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A complete rewatch: One Tree Hill

Season 1, Episode 15

By CharPublished 2 years ago 10 min read
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Episode fifteenth of One Tree Hill, season one, entitled Suddenly Everything Has Changed, largely revolves around the aftermath of Lucas' accident. He is out of the hospital now, though unsure whether he is going to fully recover and play basketball again. He chooses to break up with Brooke, who is devoted as always, but hasn't told her it's because he would rather be in a relationship with her best friend Peyton. Keith is still estranged from Karen's life, and their relationship comes to a halt. In the meantime, the fight for Nathan's custody intensifies as he discovers he has the right to choose which parent he would rather live with.

BEHIND THE TITLE.

This episode is named Suddenly Everything Has Changed after a song by The Flaming Lips. The lyrics depict several mundane activities (putting the groceries away, driving home, folding the laundry) and then realising time flies fast, and everything has changed. The full title of the song is "Suddenly Everything Has Changed (Death Anxiety Caused By Moments Of Boredom)," meaning that, even during the most mundane of tasks, you aren't safe from death. Time flies fast, and anything can happen in the blink of an eye. How does this tie to the episode, you ask? You can do something as mundane as driving to the airport to pick up a loved one and risk your life. You can do something as simple as visiting the girl you like and collapsing on her bed, needing the hospital.

GENERAL OPINION.

If the past episode focused largely on relationships, how people were entwined together, and how love was the one thing we needed to get past the tragedy, Suddenly Everything Has Changed sees the unravelling of all relationships. There doesn't seem to be any sort of positive outcome possible for Dan and Deb, and Nathan finds himself stuck in the middle, having to choose between his two parents. Karen and Keith have to face the end of what they thought they could have. Lucas and Brooke break up. Peyton ends things with Lucas to salvage her friendship with Brooke. Brooke finds out Lucas and Peyton have been sneaking around behind her back and decides she does not want to see them ever again. All the relationships are coming undone, and it's done in an understated way that translates so well how heartbreaking this episode truly is.

SOUNDTRACK

- Here Without You by Jenn Shepard

- If She Wants Me by Belle & Sebastian

- Come On by Ben Jelen

- Been Around The World by Extreme Music

- Alien by Acro

- It's You That I Find by David Grahame

- I Can't Make Me by Butterfly Boucher

- Need You Here by Jude

- Lucky Man by Thomas Anderson

- Dreaming by The Luxury Liners

- Elsewhere by Bethany Joy Lenz.

This is the second time we watch a character perform music. After Jake singing at the open mike night, we have now watched Haley sing for Nathan at the café. The song she sings is not an original but a song found on Sarah McLachlan's album Fumbling Towards Ecstasy.

THE BEST BITS: KAREN AND THE KIDS.

My favourite part of the episode is the motherly instinct shown in Karen, even in the middle of an episode that sees everyone unravelling every solid relationship they have. We see it first when Brooke visits the house to drop off some tea she has picked up online for Lucas and ends up sitting down with Karen to talk about her trip to Italy. They bond over travelling, the time Karen has spent abroad, and we discover new dreams in Brooke: she wants to visit other countries. So far, we have only seen very few parts to Brooke. We have seen her as the confident girl who isn't afraid to talk about sex. We have seen her being used as a device to get the plot moving. We have recently discovered the fierceness of her love and how devoted she is to those she carries in her heart. But we have never seen her want something for herself yet. It's only a faraway dream to visit Italy someday, but it's a start, and it took Karen's attention to discover it.

Karen then offers Jake a job at the café, from which he has to bail because he doesn't have anyone to mind Jenny. Karen discovers Jenny is his baby daughter, not his little sister, like she originally believed, and she brings Lucas' old crib at the café for him to be able to work and have his daughter around. I love the way she used her past experience, being a teenage mother, to take care of someone in the same situation as her. I'd imagine that, when she was a teenage mom, sometimes in the eighties, it was frowned upon to raise a child by yourself, fresh out of high school and, as she says, it's hard to ask for help. By tending to Jake's need before he even asks, she saves him from asking for help, and she gives him a chance she didn't necessarily have back in the day, the support she would have liked to have when she was young.

THE LITTLE THINGS.

We're going to have to talk about Lucas' bedroom after Brooke "feng-shui'd" it. Logistics first, but did she simply turn up and redecorate the whole thing by herself? Do people not lock their doors anymore? The design, next. She's completely moved the bed around, I think arranged the posters, and in the corner by the door that leads outside, you can see a very random surfboard that was added for decoration. And, oh, glass wind chimes by the bed!

When Nathan visits Haley at the café and she performs for him, she sits in front of a piano that seems to belong here, but...Where was this piano before? There was never any sign of a piano. Even when people performed for the open mic night, keyboards were brought in.

At the end of the episode, when Nathan moves into Dan's beach house and brings all his boxes from his mother's house, you can see a chessboard poking out from one of the boxes. A chessboard?

In many TV shows and films, big brands cannot be presented for legal reasons, which is why you have knock-off versions of them shown. (Similarly to the cheap, fake Halloween costumes that tend to become viral in October of every year, with descriptions such as "Middle of the week child" because saying Wednesday Addams is a no-go for an unofficial product.) In this episode, Haley and Nathan are hanging out at Haley's and looking up his right when it comes to his parents' divorce, and the computer screen simply says "Internet search" in Google colours.

THE MOST 00s MOMENT

It has been mentioned before, but it almost feels like any appearance of a good old Nokia 3310 deserves its own post. In case you missed out, it was THE quintessential phone of the decade. To add to the "time and place" kinda moment, in this episode, Peyton looked at it to see "Brooke's cell" calling her, because, in 2003, chances are, people had your landline phone number and your cellphone number had to be entered separately.

Jake turns up at Lucas' house with yet another staple of the teenager in the early noughties: the PlayStation 2. I think we bought one of those when I was in junior high, so I must have been about twelve, and one of the first games I had on it was The Sims- we didn't have the right computer for me to have games, so it was the only way I could play. We also used it as a DVD player, and, almost twenty years down the line, we still have one which is mostly used to play films. (And because of that, I have never owned a DVD player outside of my portable one.)

Halfway through the episode, Lucas is watching Peyton on her webcam and messages her on IM, short for Instant Messenger. That's the one thing I knew about but never used as I didn't have access to the Internet until I was seventeen, and the first thing I did when that happened was to download MSN to chat with my school friends. The ancestor of Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp truly was IM, and it seemed like the height of technology, back in the day.

I was recently listening to the Drama Queens podcast, which I follow along while writing these posts, and in the latest episode, Sophia, Joy, and Hilarie addressed a criticism they have faced: they call out Lucas on his behaviour too much, according to some fans. It's also a conversation that is very prominent on Reddit, where a lot of users accuse them of defending their characters too much instead of recognising when both the girl and the boy are in the wrong. The thing is, I think we need more of a perspective like Sophia's, Joy's, and Hilarie's on shows like One Tree Hill. When I was a teenager, I remember magazines and media describing the show and the various plots as "two girls fighting over a boy," and as the actresses say on the podcast, what Lucas does in the first season was very much acceptable boy behaviour back in the day. We simply did not criticise boys for their actions, and a lot of the time, the blame was thrown on the girls, the easy scapegoats. When I was a teenager watching this show, I'm sure I also saw it as "two girls fighting over a boy," and now I am watching it as an educated adult, I see Lucas' behaviour differently. As a kid, yeah, I knew cheating was wrong, but that was about it. I never saw any of the red flags, and I never saw the rest of what Lucas did wrong.

Yeah, Peyton messed up, big time, and it is never okay to get with your best friend's boyfriend, or with anyone's boyfriend if you know he is otherwise taken by someone else. But we have addressed this in the past seventeen, eighteen years. We know this! We don't need to address what Peyton does anymore, because we have done a lot of it for the past almost two decades. (And, if you look at places such as Reddit, this conversation of "Peyton being the bad guy" is thriving.) But we need to address Lucas' behaviour with the girls. I think he struggles to choose between the two because they bring two completely different things to the table. Brooke is shown as more fun, more confident, she is funny, and being with her is a little more light-hearted. Peyton is more serious, and Lucas seems to have more of an emotional connection with her. They share art, they like the same music too. And he's a lost kid who doesn't know what he wants the most, whether he wants to find someone to have fun with or someone he connects with emotionally. Which is pretty okay. It's okay not to know.

What's not okay is to break someone's heart over it. And that's where the heart of the matter is: he should have absolutely never dated Brooke in the first place if he knew he had feelings for Peyton, and if he knew he was only dating her to protect himself from being hurt. Because he didn't protect Brooke in the process, and in this episode where she gets broken up with, lied to, and cheated on, she's the one who's arguably hurt the most. Finding out your boyfriend is cheating on you through a webcam is probably awful too. No one has told you the truth in this scenario.

In the scene where Peyton and Lucas talk, after he has broken it up with Brooke, there is a line I had never noticed before. "I just wish we could fast forward the next six months." Did he plan on stringing Peyton along and seeing her in secret for six months, half a year, until it was socially acceptable for him to start dating her? I had never, ever noticed this line before, and it annoyed me so much. Now he knows which girl he wants to be with, maybe he could simply own up to his feelings, hold himself accountable for fucking it up with both of them, and not plan on doing more damage.

FOR FUTURE REFERENCE.

- What's going to happen with Haley saying she wants to "try new things?"

- What's Deb's big secret? What is she hiding from everyone?

- What's going to happen to Keith after he has to put his garage up for sale?

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About the Creator

Char

Sad songs, teen films, and a lot of thoughts.Tiny embroidery business person. Taylor Swift, Ru Paul's Drag Race, and pop-punk enthusiast.

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