What I’m Watching: Casual

Casual: Season 2, Episode 9 “The Lake” (B+)

What a great episode this was about the nature of commitment and how it really affects your life. After she went to go find him at the hotel room and he wasn’t there, Valerie forgave him and then was enticed by his offer to indulge spontaneity and go somewhere that she wished she could go if the things in her life weighing her down didn’t exist. She was right to criticize the flighty way that he lives his life, but he had a valid point when he saw that she couldn’t stop to enjoy anything because she was so busy trying to keep tabs on her troublesome brother and make sure that his life was headed in the right direction. Finding that the lake no longer existed was a miserable finale, and it sort of bursts whatever bubble that Valerie had briefly considered living in. Alex’s latest decision has come back to bite him in the ass immediately, and Sarah has wasted no time moving in with him, even deigning to confrontationally ask Laura if she and her mother ever considered getting their own place. She’s made herself at home, and the fact that he feels trapped isn’t going to make the ensuing interactions easy to watch. Jordan’s ultimatum was a brutal one, but it shouldn’t have come as a surprise that he was angrier than anything else and willing to let innocents pay the price for Alex’s misdeeds. Laura was not kind in how she spoke to Aubrey, and she raised some valid points about the way that Laura was manipulative and unfair to her. I think that friendship has been irreparably severed, and it’s only going to sting that much more when Spencer’s terminal cancer becomes more than just a punchline.