‘Faking It’ season 3, episode 9 review: The truth hurts
What “Faking It” has established a real skill at over time is coming up with great romantic story arcs, one that feature huge challenges that cause the students at Hester High enough pain and heartbreak for any soap opera. While this is a show entirely too obsessed with romance, even to the point that they often focus on this and very little else, what the show does, it does well.
Take, for example, their constructed arc Tuesday in order to make Sabrina into a far more sympathetic figure than just someone out to ruin Amy and Karma’s friendship. You have to remember here that, at least fundamentally, what is being done here is not really any different one way or another from what was done with Amy and Karma during the first season. Sabrina entered a pretend relationship with Amy with a false pretense (that she was interested in women), only to realize that she actually was by the end of it. The problem was that she had a boyfriend. Amy and Karma, meanwhile, originally were “faking it” in order to gain popularity, only for Amy to develop real feelings. The only substantial difference here is that at least Amy and Karma didn’t enter the relationship lying to each other. That, plus point of view, makes Sabrina more unlikable.
Yet, it was clear by the end of the episode that she really wanted things with Amy to work out, but as we say in the title, the truth hurts and so does heartbreak. Karma and Felix teamed up to bring her boyfriend into the mix, and hats off to the writers for having Amy defiantly send her away at that point, vowing to never see her again if she had anything to do with it. She’s been around enough liars already to not want to continue the cycle.
While we wouldn’t say that this episode was for the most part hilarious, it was well-constructed. We see Shane’s struggle with Noah as understandable for someone his age, at least in that he wants to be with Noah, but at the same time is questioning some of his own identity because of Noah being transgender. He handled it in a really uncomfortable and ultimately offensive way to his new partner, but we are all learning in life and Shane is doing the same. We feel like he’ll figure out the right way to say sorry and then move forward from there.
Finally, we’re loving Liam and Lauren right now. Her pretending that he was her boyfriend in order to spurn Theo, only to have an Instagram post go viral, was probably the funniest moment of the night. These are two people who really shouldn’t be together because they have nothing in common … and yet we’re rooting for the two of them hard. Liam may be season 3’s greatest victory right now, since the struggle for fans the first two years was that he was a challenge to the Amy / Karma relationship so many want. Now, he’s in a spot where he could provide happiness to someone else, and he’s significantly more vulnerable. It’s interesting, and this caps off our full take on a very-solid episode. Grade: B+.