Suburgatory

Suburgatory

Episode 12: The Casino Trip

By: Carlos Uribe

Suburgatory is a show about a city teenage girl who is forced to move to hell-the suburbs.

Spoilers Ahoy!

Trust is always a big issue between parents and teenagers. Teens want their parents to be able to trust them to be alone in their home and to trust with with a car. Teens want to have the freedom that will come with a parent's trust. Teens want the trust from parents simply because they want their parents to respect them. Here's the thing about trust. Teens want parents to trust them, but that's partly because they want to be able to get away with things. Teens want to be trusted with being home alone so they can have a party or have a boy over. They want to be trusted with a car so they could go to parties or something similar. They want the trust so that they can have unsupervised fun. They also want respect, because it's something everyone wants from the people they love. They want that respect to stay, which means having the parents trust them enough that they don't have a chance of getting caught.

Parents don't always trust teens either because they know the kid or they remember what it was like to be a teenager. They remembered that back when they were in high school, they couldn't be trusted. They would use every opportunity they had to be with a person of the opposite sex or to go to parties or do other reckless stuff. The reason teens are able to gain the trust of parents is because parents want to be able to trust their own teenagers. They will pretend to trust the teenager and sometimes they actually might. There is always a lingering doubt in a parent about how far the trust is actually going. Why am I talking about trust? Because when it all came down to it, that's what this episode was about. The trust between a father and his daughter, or rather the lack of it. George wants to trust Tessa and Tessa wants George to trust her. The difference is that George doesn't trust Tessa and he's right. He shouldn't trust her. Tessa was hoping to use the trust to be with a boy.

This week, George wins a trip to Atlantic City. He takes all of his guy friends on a trip. This includes Frank, Noah, and Tom and Alex. This meant leaving Tessa alone. He didn't want to, because he was afraid of what she might do. He tries to trust her but he can't. He sends Dallas to spy on her but this doesn't alleviate her concerns-especially when he finds out a boy is over. He almost rushes home, but he decides to wait because he doesn't want Tessa to think he doesn't trust her. As for the boy? He wants to take things slow so Tessa doesn't end up doing anything bad with the boy. Not because she didn't want to, but because the boy wanted to. This is the kind of guy that George should be able to trust, but the problem is he can't even trust his own daughter. The episode ends with George discovering a love box that has some condoms. The last time he discovered these condoms he moved Tessa from the city to the suburbs. The problem is that he can't really run away again. He's already tried it, and the results clearly failed. What to do now?

There's some other trust issues. Fred has a gambling problem, something he kept secret from George. At Atlantic City the guys tried to keep him from gambling. They ended up failing and he ended up winning money. The problem is that his wife is going to know that he came into money (she has some physic bond with him) which means having to tell her that he lied to her about his favorite aunt being sick and that instead he went to Atlantic City. When he gets home, he finds out that his “aunt” died. The “inheritance” becomes his gambling money and he gets off scott free. Meanwhile, Dallas thinks that Steven is in Singapore when in reality he's in Atlantic City. She seems to trust him, but she has no reason to. The difference in these sub-plots is that the trust is there, but there shouldn't be any. They have no reason for there to be no trust. Their adults, their not teenagers. Their supposed to be trustworthy but their not.

This episode was pretty good. It had some moments which weren't funny, but it had other moments that had me laughing out loud a lot. It seemed to end in some sort of cliff-hanger with George discovering some condoms in Tessa's room. Hopefully that is addressed in the next episode instead of being ignored. That would be annoying. Anyways, I can't wait until the next episode in February.