A complete rewatch : One Tree Hill

Episode six from the first season of One Tree Hill is entitled Every Night Is Another Story, and it centers around one night that could potentially become central in the lives of our core characters, kids and parents alike. The Ravens head to Pickerington to play an away game, and things go south after Lucas and Nathan start fighting on the pitch over their playing and bring the girls into it. Brooke is injured in the process, and Peyton and Haley find themselves hanging out for the first time as they drive her safely back to Tree Hill. Meanwhile, the boys are forced to join forces to find their way back home safely. Finally, the parents attend a dinner out of town for small business owners, and things get heated between another set of brothers. It's a much more light-hearted episode, less heavy on the analysis, which offers a good balance after last week.

BEHIND THE TITLE

The title comes from Every Night Is Another Story, a song by the band The Early November, another emo classic of the early 2000s. This song deals with subjects usually found in lyrics of the genre, loneliness, and the feeling of being misunderstood, which both come up in the episode. We are going to take a closer look at Keith's and Karen's loneliness, Brooke's fears, and a lot of our teenagers feel misunderstood. Nathan knows his life is not as wonderful as it's cracked up to be, and Haley and Peyton have others assume their feelings towards something or someone.

GENERAL OPINION.

As mentioned in the post about episode four, Crash Into You, I love a good party episode because I am enamored with the idea that a single evening or night can change the course of your life. Every Night Is Another Story gives me that sense of infinite possibility, and I love how it centers around one night, just the one. We don't know anything substantial about the aftermath yet. You know how, at the end of movies like The Breakfast Club and Ferris Bueller's Day Off, you have experienced all the adventures of the day, but you have no idea how they are going to impact the future lives of the characters? There's something of that in Every Night Is Another Story. Only tonight matters. The future can wait.

SOUNDTRACK

- Cool Kids by Screeching Weasel

- Holiday by The Get Up Kids

- Impossible by Lucky Town

- Seven x Eight by Anjali

- Blueside by Rooney

- Hypocrite by Jibe

- Time Running by Tegan & Sara

- Headlights by Dispatch.

I love nothing more than making fun of myself, so, just so you know, I started listening to Rooney in 2007, unrelated to One Tree Hill, because one of my friends found them somewhere on the Internet. The reason why they stuck with us and we decided to give it a try? Because we were heavily into English football and we had no idea it was not a reference to Wayne Rooney. (Also, funnily enough, I have just discovered the name was a reference to Ed Rooney from Ferris Bueller's Day Off.)

QUOTES

This episode holds some solid quotes and comedic moments, and, as evoked before, it's a lot more light-hearted than the previous one, a perfect one-eighty from the heaviness and grief clouding All That You Can't Leave Behind (1x05).

- What's your name?

- Haley.

- I don't like that name. Let's call you Brooke.

Brooke, high on painkillers, deciding that she didn't like Haley's first name and that Brooke was a more suitable one for her is everything to me.

- I don't want to walk home, it's dark.

One of Nathan and Lucas' kidnappers complaining about the dark in the forest after he's participated in abducting two players from the opposite team and broken a wide range of laws retains that perfect absurdity I love in humour.

"As happens sometimes, a moment settled and hovered and remained for much more than a moment. And sound stopped and movement stopped for much, much more than a moment. Then gradually time awakened again and moved sluggishly on."

This voiceover comes from John Steinbeck's Of Mice And Men, and it conveys the idea that sometimes, you'll experience a moment (here, a night) that seems like it lasts forever, as if time was stopped, and then, the cogs of life will start turning all over again, as if nothing ever happened.

THE BEST BITS: NARRATIVE DEVICES.

In previous posts, almost every week, I feel, we have talked about my undying love of paralleled moments and scenes, but in this episode, I want to talk about another one of my favourite devices, used in the first few minutes of Every Night Is Another Story.

The first scenes you see are Haley and Peyton hanging out in a car that definitely does not belong to Peyton, and they are listening to music together and enjoying themselves, showing the idea that they might have similar tastes. Brooke is lying on the backseat, in pain for a reason we still ignore, and she complains about the loud noise. The girls almost run someone over, and they are shocked beyond belief to find out it is Nathan and Lucas, together, and not at each other's throat- so are we. We have no context at all for any of this, we don't know where the road is, we don't know why they are all hanging out together on a deserted road and in a forest in the middle of the night, and we don't know why they now get along, but we're dying to find out. Then, the timeline goes back to twelve hours prior, and you have the rest of the episode to figure out how this happened.

I love it when narration messes up with timelines and, in this case, I am obsessed with how things are completely different from the current status quo, with how you left things at the end of the last episode, but you don't know why. Have you missed something? It's clever for suspense purposes, and it's well-done from a narration standpoint. And, as we see at the very end of the episode, it doesn't even ruin anything to know how things turn out.

THE LITTLE THINGS.

The place where the away game is said to happen, Pickerington, is a real place, but it is not situated in North Carolina, where the plot of One Tree Hill is taking place. The only Pickerington in the United States is in the state of Ohio, not far from Colombus.

Towards the end of the episode, Peyton starts looking for a CD to play in the backseat, and it's only thanks to Haley's reflexes that she doesn't crash Brooke's car. The question remains: how did she even pass a driving test?

Can we talk about how Haley, now known as Tutor Girl, the girl so quiet and discreet no one knows her name, has a lot of street smarts? I'm not surprised she would be carrying a pocket knife for safety, but she knows how to siphon a gas tank with her mouth. Where did she even learn how to do that?

FASHION REVIEW.

It is a very short one in this episode, as most characters don suits or sporting equipment, but I have to mention my favourite outfit, worn by Peyton (again!) when everyone goes back to school the following Monday. That's my alt, emo kid heart speaking, but I am head over heels in love with that red plaid skirt, black leather jacket, and low Converse combo.

THE MOST AMERICAN MOMENT.

I think, to me, the main one is all these people going to a high school basketball game over thirty miles away from their hometown, on a Friday night, instead of doing things normal teenagers do to celebrate the weekend. Don't they have dates, parties to attend? Do they have nothing better to do? They just drive (or take the bus!) more than thirty miles to some deserted place called Pickerington to watch their high school basketball team play. Tree Hill High has made sports so cool that people would follow the players on a long drive away from home. I would have barely even gone to my own school for anything outside of studying hours! In my three years of high school, I attended a party because it started at a time I was already there, and one of the drama club plays because one of my friends was in it. Granted, we didn't have much going on. Maybe I had no school spirit, and it's not down to me not growing up in the United States. But as a general rule of thumb, I have a feeling the very concept of school spirit is intrinsically American.

THE MOST 2000s MOMENT

There was a lot, and I loved that about Every Night Is Another Story. In hindsight, it's strange how One Tree Hill was one of the most popular shows of the noughties, but when you ask people about teen dramas from the time, they always quote The O.C or Gossip Girl first. I'll argue that One Tree Hill was the quintessential 2000s programme about normal teenagers, as The O.C and Gossip Girl centered around kids who came from rich families and well-to-do areas.

The first 2000s element in this episode happens to be quite central, and it's Brooke's car. She drives a white Volkswagen New Beetle, and those little guys were EVERYWHERE back in the day. It was to the early 2000s girls what the Fiat 500 is to teens and young women nowadays. I have vivid memories of Mandy Moore driving one to the diner in the Candy music video, and I'm pretty sure Paige Halliwell had a lime one in Charmed. Just a quick search on Google told me it also appeared in N*Sync and Aaron Carter music videos. This car was nothing short of iconic, and I still kinda want one.

The second moment is brought to us by Peyton, and it's her making Lucas a mixtape. Mixtapes were the love letters of the 2000s for kids who believed music expressed their feelings better than their own words ever could, which is exactly what Peyton is. I love how she tries to pass it off as nothing, she calls it "PS Whatever," and tells Lucas not to read into it, but...has any of you ever burnt a CD? It took a long time. It's not the same as picking and choosing a couple of songs on Spotify and having them available at the click of a finger. If you owned the original albums containing the songs you wanted to include on the mix, you had to transfer them onto your computer, maybe fiddle with the file extensions, and then, you burnt them onto a blank CD that you had to buy in person, in a store. She really went the extra mile for something she calls "PS Whatever."

The last one I have noticed happens when the Ravens are sitting on the bus, heading to the fictional town of Pickerington for the basketball game. Someone has put music in the stereo, but Coach Durham decides that he is the one choosing what everyone's listening to. Pretty standard and universal, a tradition that stood the test of time, until you see the music comes out of the stereo in the form of a cassette tape. As someone who doesn't drive yet, I had to ask my brother, also known as the driver of the house, for a timeline, and he stopped having cassette tape players in his car when I was in primary school, which I left in 2001. I loved cassette tapes. It didn't keep very well, but I liked them a lot. (And you can be sure that if my favourite bands ever release them, I get the bank card out. Nostalgia is a funny little thing.)

ALL THE LONELY PEOPLE.

So, I know I previously claimed this episode was light-hearted, but I couldn't help noticing how lonely Karen looks from the outside, even though she seems like the kind of person who would pretend she isn't until the very end. She doesn't have anyone to have adult woman conversations with and ends up asking Lucas for clothing advice. That boy's worn the same outfit and colour combination for the past five episodes, as if he's going to know what's the best dress his mother could wear.

Most importantly, she doesn't have anyone to talk to about Keith and their feelings. Lucas telling her that he would not mind if they ever dated was sweet, but I feel it's time for Karen to find someone else to confide in, someone her age, someone who would understand the implications of potentially dating your best friend better than your teenage son. Things might not be as easy as "you are there for each other, and you've known each other forever, so you might as well date," and a sixteen-year-old boy with no experience may not grasp that, no matter how mature.

And from the way Karen and Keith both told each other, towards the end of the episode, that they pretended their dinner was a date, maybe it wouldn't be too far-fetched to assume that Keith is in the same boat as her, lonely.

PARALLEL LINES.

Is it really an analysis of One Tree Hill if I don't point out the paralleled moments in the plots and the scenes? I didn't think so. In 1x06, we don't get one in two scenes as such, but in parts of the plot. At the basketball game, Nathan and Lucas disagree on their playing and bring girls into the fight, and it ends in fisticuffs. Back at the Small Business League dinner, Dan, true to himself, provokes his brother and points at all his flaws in public. Under the influence of alcohol, Keith tries to swing at him, which leads to nothing as he is much too drunk to aim properly. We see the parallel between our two sets of brothers, disagreeing and on different wavelengths to the point of physical violence, but the aftermath of the two fights couldn't be more opposed. Lucas and Nathan learn to team up to defeat their kidnappers and return to safety, and they even confide in each other. Keith and Dan go their separate ways, the argument unresolved. One of them goes back to a woman who's done with his attitude and needs to see change, and the other one goes back to a woman who's here to mend his broken mind and body.

LUCAS, NATHAN, AND THE THINGS.

After Lucas and Nathan have fought in the middle of a basketball game, been excluded from it, and almost cost the team its undefeated streak, Coach Durham decides to stop the school bus in the middle of nowhere and kick them out, just so they can figure out how to work together in finding their way back home. While the sentiment behind it is honorable and not an awful idea, the question remains: was this the way to go? On paper, we are talking about an adult man, who is responsible for however many underage kids are on the bus, and he decides to abandon two of them in the middle of nowhere, at night, with no phones or wallets. Surely, that can't be legal. Couldn't he just give them detention come Monday or something? If this was the real world, Whitey would be at the very least out of a job by the time the bus reached Tree Hill.

While they are bickering, Lucas and Nathan come across some of the boys from the Pickerington team, and Nathan gets into their car despite Lucas warning him it is a setup. He follows, and they end up being held at fake gunpoint and having to strip down and head into a rest stop shop to buy ridiculous items. The scene heavily reminded me of that episode of Malcolm In The Middle (one of my other favourite TV shows) where Francis escapes his military academy and hitches a ride to Alaska, hoping to find work there. The truck driver who picks him up makes him wear ladies' clothing and make-up and go into a rest stop to buy traditionally embarrassing products. After the services area scene, the Pickerington boys make Lucas and Nathan fight, and the winner gets a ride home. They start punching each other, despite Lucas claiming they won't, but it was only a long-winded and painful-looking ploy for them to steal their car keys and escape.

After the olive branch extended in All That You Can't Leave Behind, I loved that the narrative followed through with the two brothers learning to collaborate to return to safety together, and they even confided in each other- mostly Nathan, who showed a vulnerable side to someone else than Haley.

Also, can we mention "Thing, Thing 1, and Thing 3, because I'm the third?" Comedy GOLD.

WHO THE HELL IS BROOKE DAVIS?

In some of the earlier posts, we started analysing Brooke Davis' character. Is she the cliché of the mean-spirited cheerleader who doesn't see any further than boys and her squad? Is there something more to her, hidden in the clarity with which she talks about her future as a woman? Is she the perfect trope of the overly sexual teenage girl who has done so much stuff she cannot even find a question to ask at a Never Have I Ever game?

At the end of Every Night Is Another Story, I honestly have no idea.

She seems to be portrayed as the cliché of the dumb cheerleader, who's all looks and no brains, especially when she is trying to explain to Peyton her theories about who likes who and calls it all a "love rectangle plus one," seemingly not knowing the word pentagon. Then, after her injury, she attempts at seducing the college student who's taking care of her so he'll give her strong painkillers that she swallows in one go while he is warning her not to, again, playing the dumb cheerleader to perfection. (This reminds me of the one time when, at my old job, I hurt my jaw and the medic was not allowed to give me painkillers, so he just left them there for me to take. The only difference is that I did not have to play pretty girl to get them, he just felt sorry for me being adamant I couldn't go leave even though I should have gone to the emergency room.) Watching Brooke bat her eyelashes and show off her legs tells us that she seems to know how attractive she is, and she feels like her body is the only way she can get what she wants, even if it's just about painkillers.

At the end of the episode, however, while Peyton and Haley are listening to music together, she wakes up, seemingly having sobered up, and she asks them, bewildered: "That's so tragic. You don't actually believe you'll still be friends tomorrow?" It could be interpreted as Brooke Davis, the mean-spirited cheerleader, but I personally see her as Brooke Davis, being insecure and scared of losing her best and closest friend to someone else, someone who seems to have music in common with her, which, as we all know, is massively important to Peyton. So, her defense mechanism is being mean in order to protect herself, her comfortable status quo, and her most precious friendship.

Six episodes in, and we still don't know who the hell Brooke Davis is, and it's fine. She's sixteen, she probably doesn't know either.

FOR FUTURE REFERENCE.

The most important moment to follow for me is Keith confessing his feelings to Karen, taking their friendship somewhere else. "I love you, always have." Is something going to change for our two loneliest hearts?