A complete rewatch: One Tree Hill

(Disclaimer: a content warning is in order as this episode discusses date rape.)

It's the Saturday after the big party at Dan's and Deb's house, and Brooke is dead set on making amends for the wrongs that she has caused the night before. She aims at setting up Nathan and Haley and takes Peyton out to a college party, with no alcohol involved. Things take a turn for the worst as a mysterious guy slips Peyton a roofie. In the meantime, Karen gets accepted to a cooking programme in Florence, something she has been dreaming of for years, but she struggles to see how she could make it happen, and even with the idea that she is allowed to have things for herself.

BEHIND THE TITLE

The episode is named The Search For Something More, after an album by the alt-rock band Antifreeze, released in 2003. The title relating to the episode is evident, as all the characters start feeling itchy in the comfortable place where they are and are looking to switch things up. Brooke wants to party and remember it the next morning for once. Peyton is done with boy drama and just wants to have fun. Nathan wants to change from the guy he used to be and become someone who's good enough for Haley. Deb, Karen, and Keith are sick of settling and want to go after what makes them tick.

(On a side note, I found an old Punktastic review of the album, which explains it heavily deals with post-break-up feelings and, according to the journalist, Antifreeze had not quite found that something yet.)

GENERAL OPINION.

At this point, everyone must be starting to wonder if there are any episodes I don't like. (I have least favourites and plots I connect less with, but we are seasons away from the conversation.) I love The Search For Something More and, rewatching it, I found myself with a stupid grin plastered on my face at many points. Karen and Deb's friendship makes me all fuzzy inside, and watching Nathan and Haley's first date is nothing short of adorable (until it's not.) This episode balances serious issues and light-hearted moments well and, again, the soundtrack is absolutely fantastic. (When it is not?)

SOUNDTRACK

- Read All About It by Kyf Brewer

- Street Survivor by The Flaming Sideburns

- Sparks by The Man

- Bad Circulation by Witchypoo

- No Exit by Runaway Cab

- Did It For The Drugs by Supafuzz

- Filter Factory by Dee

- Time by Runaway Cab

- Breaking Away by Bosshouse

- Dare You To Move by Switchfoot

- Untold by Pete Francis.

QUOTES

There are two I find hilarious and really love. The first one is delivered by Haley when Brooke tries to convince her to go on a date she will have planned for her and Nathan:

- What's your idea of a perfect date?

- Watching you get hit by a bus.

Haley has so many quick and witty comebacks in these first episodes, and I love this side of her.

The second one happens at the college party while Brooke is making out with a guy. He picks up the phone in the middle of it and, while he's talking, she overhears him say "you said I could stay until midnight," and realises he is a high school boy pretending to be in college. Her response as he walks away to his mother is everything:

"What kind of loser pretends he's in college?"

You. You're doing just that, Brooke.

THE BEST BITS: NATHAN AND HALEY'S FIRST KISS.

As I mentioned earlier, I find Haley and Nathan's first date adorable, and my favourite moment of this episode is linked to the two of them. In The Search For Something More, Nathan and Haley start tiptoeing around each other and share their first kiss, and it makes my heart all kinds of happy. When Haley leaves their dates, standing up for herself one more time, you can tell Nathan is starting to realise that if he wants Haley, if he truly likes her and wants to be with her, who he has always been and simply saying "you gotta believe me" after every mistake is not going to be enough. Haley is not going to be swayed by the same tricks everyone else did, and he is starting to see it. (I fully understand how Haley must have felt when Nathan denied being on a date in front of the basketball team, but I see some vulnerability in it, as if he was protecting himself and his feelings from a part of his life that wouldn't understand.)

On a Sunday morning when you're sixteen, there aren't a lot of grand gestures available to convince the girl you like and, most importantly, the girl you have disappointed two nights in a row to give you another chance, so, Nathan settles for a classic move- throwing rocks at her window. Haley comes out, tells him it's her parents' bedroom he's hitting, and they argue. Nathan finally opens up and admits he wants to be someone who's good enough to be seen with her, and Haley delivers a line we all know and love, to a point I can pretty much recite it along with her as it happens: "There's nothing you can say or do that's gonna surprise me."

And then, he kisses her.

I love their first kiss because it is unplanned, vulnerable, and happens in less than ideal circumstances. It's a random Sunday morning, and Nathan has messed up with Haley two nights in a row. She has just come out of her house to try and stop him from waking up her parents, she isn't dressed up or anything. There is no build-up for the kiss at all. She thinks he can't surprise her, and he goes for the kiss. I love it because, so far, Nathan has been shown as experienced, as far as girls are concerned. He's had at least one girlfriend he has most definitely slept with, and we have seen him make out with her in the back of his car and take showers with her. At the same time, in the face of a girl he feels something different for, he admits he has never been out on a real date, and, after he has kissed her to surprise her, he looks at her like he knows that, maybe, he shouldn't have done that. He looks more like a kid who's randomly kissed the pretty girl on the playground than a teenager with romantic experience- and I LOVE that.

Haley is surprised, to say the least, complains that he shouldn't have done it, and they kiss again while Switchfoot's Dare You To Move is playing in the background, a fitting title for such a scene. It's likely that this is her first real kiss, and I still don't fully understand why or how she looks like she is jumping in his arms, but it is so imperfect it becomes perfect.

THE LITTLE THINGS.

An important chunk of the episode takes place in Peyton's bedroom, and I adore how everchanging it is. Her decoration and art on the wall seem to evolve with every episode, and I love analysing the background and spotting all the details. A few of my favourite this episode: The Ataris and Rufio posters on the walls, and the sunflower tied to her bedpost. Girl's got taste.

At the end of the episode, the morning after the party, Lucas drives Brooke somewhere, and I had always assumed he was driving her back home until I noticed the white (icy blue?) Volkswagen Beetle in the parking lot and understood he was driving her back to Duke.

Speaking of Duke University, it is in North Carolina, but it's a two to three-hour drive away from Wilmington (if we assume Tree Hill is in the exact same spot.) That's one hell of a long drive for a party, and even worse the next morning, when Lucas drives Brooke back to her car. 1423 River Street, where the lingerie shop is supposed to be, is a real place, but in Wilmington, Illinois, as opposed to Wilmington, NC. Finally, the airport where Karen and Keith say goodbye to each other is Wilmington International Airport.

My eyes are always drawn to the parallels in every episode, and there is a tiny one in The Search For Something More. When Nathan and Haley are on their date, Nathan says he doesn't have much experience with this, meaning dates, and Haley replies "What, ordering food?" When Brooke and Lucas are watching over Peyton together and talking, he makes coffee, and she responds "I don't know how you do it." His answer holds the same energy as Haley's earlier: "It's easy. Directions are on the bag." It's a tiny moment during which you learn to appreciate Lucas and Haley's friendship and how similar their minds and senses of humour are.

When Brooke plans the date for Nathan and Haley, she tells Haley Nathan will pick her up at seven. They meet up, read the cards, and head to the lingerie store together, which...happens to still be open to customers after seven in the evening?

When Peyton leans on Gabe's front door and comments on the music ("Fugazi. Sparta, and on vinyl"), it's not a Fugazi song that's playing in the background. (I imagine it might have been harder and more expensive to get licensing to play Fugazi songs instead of up-and-coming indie artists, but still.)

Moira Kelly, the actress who plays Karen, was written out of several episodes as she was pregnant, which is the reason why her character was sent off to Italy for six weeks. I remember reading this fact a while ago, but rewatching it and knowing, I find it unbelievably obvious the way the camera works and props are hiding her pregnancy. She is always wearing a big woolen jacket and shown holding groceries and shelves, and only the top half of her body is shot. While she is having dinner with Keith, the shot of the top of them stops before she drinks her glass of wine, too. (I'd imagine it wasn't wine either.)

THE MOST AMERICAN MOMENT.

Rejoice! This is not all about me not grasping the concepts of school spirit and high school sports, which I never grew up with. This week, we're going to talk about something I never experienced as a little French kid in my suburban life: college parties. I did go to university, I have an English degree, but I never once attended a party while there. Maybe I was a sheltered teenager and young adult with mild social anxiety, but most importantly, it wasn't as popular as you might believe it is in the United States when you watch films and TV shows. I remember seeing flyers for parties on the campus noticeboards, but they always included trekking to Paris to go to a nightclub on the Champs-Elysées, if I remember correctly, and it was simply never a budget I had on hand. They were also always organised by law students, and they were a far cry from us English students, they partied and had notoriously more money than we did. The party culture in French universities is simply not the same as it is in the United States, and watching it in filmed media is always something wild and foreign to me. These people attend parties and don't have to pay fifteen euros upfront, ten euros on the train there and back, and spend extra money on drinks? Unheard of!

THE MOST 2000s MOMENT.

They are quite tiny details in this episode, but I loved spotting them. The first one is in Gabe's bedroom, and it's the lava lamp on his nightstand. I used to have one of those when I was a teenager, though it was some sort of attempt at having a funky and colourful-looking bedroom more than it was a cool accessory to include in my all-black decor.

Another detail I noticed was Peyton's cellphone as she manages to call Brooke to save her. You could tell you had to press on every number key several times to type a text message, and there was no such thing as spending a whole evening texting someone you liked. You would have ended up with carpal tunnel afterwards. My first phone had a telescopic antenna- how ridiculous is that? (I remember unscrewing it from the phone because I was ashamed of how lame it looked, and, also, at the age of thirteen, I did not understand the idea that antennas on such devices were designed to help them work.)

In the same vein, when Lucas heads to the Rivercourt to hang out with his friends, his phone rings, and Skills' reaction is to say: "you got a cellphone now dog?" It's crazy to think back to a time when people would simply not have cellphones, and people owning them was almost shocking.

Finally, the last one happens at the end of the episode, when Lucas comes back home from Peyton's house and, after a conversation with his mother, tells her he's used Peyton's computer to book her a flight on the emergency credit card. Again, it's crazy to think back to times when people simply did not own computers. (I had one, but we didn't have the Internet on it until 2007, just before I turned seventeen. Imagine Internet-less teenagers now?) I am aware this scene, this sentence, also shows how skint Lucas and Karen tend to be. They can't justify such expenses, and the emergency credit card has to be involved. Chances are, if they don't have a computer, it's because they can't afford it.

I JUST LIKE BEING HERE. IT'S LIKE A LIBRARY. OR A MUSEUM.

One of my favourite short and sweet scenes of the episode is the one showing Lucas and Haley at the record store. Record stores belong in my safe, quiet, happy places, alongside book stores, museums, concert venues, and the beach. (The quiet is for my brain, not necessarily the environment.) And at the same time, sometimes, I find record stores super intimidating, especially as a woman. In my head, there is always the assumption that record stores are designed for men into a certain type of music, and, most of the time, it is only men that work there. Being a girl into emo and pop-punk at the age of thirty somehow feels like not belonging. But when you go with someone else, none of this matters. You can look at records and CDs together and discuss your favourite bands, and recommend music to each other, which is why I love this scene so much. I would definitely be like Lucas in this, telling my friend the band's entire Wikipedia page when they just ask if I like them, and I love finding parts of myself in tiny details like those. The record store in One Tree Hill is one of my favourite places and settings. It looks so cool with the posters everywhere, the stickers haphazardly put on the walls, and the fairy lights. It feels a lot less intimidating than regular record stores, and I would have loved to have a similar place around me growing up.

A DISCUSSION: DATE RAPE.

When Brooke and Peyton head to Duke for a college party, Peyton briefly talks with a student, Gabe, about music, and he uses the vulnerability she shows to slip a roofie in her drink, and then, attempts to force himself on her. Now I am an adult and stories like Peyton's have been all over the media these past few years, I see the red flags from the start. The most major one is when Peyton says she isn't drinking tonight, and Gabe insists. If he can't take no for an answer when it's about a drink, he might not take no for an answer about anything else. (I also think it's obvious he's a douchebag when he acts shocked because Peyton knows The Descendents because he's judged her on her leopard print top, but that's a more personal take on the situation and general music elitism.)

My issue with this scene is not that it has been shown- quite the contrary, actually. I love that such a serious topic was tackled so early on. (Bear in mind, this is only the eighth episode of the show, and at this point, chances are they had no idea if they would be renewed or anything, so having the guts to talk about something so serious so early is something to be noted.) It was an important issue to talk about, older guys preying on younger girls and using drugs to get their way. (When Gabe slips Peyton the roofie, you can see he has a pack of them in his bedroom. It isn't the first time he's doing it.) The show also did an okay job at exploring the situation. The best thing they showed is Brooke's attitude. She finds people to open the door, she alerts others on the situation, and she isn't scared of going head to head with a guy who's older and bigger than her to rescue her best friend. The display of love, care, and sisterhood shown by Brooke is one of the most important parts of the show, and why the female friendships in One Tree Hill resonate so much with young women across the world.

However, I have beef with the fact that Gabe, Peyton's assaulter, faces absolutely no consequences for what he did. I understand it was 2003 and such things weren't as widely discussed as they are now. But they still should have done more. The only consequence Gabe faces is Lucas punching him in the face and the way he says "you better hope to God she's alright." And that's it. There should have been even the tiniest inkling that Gabe was going to face some serious consequences for drugging a minor and attempting to rape her. In some ways, yes, it's a realistic portrayal of what usually happens. A tiny portion of sexual assaults are actually reported to the police every year, victim shaming is still going disgustingly strong, so it isn't surprising someone wouldn't report what happened to them, especially in 2003. But the show should have gone for something better than simply realistic, than just a punch in the face, than just kids looking a drug up on the Internet to figure out what to do with their friend, than just labelling the night "a bad party" at the end of the episode. There was room for more.

AND SOON ENOUGH YOU'RE BEST FRIENDS.

For the past few episodes, we knew that Brooke and Peyton were close friends, best friends, maybe, hanging out in Peyton's bedroom and going to basketball games and parties together, but we hadn't seen much of the strength of their bond. I still believe that, in 1x06, Brooke's mean reaction to Haley and Peyton making friends in her car was her trying to protect the strongest, most solid thing she has going on in her life, but it's a personal belief more than anything the images have shown me. In The Search For Something More, however, we see on the screen, no imagination, how solid their friendship is.

Brooke doesn't hesitate one second before she enters Gabe's bedroom to rescue Peyton from him. She immediately understands something isn't right on the phone, and she shows absolutely no fear in the face of her best friend's assaulter. It's almost like a gut reaction. She goes in, gets involved, and takes Peyton the hell away of here. She knows who to call, she knows who will pull through, and she stays up all night watching over her when she could so easily leave that responsibility to Lucas and get some sleep. She's had a rough night too, she would deserve it. But she doesn't. She feels guilty and sticks around. And I want to believe that, at the end of the episode, her asking Peyton, playfully, "Been to any bad parties lately?" is her way of checking up on her.

BEING FEARLESS.

A common theme in the episode is the adults wanting to become fearless again. Chances are, they watch the teenagers around them taking big steps and making potentially life-changing decisions, and they want to feel infinite and brave again. We have Deb, who wants to go back to work and solidify a new friendship, despite her husband's opinion. Karen is debating whether she can justify going to Italy on a cooking course she has wanted to attend for years. And Keith is trying to find the bravery of his lifelong feelings for Karen. In the end, they all take steps in the right direction for themselves. Deb offers to take care of the café while Karen is in Italy, because Karen chooses to spend six weeks in Florence and make her dream come true. Keith shows himself to be unfailingly here for Karen, and she kisses him at the airport before she leaves. Deb and Karen finally admit they are fully-fledged friends and take it to the next level, despite their tangled pasts.

The last important adult we have is Dan, and he lives in a world of his own compared to Karen, Keith, and Deb. He still lives in the past, in a bubble where things should have to go his way and no one else's way. He doesn't ponder about fearlessness or taking risks. He is on a different wavelength than everyone else, on the sidelines. His reaction when Deb informs him she is going back to work is interesting. At first, he seems genuinely delighted and happy for her, but this begs the question. After being upset with her for not being around enough and blaming Nathan's problems on her business trips, such joy could imply he is sick of having her around, making decisions, and getting involved in things, especially since her thought process and course of action are wildly different from his and lead to things he doesn't necessarily agree with. Then, he finds out what she is doing, and he grows angry at the situation- because it doesn't go the way he wants.

GIRLS AND FAMILIES.

In The Search For Something More, we find out even information about the core girls and their families. It's the first real insight we have into Haley's people, even though we already know she has a lot of siblings, which is why she took to hanging out with Lucas and Karen, who "needed her more." Now, we understand that her family is around. We never see them, but she does. They live at home with her, which is almost unusual in Tree Hill. She isn't isolated. Her father works at the power company and, due to the way Dan reacted when he mentioned their neighbourhood of Westover, it's easy to guess it is a less wealthy area of Tree Hill. Haley also has to take care of her family and participate in home life, which is what leads her to cheat on an exam and start tutoring.

We also discover Brooke's background, though it doesn't come as a surprise after she has acted like an adult for the past seven episodes, owns a car that was quite expensive for the time, and never mentions any relationship with her family. She explains to Lucas that her parents are never here, and they would rather throw money at her instead of attention.

We have known for a couple of episodes that Peyton's mother had passed away and that her father was away a lot, working on dredging boats, meaning that she lives on her own in a large house. It is worth mentioning that no one thought to inform her father after what happened to her at the Duke party. She was sexually assaulted, and no one thought a, to inform an adult who could have given her pointers on how to react afterwards and how to take care of herself and b, to inform her family. It didn't even come into the equation, at any point.

FOR FUTURE REFERENCE.

- Mouth and Brooke meet for the first time at the Rivercourt, and their first interaction is adorable. You can tell Mouth doesn't understand his luck and why a girl as pretty and popular as Brooke is talking to him, calling him cute, and asking him if he has a girlfriend. Brooke shows a different side of herself, inserting herself into Lucas' world for real, sharing summer camp memories, and making friends with his friends.

- The last shot we see of Lucas, while Brooke and Peyton are walking away, might imply that he has a crush on both of them. He has spent the night with Brooke and has seen a new side to her when she came to the Rivercourt, but all of this happened because his instinct was to save Peyton, who he made out with two days before. Where's his heart at?

- We also have to mention Karen and Keith's first kiss at the airport, just before they are away from each other for six weeks. The way Keith touches his mouth afterwards and the smile on his face are so adorable- you can tell he's been waiting for this moment his whole life.