Television Review: "Life UneXpected" Episode Two

By our guest blogger, Travis Harvey

So, where did we leave off last week? We met Lux, she met her biological parents, they received temporary custody and everyone was all smiles. This week, we see a different side of "Life UneXpected" as the episode explores a problem that’s common to many new parents, especially if they are the parents of a 16 year old.

The episode starts with the visit of the social worker, and the first morning, we see problems with getting Lux to school. Luckily for Lux, she has responsible parents that can make arrangements for things like that.  Actually, that's not true.  Cate has to be at the radio station, so she calls Baze, who is still drunk from the night before, so he calls a cab to pick up Lux, which makes her an hour late.

But like her newfound parents, Lux has a few secrets also.  In the first episode, we learned that our little Lux was a little rough around the edges--we didn’t find out until the first 10 minutes of the second episode that her rough edges also included skipping school and running off to see a gentleman friend.

Lux’s boyfriend, Bug, has dropped out of high school along with his friend and Lux’s best friend, Natasha.  They’re all staying in a shady apartment together in hopes of starting fresh, but those plans changed when Lux met her biological parents. The plan for her to become emancipated would make the judge more lenient towards granting emancipation for Natasha, who also is a foster child.

When Cate goes to work, she learns that the higher ups want her to read a statement saying that everything that happened in the previous episode, when Baze called into the radio station, was a joke and that she was never pregnant in high school. She looked to Ryan (Kerr Smith) for advice, but he gave her none.

Later, Lux is pressured to tell the social worker that she doesn’t want Cate and Baze to get custody of her so that they can retry for the emancipation case. They visit Cate’s home to pack Lux’s things to bring her back to the apartment, but she doesn’t want to go. She and her friends get into an argument because she is in a better place.  As things begin to calm down, Lux hears the radio show in which Cate assures Portland that she does not have a kid out there.

The visit from the social worker proves to be a bit disastrous.  First, at Baze’s apartment, the social worker finds a lot of things that are deemed inappropriate for a teenager, such as easy access to alcohol, a bong lamp, and a beeping smoke detector. At Cate’s home, the backlash of the radio comment comes back to haunt Cate and an argument ensues between the three main characters, unfortunately the social worker sees the entire thing. In the end, it takes Ryan to talk Lux into staying with Cate, saying that she’s a lot like her.  Thankfully, the judge had ruled for them to have temporary custody.

This episode proves that this show has staying power, the characters continue to grow and become deeper embedded into the audiences’ hearts. The second episode shows the more dramatic side of raising a teenager who is the exact product of her parents--one who was very smart at that age but made a lot of mistakes, and another parent who is somewhat reckless and irresponsible, but means well in the long run. Hopefully this series continues to develop and I feel it can only get better from here.