Becca gets coffee for her new bosses one morning and walks in on them discussing the latest plan to ad swap with Allison’s Records. The magazine advertises the record shop in their first issue, while the shop will carry the magazine in an advantageous place, thereby ensuring that customers will pick up a copy. However, Chester is still firm about his desire to stay away from pop music and puff pieces. Becca then suggests an article about an upcoming R.E.M. concert in Chapel Hill, North Carolina – what happens when a group that got so big finds itself back in the small town it began its journey? Both of her bosses like the idea and tap her to actually go down there, see the show, and write about it, assuming she’s comfortable getting herself there and buying her own tickets. Eager to prove herself, Becca accepts the challenge.
Lolly is, of course, ecstatic at the thought of seeing R.E.M., but when Becca goes to her dad to borrow his car for the trip, she’s forced to talk to Jamie after ignoring his calls for the past week. She tries to explain that they’re in two different places in their lives and inadvertently insults him when she infers that he’s selfish; she does tell him that she might need this trip to sort her head out, so the door isn’t completely closed for their relationship. Although Lolly didn’t get the tickets herself, she called on Paige to use one of her hook-ups in exchange for getting to go on the trip herself, disappointing Becca since she thought it would just be her and Lolly. Things don’t get better when the girls hit the road, as Becca questions why Paige has never been on a road trip, Paige tells Becca that it’s obvious she’s not over Sean, and Lolly brings up Becca’s summers with Andy. Meanwhile, Melanie is behaving very passive aggressively toward Andy and comes down on him when he tries to talk to her about it. She doesn’t think he can use the “old friend” card regarding Becca anymore and all but pushes him out the door when Jamie comes by asking him to go out for a beer.
Once at the bar, Jamie talks to Andy about what happened with Sean, with the latter emphatically denying that he had anything to do with Sean’s break-up with Becca. When Andy agrees that he should be telling this to Sean, Jamie jumps and runs to the phone, all in hopes of showing Lolly how unselfish he actually is. Back in North Carolina, the girls arrive at Lolly’s dad’s place, where they hope to crash for the one night they’re in town. Unfortunately, Harry didn’t check his answering machine and Paige, Lolly, and Becca walk in on a tryst between him and graduate student Suzanna. As Suzanna leaves, Harry apologizes for the situation, but things quickly take a turn as Lolly isn’t in the mood to deal with yet another of her father’s age inappropriate affairs, the likes of which broke up her family when she was in 3rd grade. She gets offended at Suzanna’s tone when mentioning her job at the video store, yet he doesn’t exactly know what she wants to do with her life, so he couldn’t qualify her temporary station with future ambition. Upset at her absentee father coming down on her, Lolly goes out for fresh air just as Paige and Becca prepare to head out and get the tickets.
Over a beer, Andy and Sean seemingly work out their differences, as Sean believes that Andy didn’t have anything to do with the break-up due to his honest face. Now that they’re over it, the boys decide to bond by trying to climb The Wall, a marathon of 12 beers that, if they finish, would land them infamy in the form of a name plate on the bar wall. The conversation turns when Melanie pays a visit to the bar after Andy had been gone for three hours; she makes cutting remarks about his love of Dungeons and Dragons and decides to pair with Sean in a game of pool against Andy and Jamie. Meanwhile, Lolly stops at a local coffee shop and runs into Kevin, her childhood friend who just returned from working in Alaska. The two used to work together when they were teenagers and when they start reminiscing about a barn party they attended, they quickly decide to go see how it’s holding up after all these years. When they get there, Kevin reveals that Alaska is lonely for him. Although it’s three months of work for a year’s pay, life as a fisherman is pretty isolated and makes the transition back into the real world all the more difficult. It also makes dating impossible, though he does learn that both he and Lolly are single.
Melanie and Sean skunk Andy and Jamie during their first round of pool and things don’t get any less tense when Jamie asks Melanie what women want. She explains that women want a strong man who knows who he is and that how people act is who they are inside, though Andy doesn’t agree with the latter stance. When he tries to interject, Melanie makes a point to ask Sean for “help” lining up her shot, reveling in making her boyfriend jealous with the physical contact from another man. After getting a flat tire from inadvertently driving over a nail, Becca’s plans of easily getting the R.E.M. tickets pretty much go out the window. It gets dark quickly and with about an hour remaining until the concert, neither she nor Paige is able to read a physical map. The two bicker about Paige flirting her way to a $0 mechanic bill and Becca’s need to blame other people for the follies in her own life, but they have to put a pin in that when they get pulled over.
The officer doesn’t have any real reason to pull them over, fortunately. He claims that out of state license plates can sometimes belong to drug traffickers and ends up letting the two off with a citation for expiring tags. Back on the road, Becca marvels at Paige standing up for them to the officer and Paige reveals that she was terrified – she just channeled her acting skills. She started acting when she was 3 and found herself drowning in a sea of classes when she was 5; she missed several important school landmarks (e.g. prom) all for her career when it turns out her parents were stealing the money she made. At 16, she got emancipated, thereby explaining her lack of college and inexperience with road trips, a fact that makes Becca rethink the way she’s approached Lolly’s new friend. The two then engage in an Alanis Morissette sing-a-long and head to the concert venue.
There they meet Lolly, who gets dropped off by Kevin. Although Becca should be upset at not having tickets, with scalping illegal on college campuses, she decides that her story can change from its original pitch and still retain its quality. Her new piece? She talks to several students who didn’t get a seat at the concert and had to watch it from the rooftop of a nearby dorm, a play on her idea of a huge band returning to its roots. Back in New York, Melanie gets sick while trying to conquer The Wall and has to go to the bathroom, while Sean is decidedly woozy from all the beer he’s had to put away. When he makes a remark about how Becca hated his drinking, Andy responds by saying that if he loved his former fiancée, that wouldn’t have been an ongoing problem. The two verbally tussle some more, Andy reminding Sean that Becca isn’t his fiancée and Sean insisting that the wedding invitation was an obligation, and Andy decides to leave. However, Melanie decides not to come with him and tells him that instead of coming home, she’ll be staying with her parents for a while.
The morning after the concert, Lolly finds her dad and tells him that she’s still trying to figure out who she is and what she wants to be, that she doesn’t need an absentee father coming in to critique her life before disappearing for another six months. She doesn’t want them to drift apart anymore, so Harry agrees to check his messages more and Lolly entertains the idea of riding down to D.C. in two weeks to see him. The girls then get on the road and when they’re about 40 minutes from Lincoln Tunnel, Paige encourages Becca to figure out what she wants regarding her love life (seeing the Spring Lake sign again hit her harder than she thought) and go for it. When Sean brings a hungover Jamie some coffee, the latter confesses the real reason that he tried to patch things up between the former and Andy – he wanted to prove himself to Lolly and hopefully win her back. Sean is fine with it; he’s more worried that there might’ve been truth in Andy’s assertion that Becca called off the wedding because of him, though Jamie tells him that Becca just changed her mind. Nothing more, nothing less.
Becca drives up to Spring Lake and calls Andy, telling him that she couldn’t stop thinking about him. He reveals that things aren’t great for him and that he needs Becca to start being honest about how she feels. She suggests that he come to the cabin so they can talk – if he doesn’t, she’ll know how he feels. While Lolly gives Becca some encouragement before leaving with Paige, Andy tries calling Melanie, gets a busy signal, and leaves the house for Spring Lake. Unfortunately, on the way over, his car flips and Paige and Lolly see the damage as they’re driving by.
Additional thoughts and observations:
-“Yeah, go back in time and stop them from fighting. You can’t do that, can you?”
-“I’m Lolly. Are you my new mom?”
-“I am Boutros Boutros Ghali.”
-“My kingdom for an Uber.”
-“No spare?” “Tell me about it.”
-“You can come stay with us. We have a terrible futon.”
-Non-Exhaustive List of 90s Songs Included on Hindsight: Deep Blue Something “Breakfast at Tiffany’s”; R.E.M. “Shiny Happy People”; Alanis Morissette “You Oughta Know”; Del Amitri “Roll to Me”; R.E.M. “Nightswimming”.
-“Roll to Me” was one of the 90s songs I was secretly hoping would be played on this show, so that was a pleasant surprise. Thank you for reading my mind, Hindsight music supervisor.
–This was basically my response to that ending. I mean, we know that Andy is okay given the present-day scenes in the pilot, but I was still very shocked that the show would go somewhere this dark. I guess that’s what made it such an impactful scene – that it came on a show that has a decidedly light tone and doesn’t deal with violence beyond the occasional sucker punch. The ending was jarring, but I don’t think it was necessarily in a bad way; my hope is that this is the beginning of an interesting angle to the Becca/Andy/Sean triangle and wasn’t strictly an excuse to keep Becca and Andy apart for longer.
-I love that Lolly is having her own mini-Hindsight with Kevin. Not only was it a cute nod to the show, as was the R.E.M. storyline with the group returning to their past, it stretched her storyline in necessary ways (there had to be some type of shakeup in her relationship with Jamie) and made her friendship with Becca a bit more balanced. Instead of Lolly bending over backwards to help Becca and that’s it, Becca can help her just as much and the two can grow due to their shared experience. If played right, this could be kind of beautiful, you guys.
-Honestly, I kind of think Becca’s feature will be better because of not getting tickets. It’s an angle, the decision to talk to those who also didn’t get tickets, that I didn’t think of and I like the fact that practical, organized Becca was able to roll with the punches here. It shows that her time in the past is paying off.
-It’s a bit surprising that Hindsight would get Alan Ruck for what amounted to a bit part. But where Lolly is such an integral part of this show, I don’t think this is the last time we’ll see him, so hopefully the next trip to North Carolina can dig into her issues with him some more.
-Also, I liked that their relationship wasn’t necessarily solved at the end of this episode. Lolly isn’t getting on the train to D.C., not when she’s still smarting from her father repeating the same patterns of behavior that led to his divorce from her mother.
-The subplot with Sean, Andy, Melanie, and Jamie was fun. It was nice seeing Jamie being proactive, even if his motivation wasn’t exactly altruistic, while the show’s willingness to throw together different character combinations is a definite positive heading forward. (Plus, this is the episode where the show could’ve easily tipped its hand regarding who it wants Becca to end up with, but I think it’s doing a good job at making both choices valid while not making either man a villain or third wheel.) What I’m most curious about is whether Melanie will become a sympathetic character because here, as much as it sucks that her boyfriend kissed another girl, she was petty and awful. It was entertaining, sure, but between this and how she talks to Becca, she’s definitely the show’s antagonist right now and that’s something I wouldn’t have expected.
-I wonder where Xavier is. He was in the first two episodes and that’s been it. Will it take something like Becca putting herself in danger for him to pop up? Why hasn’t she seen him given all the time she spends at the bar?
-This episode fleshing Paige out was appreciated. I think she fits more into the fabric of the show than she did before and taking Becca down a peg by revealing the hardship that Paige had to overcome was a nice touch. I like Becca and I understand why she would be annoyed that someone tagged along on a trip she wanted to take with just her best friend, but she was a bit out of line and needed to get a reminder on not allowing her story to dominate her perspective of the world.
-Lolly got a film degree. Prediction for the end of the series (which should hopefully be years and years away): in the present, when Becca catches up with her, she finds out that Lolly’s a director. Or at least something in the film industry.
-Next week on Hindsight: Andy’s accident shakes Becca up, while Paige grows closer with Sean.
2 Comments
” I mean, we know that Andy is okay given the present-day scenes in the pilot, but I was still very shocked that the show would go somewhere this dark.”
How do we know he is okay? Beccas actions change everything. The scenes in the pilot became irrelevant, once she acted different for the first time in the (new) past. Without (future) Becca Andy would have never driven that car at this exact moment, so he he easily could be dead.
Can’t edit so i have to add it: I never watch previews, so you might know more than me, but this still doesn’t change what i sad.