I know you’re feeling a lot of feels right now, but let’s try to keep together at least for a few minutes, and then we can all freak out. The Fosters‘ second season has ended, and finally resolved some of the things we’ve been dealing with for 21 episodes.
Sweet resolutions
First off, let’s get the unimportant stuff out of the way. Brandon, who honestly didn’t provide too much interest this season, almost misses his super important audition for a music program because of a make-up/make-out session with Lou. He manages to get there in the last minute and performs what seems to be a good audition, except by that point we don’t really care anymore. Sorry, Brandon. Maybe you’ll be interesting again in Season 3.
Now to the more important stuff. Mariana is turning out to be quite the strong female role model. In the previous episode Emma joined her dance team and was upset because the boys at coding class weren’t taking her seriously anymore. Mariana told her that she shouldn’t let these boys influence her decision on whether she should dance, and made it clear that you can be sexy and smart at the same time. Then Mariana said that she has an idea and promised that Emma won’t have to choose between smart and sexy. I was very curious to know what she meant, and now we found out: the two girls used their coding skills to program these neat lights on their dance outfits, which made them really stand out and beat the mean girls’ team. Yay for science and dancing!
Mariana’s girl power was made even better by the brief conversation she has with Ana, her birth mom, who is so impressed and proud of Mariana’s intelligence and talent. Ana tells her about her struggles and substance-abuse growing up, and says “It’s really hard being a girl in this world.” Ain’t that the truth.
Callie is finally getting adopted! I might be celebrating prematurely because, as you know, The Fosters has a tendency to really exhaust all the ways in which this adoption could go wrong, but I believe they will finally let this old storyline go and find something new to put Callie through. Her biological dad finally gets some sense and decides to agree to what Callie wanted all along. God, I am happy to move on! This adoption thing has been going on for so long that it was almost solved by Callie turning 18.
Okay, here’s what you really want to talk about: Jude and Connor. I can’t even handle this. Call me a fangirl, but I think this is the single most anticipated storyline in the whole season — maybe even the whole show — and it felt good to have a few romantic moments to satisfy our faint hearts. First off, let’s applaud Jude for being a total badass and refusing to leave the hospital without seeing Connor. He puts on some blue nail polish, which closes a little circle for him and Connor, and goes on to confront Connor’s homophobic dad. I absolutely love that he describes his nail polish as “war paint,” showing how something that we see as feminine can still be really powerful. Eventually, Connor’s dad gives up and allows Jude to see Connor. In the most aww-worthy moment of all time, Jude lays down next to Connor on the hospital bed.
After Connor came out to his dad in the previous episode, it’s Jude’s turn to come out to his mama and later to Callie. He’s adorable and brave both times, and we all simultaneously melt every time we hear his say the word “boyfriend.” If you ask me, this is the best part of the episode (outshining Callie’s anticipated adoption… Sorry, Callie), and we sure had to wait for it. I’m very excited to see what happens with these two in the next season, and I hope that they will get to explore their relationship and not have it all be about Conor’s dad. After all, this is their first relationship (if we ignore Connor and Daria), and it is interesting regardless of their genders. Oh, to be young and in love!
I might genuinely be more excited about this relationship than I’ve ever been about anything in my life. Maybe that’s a bad sign, but I’m okay with it. #Jonnor forever.
Less sweet complications
Lena and her boss, Monte, ended up kissing after a “we saw it coming” hangout session with a bottle of wine. I like that they’re allowing Monte to fall in love with Lena although she was ever attracted to women (that we know of), but c’mon! Don’t do this to us. Lena and Stef are our parents and we need their stable relationship. I didn’t feel like Stef and Lena’s relationship was going that badly, so I think this is probably just a little hiccup in the name of drama, and they’ll recover from it soon enough. (After some obligatory turbulence, of course, because I’m sure Lena will eventually tell Stef what happened.)
And so we inevitably reach the end of the episode. Ana finally gets to play mom and drives the twins home when she starts feeling pains and wants to go to the hospital. The twins can’t decide which one of them should drive and eventually Ana she says she’s fine to keep driving. At this point, I got very nervous, anxious in my knowledge that The Fosters would never let a reckless driving decision slide without teaching us a lesson. And so, to Brandon’s dramatic piano playing, we see Ana, Mariana, and Jesus get hit by another car. The last few seconds of the episode show Stef starting her shift and getting called to the scene of the accident, obviously not knowing her kids are involved, and the dispatcher announces that there is one fatality at the scene.
That’s it! That’s what they leave us with until next season. Now is the time to freak out, in case you were waiting.
I don’t have any real spoilers for you, but I will make some educated guesses based on what’s been happening on social media, so if you want to avoid that info, I’d suggest you skip this next part.
The way I see it, killing a character is really… well, out of character for The Fosters. We had another false alarm just two episodes ago. That being said, everyone on Twitter is freaking out about Jake T. Austin (Jesus) announcing that he’s leaving the show. This is a little stressful and definitely sad, but I think it’s pretty clear that it’s a bit of a stunt to keep us on our toes. Jesus has been talking about going to boarding school for a while, so this is probably why Jake T. Austin is leaving.
Bradley Bredeweg, the show’s creator, tweeted this mysterious tweet after the episode aired. So this is my theory: Jesus is just going off to boarding school, while the fatality in the accident is going to be someone in the other car. This is going to be a classic Fosters close call, which we have learned to expect and love. After all, this is ABC Family, not Game of Thrones! We can check in about this when the show returns for its third season, and I will celebrate with an “I told you so!”
Final thoughts
A lot happened this season. We saw Lena and Stef deal with the heartbreak of losing their baby, and Lena having to come to terms with the idea of her probably never having a biological child. Callie also faced a dilemma about biology and family and fought bravely to show that family is about love, not about blood. Mariana went from bleaching her hair to fit in with the mean girls in the dance team to starting her own dance troupe and combining her love of dance and coding into one awesome performance. Jesus went through the motions with two different girls, but eventually ended up on his own and probably on his way to an all-boys boarding school. Brandon came to terms with losing some of his piano-playing abilities, and started getting used to the wild life of being in a rock band. Finally, Jude went through the struggle of figuring out his first relationship, combined with having to navigate sexual identity and homophobia.
Overall, it looks like most of characters are in a better place now than they were in the beginning of the season. I know it’s tough right now and the wait is seriously nerve-wrecking, but it’s only a few months! And whenever you feel sad or worried, just replay these words in your head and everything will be better: “He’s my boyfriend.”
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