i made my best friend watch btCrib and btGold for my birthday because they're the two best kogan episodes
At Length we discussed the flanderisation of kendall knight and assassination of logan mitchell. we used to have a mischievous anti-authoritarian leader and reticent rule-abiding best friend which shunted the typical four-humours personality lineup that the teenage mutant ninja turtles perfected in a refreshing and compelling way. then we got the anxious straight man leader and goofy pseudo-intellectual best friend. it certainly wasn't in the best interest of btr's branding to portray characters on their tv show which were so unlike their actual selves, so we understood that the characters we were introduced to needed to undergo transformation. however, the versions we ended up with still don't address the underlying issue which made this ip so much less successful for nickelodeon than hannah montana was for disney. they could have altered the characters to bridge that gap and make it easier to promote the real life band, or they could have kept that gap in order to facilitate the creation of an interesting, character driven show; and instead they gave us neither. astounding decision making on the showrunners' parts.
even though the personalities were much goofier in Gold vs Crib, she had more fun watching Gold. Crib still felt like show exposition to her which, while helpful and enjoyable, was harder for her to connect to since she knew a lot of that set up wouldn't last. Gold also had the benefit of kogan acting more like a team than they did in Crib where it was very much kendall leading by the seat of his pants and logan following along begrudgingly (a delightful dynamic for one episode but not for a whole friendship). in Gold, they both enabled each other's bad decisions, which is True Friendship.
she didn't realise that camille was in both episodes because erin sanders had such a glow-up between seasons lol
she liked camille in Crib but not in Gold because she thought camille was Annoying. afterwards i explained that camille was deffo exaggerating just to make logan sweat (along with a crash course on how freak4freak lomille are), so she was willing to give camille/lomille a second chance; but for now she vastly prefers jo/jendall to camille/lomille. this is refreshing to me because that is not a popular sentiment in the btrtv fandom lol
she observed that kendall knight may have evolved into the group's straight man amongst the band, but in Gold that responsibility to temper the other three's antics seemed to fall to jo. i LOVE that. i already liked jo/jendall, but this heretofore unexplored insight into the kogan-jomille dynamics and her role in them made me appreciate her so much more.
she was also surprised that kendall wasn't the one to end up with camille, and i was SO HYPE SHE NOTICED THAT because kenmille are one of the very few instances i can think of where the Most Eligible Female Character is not paired up with or intended for the Most Eligible Male Character in the media. my conspiracy theory is that they paired erin sanders' character up with logan simply for the zoey 101 quinn pensky/logan reese parallel and that camille and kendall would have otherwise been dating in an alternate universe.
i told my friend that i ship all four sides of this love square, and she went 'even logan/jo?' at which point i got to reveal that in the episode that introduces jo, logan was only taken out of the running as a contender for her affections by camille's dibs on him. otherwise he conceivably had as much of a chance to woo her as kendall did, which is personally more than enough for my wheels to start turning. i love rarepairs idc idc
for my next opportunity (maybe her own birthday? although i don't know how much of a gift it is to make her watch episodes of /my/ boyband lol) i am torn between two lomille episodes or two jendall episodes. she still doesn't know the contextual impact of worldwide, after all haha
