#warpa

You know, I feel really bad for Tammy. She’s the resident mean girl but I don’t think she’s really a terrible person. I think it comes from a place of insecurity and arrogance (some of which I think is her version of feigned confidence), none of which is surprising given her age and usual status within the school. While some of this does seem to predate Frankie’s arrival at the school, her arrival seems to have seriously upped it several notches because for the first time in her life she feels like she’s being usurped, and the things that make her special no longer make her special. She’s never had to deal with this before, and that can be difficult for a kid who has their identity wrapped up in being perfect, which usually comes so easily for them, only to suddenly have some new person come along and bump her into second place.

She definitely needs to work on that, and I hope that she does as the show progresses. I don’t need her to be Frankie’s new bestie, or even to like Frankie at all but I would like for her to have Frankie’s back once in awhile when it really counts (like in matters of actual importance and real-world consequence bigger than just herself and her reputation within the school).

I will say that the only time I truly disliked Tammy was when she came up with the idea to dump water on Frankie. She’s already gotten it into her head that Frankie’s a robot, so if that’s true it would fry Frankie’s circuits and that could be catastrophic for her. I can see how she may not think this is a horrible thing, considering that she may be viewing Frankie as just a machine that isn’t really alive and doesn’t have actual feelings and probably can’t even feel pain (at least as far as she knows, none of that is far-fetched). When people dump water on a laptop, for example, nobody expects them to feel bad *for the laptop*. They expect the person to feel bad for upsetting the person that owned the laptop. And it’s possible that’s kind of have she views that situation, not so much the same as putting a human being in the hospital or killing a person, or sending a cat the vet, but as destroying somebody’s property that can’t feel anyway.

BUT...the reason I disliked Tammy in that instance is because her reasons for thinking Frankie is a robot, while the conclusion was right, were ridiculous and she was jumping to conclusions based on her own distress at her concern for her waning status as the smartest, most perfect person in the school. And on top of that there was an alternate reasons given for why Frankie was not allowed to get wet; an allergy to water that could be very, very dangerous to her. Even her friends tried to tell her that this was a really bad idea and an awful thing to do, because if Frankie isn’t a robot, which they were sure was extremely unlikely and certainly untrue, then Tammy would be triggering a dangerous allergy from a human being. And you could tell that for a moment, it did give Tammy some pause, because she doesn’t want to actually physically harm actual people. She hates Frankie but that doesn’t mean she wants to kill her or send her to the hospital with a life-threatening allergic reaction or disfigure a real person.

And while she is right that Frankie’s a robot, her friends were right to try to talk sense into her. It was infinitely MORE likely that Frankie was just a human girl with an unusual but potentially dangerous allergy. That should have been enough to have her abandon that particular plan in favor of something else. But, she went ahead with it anyway and almost did dump water on Frankie. She would have done it, if someone else hadn’t pushed Frankie out of the way in the last second so the water fell on empty floor where Frankie had been standing a moment ago instead.

(also, don’t think I didn’t notice that that was absolutely a Carrie inspired moment, even if it was water instead of pig’s blood in that bucket and even if it ended quite differently)

That was just beyond the pale, and I wish there had been more consequences for her on that front and that she had truly been made to feel bad for what she’d almost done. There’s still time for that to happen, and I hope that it does, but I also won’t be shocked if they just forget all about it in the show or gloss over it. I mean, it is a Nick show and they don’t seem to try very hard with shows that are deemed for kids these days. Although, I will say that this one definitely s good enough to capture my interest and get me engaged and thinking about the characters, so it’s definitely a good show and I’m not trying to say it’s not. I just don’t trust easily, ya know? :p

But, I would like to see Tammy have some sort of redemption arc, and I do see a lot of potential for that within her.

I haven’t really explained the current reason I feel so bad for her, though. I’m on season 2 right now, and WARPA tricked her into going with them and I’m...not entirely sure what’s going on with her right now. I’m kind of waffling between whether I think they’ve got some kind of mind control device on her (they’ve branded the back of her neck with their name in a kind of...weird tag or tiny plaque, like you see on toys sometimes), or if they’ve replaced her with an android that doesn’t know it’s an android. I’m leaning toward the former for now, but it’s just...awful what they’re doing to her. 

She doesn’t know she’s been brainwashed, because they take her over and literally make her say their own words and do their bidding whenever they feel like it in order to try to spy on Frankie and her friends to see if they’re up to something. She walks where they want her to walk and she talks how and when they want her to talk. They literally speak into a microphone and she says their words to whoever is in front of her at the time. When they’re finished, she has no memory of having done any of this and is often left confused about what people around her are talking about, why she’s standing here with people she doesn’t like, or why her friends are acting so weird around her and insisting she’s been acting weird and saying weird things she’d *never* say.

And I’m sure there are plenty of other connotations that are pretty awful, considering that one of the people monitoring her, seeing through her eyes or through some camera they have on her I don’t know, taking over her body and manipulating where she goes and who she talks to and what she says, is a white man while Tammy is a person of color.

I can’t really begin to explain why this entire situation is so horrible. I mean, where in the heck do you start wading through that slime? This poor kid. :(

Also, as a quick side note. I realize I’ve spent all this time talking about Tammy and the horrible decisions I think she’s made, and I don’t want to leave out the fact that she’s in this situation right now is at least somewhat due to Dayton lying to her and tricking her into hacking WARPA’s servers, that specific lie is even the reason that Tammy went so willingly and quietly with them when the WARPA agents came looking for her. I don’t think Dayton ever thought something like *this* was going to happen, and would probably have tried to come up with an alternate plan had she known that she was truly putting Tammy in danger. She had Tammy help her because Tammy would know how and Dayton didn’t know how. Not because she was afraid that WARPA would come after her, I don’t think the consequences of what she was doing had truly set into Dayton’s mind. But, she also didn’t try to warn Tammy when she realized WARPA agents had come to the school looking for whoever had hacked in, and she didn’t even attempt to stop Tammy from leaving a calling card when she hacked in so they’d know it was her even though Tammy told her she was going to.

Now, why do I say Dayton’s only somewhat responsible here? Because, Tammy and Dayton are both children. The real villains in this scenario are WARPA and their goons who are coming after kids to do horrible things to them FOR ANY REASON. There’s no excuse for that, there’s no way anything could make that okay, no matter what.