crazy homeless person´s life is like)
Subjects: Getting your start in the job market and making a new friend in the process. Learning the unwritten rules of the job market.
Reasoning: Getting your start in the job market when you have nothing on your CV yet and no recommendations to show to potential employers isn´t as easy thing. I applied for lots of jobs, before I finally found my first "Adult Job", that I lasted all of three weeks in, before I got fired. Not that I cried too hard over it, since it was a sucky and underpaid job, but I wanted one of the characters to try something similar to it and that became Manny, who needed a way to move into adult life the right way.
A lot of the inspiration for the story comes from another story from my own life, that goes back around five years or so. Basically there was a girl from Slovakia that I worked with, who was around ten years younger than me at the time and quite pretty on top if it, that I started to become friends with, in great part thanks to her being very easy to talk to and us taking the same buses and trains to and from work every day and having plenty of time to pass on the way. Us starting to become friends also had a downside unfortunately, since rumors quickly started flying around the place we worked at, that we were doing "Other Things" outside of work on a daily basis, none of which were true and we had to stop talking while we were at work for a good while, before the rumors started dying down again. I haven´t seen her in a long time, but I´m sure it´s not something she remembers any more fondly, than I do. It also showed me how incredibly fast that a rumor like that can be seen as fact by the people you work with, even if it doesn´t have any basis in the truth at all. Bowling for Soup were spot on with their song title "High School Never Ends", because in many ways, it really doesn´t!
Of course it was also about getting the Jay and Manny friendship storyline started, that so far has only just begun and will continue from the beginning of the next season.
Cyrus and Sarah were both very loosely based on a pair of Trailer Park Boys characters of the same names and ended up serving their roles in advancing the storyline pretty well, I thought. There is a bit of irony to what Cyrus did too, but what it is won´t be revealed for a good while to come and I´m not going to give away any spoilers here.
Episodes 10 and 11 (named after one of the most self aware break up songs of all time from the band Stone Temple Pilots, that lead singer Scott Weiland wrote after his wife had left him for good)
Subjects: Falling in love with someone, you shouldn´t have, but not being able to fight it (both episodes). Getting to know a person with Asperger´s Syndrome (only part 1). Being unaware that you´re about to get dumped and being a friend of someone it´s about to happen to and knowing it´s going to happen, when they themselves don´t (only part 2). Wanting your friend to do the right thing (only part 2).
Reasoning: I felt like I wanted to do some longer serialized stories than just a two episode story here and there in the season as well and this was the first one of them, that essentially ran over the course of four episodes, these two and the next two. I hadn´t really done much of anything with Peter, Jane and Mia this season and it felt to me like they´d kind of become stuck in their roles, with very little advancement to them over the past few seasons and in great part I came up with these episodes simply to "Shake Things Up", which would then in turn lead to new storyline possibilities for them down the line, that otherwise wouldn´t be possible to do with them.
Mia and Peter had been a pretty good couple and no doubt important in each other´s development as characters in this series, but their relationship had started to grow stale from a writer´s standpoint and it was when coming up for ideas for the episode, that it occurred to me that both Sav and Mia came from Lakehurst, before coming to Degrassi, which was a way to get things started between them. I also felt like Mia had been written as being too perfect lately, compared to how she was in the OG DNG (where I think we call all agree, that she made her share of major mistakes), so having her fall for the lovable Sav was a way to get her back on track in that respect as well.
Having Darcy to use as a way to get them talking gave her a little something to do as well in a season, where she´s otherwise been a little lost in the shuffle of all of the new characters, that I wanted to get established as well.
The nickname "Dead Tooth" that Mia used about one of the teachers at Lakehurst was taken from the character Maureen Prescott from "It´s Always Sunny in Philadelphia", who is quite attractive, but has a dead tooth that gives her terrible breath.
Episode 12 (Named after one of the best kick-ass girl rock songs of all time, L7´s 1992 classic "Pretend We´re Dead" that´s since then has also become famous for all of the many video games it´s been used in).
Subjects: Surviving a boring workday, forgiveness.
Reasoning: I´ve done a few tributes here and there, often after I´ve seen the movie in question. That´s how the Manny "Back to the Future" story came to be and it´s the same for this one, that was loosely based on the movie Clerks from 1994 with a few Easter eggs thrown in for good measure. Jane was in this more more or less based on Dante while Peter was based on Randall, the two main characters in the movie.
Here are all of the "Tribute Parts" in the episode:
1 - The main character, Dante in the movie and Jane is this episode, gets awakened by a phone call from their boss and told that they have to go to work after a wild night out, despite it being their day off.
2 - The title cards. Here I used terms from Ancient Greek Drama as an alternative to the ones, that they used in the movie.
3 - The shutters that can´t be opened and a character writing "I assure you, we´re open!" on them. In the movie this was done by Kevin Smith as a way to hide, that almost the entire movie was shot at night (in the store where we worked at the time as well), when most of the story was supposed to take place during the day. Here it became a great excuse not to have too many customers come in.
4 - Both Dante and Jane exclaim "I wasn´t even supposed to be here today!" several times and there´s several others of their lines, that are very similar to one another.
5 - An elderly person coming in and asks if they can use the restroom and the main character can´t help liking them in both stories.
6 - A character sings a song, in this episode it´s Peter, who sings his anti-Mia song. In the original, it´s the character Olaf, a Russian who´s moved to the US to become a Heavy Metal singer, that serenades a girl with his amazing song: "Berserker", to which the lyrics go:
My love for you is like a truck, Berserker!
Would you like some making f*ck, Berserker?
The girl´s response line "Did he just say "Making F*ck?" is what kills it though!
7 - 37. In the movie, Dante freaks out after he finds out that his girlfriend Veronica has given blowjobs to 37 different guys, including himself and his inability to mentally deal with it ends up leading to him cheating on her. I pretty much copied that storyline here, only doing in gender swapped with it being Jane, who freaked out over finding out that Johnny had gone down on a whole lot of girls, before they started dating.
8 - Both stories play out over the course of one Saturday workday, beginning with the main character waking up and ending with them getting off work.
Episode 13 (Named after a Pearl Jam song from their album "Vs", that was the fastest selling album in the US of all time, when it came out in 1993)
Subjects: Feeling guilt. Making a big decision regarding your love life.
Reasoning: Chantay hadn´t had a story focused on her since the beginning of the season and I wanted to show that despite her being the school´s biggest gossip girl or one of them at least, she can still put it aside when it´s friends of hers that are involved. With these characters graduating soon as well, I felt like I wanted to make sure that they got at least one more big storyline, where all of them were involved somehow and playing their own little parts in a bigger puzzle coming together.
I had originally planned to do more with Johnny and Jane and at one point considered having him transfer to Degrassi, so that he could be more in the thick of things, but in retrospect, there were more than enough characters in the series already, so I made the right call in not doing it, I think. There were a few planned storylines with them, that I started writing, but never finished, including one where they were going to break up thanks to him not getting along with her friends. I still could include one more story with them in the next season though, it´s not unthinkable.
Episode 14 (named after one of the most famous Grunge songs, Alice in Chains´ tribute to their friend, the late, great Andrew Wood, without whom the entire Grunge explosion most likely never would have happened)
Subjects: Trying to impress someone you have a crush on by lying, to make yourself come off better to them. Dealing with having your first real crush on someone.
Reasoning: I hadn´t done much with KC at this point, in spite of him being one of those, who has one of the most interesting back stories in the Degrassi universe. Him and Jenna in DNG were pretty much drawn to one another instantly and I wanted them to be the same way here. With music and playing the guitar being one of the major parts of Jenna´s character (and one of the things I have a ton of expertise on) it made for a very easy to write episode, once I figured out how it was going to play out. I also liked the cute little friendship storylines with Gracie and Connor that were worked in a lot.
The song "Outdoor Type" by The Lemonheads, that´s about a guy who has lied himself into dating a very active outdoorsy type girl, when he himself is more of a lazy couch potato, who´s always avoided the outdoor life and now is starting to feel bad for having lied to her all the time they´ve been dating and is too scared of losing her to tell her that he´s made her believe that he´s something he´s not, that played a central role in the episode, was another big part of the inspiration for the story.
Episode 15 and 16 (Named after a song, that despite it not being one of their biggest songs, is still arguably my favorite Smashing Pumpkins song and one, we used to play a cover of in one of my old bands back in the day)
Subjects: Worrying over your sweet Sixteen party. Having to keep up appearances. Feeling kinship with someone new.
Reasoning: Again a movie played a big part in the creation of an episode and in this case there was one particular movie scene that came to mind for me, that was what got the ball rolling on this entire story. It´s from a Swedish lesbian teen comedy/drama from 1997 named "Show Me Love" in it´s English release, named after the Robyn song, that plays over the end credits. Basically a lot of the characters in these episodes took over the same kind of roles they had in that movie, or at least with the same kind of purpose to them. Many of them were gender swapped though, as you´ll see. I won´t name all of them, because this entry will be long enough as it is, but these are the main ones:
Katie played the equivalent to Agnes - a shy and lonely girl with only one friend, who´s about to turn 16, has a crush on another girl named Elin and feels unwanted in her new town.
Riley played the equivalent to Elin - a popular girl, who´s confused over who she is and is just like Agnes bored with small town life. Wants to be free spirited but also feels obligated to go out with the boys that her friends see as being cool, despite having no sexual interest in them.
Dallas played the equivalent to Jessica - Elin´s sister, who has become an expert on what it takes to stay popular.
Drew played the equivalent to Marcus - Jessica´s boyfriend, who´s a realist to the core and always says things as they are.
One of the two main characters of the movie is a girl named Agnes, who´s about to turn 16 in a small town, her family has recently moved to and she so far has only made one friend in, a rather judgmental girl in a wheelchair, that she has nothing in common with and who she´s only friends with because it beats being lonely all the time and this other girl doesn´t have any friends there either. Unfortunately for Agnes, she has a mom, who wants to make a big deal out of her daughter´s 16th birthday party, which Agnes would rather just forget about, since she knows that none of her new school mates will come.
Forced to by her mom however, she throws a birthday party where at first no one shows up and the only ones there are poor Agnes, the friend, she doesn´t really like, her parents and her little brother. In a great twist of fate for Agnes though, her terrible birthday leads to her becoming friends with the sweet and same minded, but also much more popular girl Elin, that she has a big crush on. That situation however has to be the nightmare scenario for many teenagers around the Western world, who are as friendless as Agnes is in the movie, or in this episode Katie is, to have practically no one show up for your big birthday.
Dallas´ role in the episode was also inspired by a character from the movie, that being Elin´s sister Jessica, who´s the more level headed of the two and tries to help Elin as best as she can, although without the knowledge, that Elin is in reality gay.
Seeing the kinship between Agnes and Katie made me think of how to do a story, that both paid tribute to the original movie and also did it without copying it, of course. I had originally planned to do a story like it with Marco in Elin/Riley´s role and an OC as Katie/Agnes way back in season 2, but I had so much material for that season already, that there wasn´t room for it. I´m glad that I waited, all things considered and it turned out to be really good way of growing both Katie and Riley´s characters going forward, I thought.
Most of the second half of the double episode I then used to set up the Dallas/Bianca storyline that would play out for the rest of the season, with it also serving as a nice way to introduce Maya as well and getting the ball slowly rolling for Imogen and Fiona.
Episode 17 and 18 (named after the Radiohead song, that got them known in the mainstream and that they ended up hating thanks to it getting them called a British Seattle knock-off. They made all of those critics eat their words later though, that´s safe to say!)
Subjects: How much is too much, before it isn´t worth it anymore? Having fears over an internet rumor involving yourself.
Reasoning: Dallas was the last one of the main characters in the storyline, that ran back to episode 15 not to have a story from his standpoint and it played well into his character at this point, that he still (in spite of what he himself believes) is rather immature when it comes to love and sees things solely from an "I Want" standpoint, without factoring what his actions will do to others into his equations. This episode taught him a big lesson in that regard and getting a girl like Bianca into his life, who won´t accept anything less than a 50/50 relationship is the best thing, that can happen to him.
The other story in it was classic Alli, with her boy craziness leading to her getting herself involved over her head and also classic Drew with him screwing up with a girl and then trying to fix it with her. I haven´t done much with them so far, but they are a cute couple, am I right?
Episode 19 (Named after a song by the one hit wonder band The Screaming Trees, that was on one of the only movie soundtracks I ever bought on CD, the soundtrack to the movie "Singles", that featured a who´s who of musicians from Seattle and other famous Grunge bands)
Subjects: Not wanting to upset your girlfriend. Jealousy. Having a minority complex over feeling less attractive than another. Going on a bad date. How appearances can be deceiving.
Reasoning: Coming towards the end of the season it occurred to me how little I´d done with Anya and Holly J, who had both been MIA for most of the season. I think we´ve all tried what it´s like to meet someone, who comes off as perfect and then turns out to be the opposite, when you get down to it and the opposite way around, where you get a less than perfect first impression of someone, who then turns out to be great. That was more or less what Holly J´s story was about here and the dating auction, although something I would never have signed up for, was a fun part of the Degrassi universe to play around with. I could see though how something like that could go very wrong in real life!
The other part with Jenna was based on a story about on a girl I knew pretty well back in my own teenage years. She started dating a guy in high school, who she thought was out of her league looks wise, but where it should have been great for her, she in stead became obsessed with trying to keep another girl, who liked the same guy and who she thought as being more attractive than herself, away from him. Predictably it lead to him breaking up with her and where as I didn´t want it to go that bad for Jenna here, I still stuck to more or less the same story. As far as I know, no actual spying happened in real life though!
Episode 20 and 21 (Named after one of the best songs of the Grunge era from one of the best bands, Soundgarden)
Subjects: Finding out something terrible and having to deal with it. Sibling love. Worrying over someone. Being in a toxic relationship. Having the courage to ask for help. Being true to yourself about who you are. Accepting your situation.
Reasoning: In the OG DNG, one of the more memorable storylines was Spinner´s Cancer storyline and I´ve wanted to find a way of replicating that without copying it. For the longest time, I´ve been thinking about how to do it and sadly it became Olivia Newton-John´s death that eventually became what sparked my creativity. Once i did, they became some of the fastest written episodes of the season, even though I had to do some research about breast Cancer on Wikipedia, before I could get started. It´s important to me that while the story is fiction, it´s fiction that´s based on real world and therefore facts like how an examination for breast Cancer is conducted, has to be presented realistically compared to how it in reality would happen. It´s of course not common for girls who are Bianca´s age to get it, but it does sadly happen now and again. Her storyline in these were mostly about dealing with the fear of what having Cancer will mean for her life going forward, as it probably would to most people in a situation like that.
Fiona´s storyline however was all about building up her character more along with her relationship with Imogen. Getting Declan introduced will open up for some interesting stories as well, that´s for certain. I already like what I´ve done with her so far, even if I´ve barely scratched the surface with her yet.
Episode 22 (Named after the hard hitting album closer about Cocaine addiction from Alice in Chains´ first album "Facelift", that I also used for a montage in season 4)
Subjects: Wanting to come off better to your old friends. Wanting to help your child. Having a job that you don´t like.
Reasoning: This is again one of those things, most of us have experienced from either one side or the other, either being the one who returns from college for the holidays and wanting your friends to think that you´re doing perfect, when you´re not, or being the friend who feels like a loser in comparison to the first one, because your life isn´t any better either. With how Emma has always wanted to be seen as the strong one, it only made sense for her to be the one in the first role and with JT having dropped out of school, he was the perfect candidate for the second role.
It worked out well for Emma in the end tough or so it would seem anyway. She wasn´t a part of this season aside from this one episode, which I plan to change in the next season, where she´ll have more to do.
THANKS FOR READING, YOU GUYS! SEE YOU IN SEASON 6!