#griley

hi I’m here to overthink this show about fruity teens again. sometimes the writing is just so good

by now we’re used to riley’s particular brand of melodramatic angst rooted in her inability or unwillingness to communicate with anyone deeper than surface level. the above desire to ‘go through life being ice’ ‘pure and crystallized, no feeling’ makes sense for where she’s at currently. any kind of vulnerability whatsoever feels like weakness, especially post-the motel scene with greta where she acted on genuine feelings for maybe the first time in her life and basically got told she was a big hot slut (greta I still love u baby) 

here the ice metaphor is positioned as an infallible shield: if riley can make herself cold i.e. numb enough to the world that she feels nothing, nobody will ever be able to penetrate the wall she is building to protect herself. the teacher talks about absolute zero as ‘the lowest temperature that it is theoretically possible to achieve’ ‘at which all molecules will stop moving which means there is no energy produced’. if riley can freeze these unwanted feelings out totally, she doesn’t have to expend any energy trying to protect herself from anything that could do her emotional harm (ahem greta)

if I had to nitpick the directing in this I wish we’d seen a shot of greta starting to see what riley is speaking around here, but for their storyline it’s probably important that they still don’t really understand each other. the feelings are so there but the comprehension is not, and teenagers are innately self involved anyway

the episode ends with the conclusion of their week on thermodynamics, and riley is chosen to demonstrate an alternate property of freezing

what I think is especially inchresting is how this possibly sets up riley’s coming arc for the season: when something able to be damaged but usually resilient (a rose or like sad lil teen riley) is snap frozen cold enough, it isn’t made impenetrable like she obviously wants and has verbalised. instead, it becomes so incredibly fragile that when pressure is applied, it shatters. I just hope riley figures this out before she’s shut everyone else out enough that it becomes impossible to put herself back together afterwards

chase sui wonders with entertainment weekly