Polehaus53 wrote: ↑Sat Jul 12, 2025 12:44 pm
First off, how is a band supposed to stay together if its members are always fighting? They need to do some team building activities.
From my understanding of pop band dynamics, that's really not that unusual. You have at least one strong personality who thinks they're a creative genius, and they want to be in charge and get the credit for everything. If you have more than one person like that, they're going to clash. That's why a lot of the biggest ones end up breaking up. It just feels unusual in AIO because we're not using to having characters that are this secular and this unreasonable for this long a time period.
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What's curious about the beginning of this episode is how normal the situation seems, even given that we know how dysfunctional it is from an intellectual and spiritual standpoint. Jules is not audibly, at least, some crazy person doing wild things. Valerie is not obviously taking advantage of the situation that we know of. There's no obvious reason, outside of yet another fight in the band, why things have to change right then. And yet we know in our hearts that the situation can't be sustainable and that it's going to fall apart very soon.
Once Jules agrees to get in the car with Gunner, something that's unusual begins to unfold. We know (as discussed in the previous topic) that she has always been a compliant person who is easy to compel to agree to something or another. In this episode, after several such agreements, there comes a point in time where Gunner decides to do something, and Jules
disagrees. She is actually insistent that it is a bad idea and that she doesn't want to be a part of it. And yet he pays no attention, and does what he wants to do, and she is stuck. Before, she always technically had the choice to stop or to back out if she wanted to, but now, she has, in a sense, lost her agency, and she is forced to wait until the decisions play out to their bitter consequence before she gets it back. Sin has truly taken her 'further than she wanted to go'.
This is somewhat incidental, but this episode is an example of why rebound relationships are a bad idea. Jules may not have meant to actually say 'even Buck', but it's clearly what she felt.
After the wreck happens, Jules is much more calm, under tremendous pressure, than I expected. Of course, I suppose somebody has to be, considering how hysterical Gunner is! Buck never would have gotten her in that situation in the first place, but if they were in a wreck, I think it's much more likely she would fall apart - because she trusts him to take care of things.
To be fair to Gunner, he is more likeable after the wreck, and he comes up bigger than I expected. I was thinking that he might be useless, or even abandon Jules. But he does help save her life, and he does risk his own trying to get them out of their situation, even if reluctantly. Although he has made a lot of bad decisions, and it's mostly his fault that they're in the specific situation they're in, he's shown to not be an unalloyedly bad person. I was pleasantly surprised when he brought prayer up. I think his worldview is that none of the bad things he does are that big of a deal, but when they're in this position, that illusion is at least temporarily untenable.
The depth of Jules' anger and issues are starting to come to the forefront here. They're in the worst fix she's been in in her whole life, and she can't refrain from ranting. But even at that, not long after railing on Connie for some point she allegedly disagrees with her about, she does acknowledge that Connie has been the human person who has been bailing her out of her jams - and that she's the most likely one to do it again.
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I didn't talk about Connie in the first draft of this post, but it occurred to me that I should have. She alternates between her own ranting about Jules' irresponsibility and malfeasance, and being very concerned about her activities and welfare, and I suspect the former behaviour is mostly because of the latter feelings. Given their father and Jules' mother, I have to say I'm not sure why she is so surprised. ;-) But I suppose she saw Jules for several months, or longer, and had developed hopes that things were going better.
It's remarkable what AIO characters' investigative skills are like. If I were ever kidnapped I would want them to be the ones on my trail. I don't think they've ever missed a perp.
Also, it is completely his fault that he and Jules are even in this situation! 
I hope that he has a moment where he admits all his flaws and works to improve.
My applause to the whole Odyssey Team on that! 
