Welcome back to Teeny Bopper TV Breakdown! Today we recap Breaker High, episode 32, “Regret Me Nots.”
We pick up almost right where last episode left off. Alex and Cassidy play basketball on deck, and as you might imagine things start to get a little physical. They have yet another moment that looks like it might be leading to something when the school bell rings.
After the theme song, Tamira and Sean have the coffeehouse to themselves and are dancing to a jazz record. Either this show is where the La La Land team first found out about Ryan Gosling’s moves, or he wanted to revisit this era of his life, and either way I love it. Tamira’s even a redhead like Emma Stone!
Sean is a bit of an antsy boyfriend, though. He gives Tamira a magnet for their 5-day anniversary, and once they get to New York he wants to buy a whole new wardrobe and get her even more presents so she stays interested. I thought he’d realized he didn’t have to be this insecure with her but I suppose not. Though she does love the roses he somehow found for her, thanks to Jimmy’s advice based on an old Gilligan’s Island episode.
Sean isn’t the only one Jimmy gives Gilligan’s Island-basedadvice to. Ashley wants Alex back, but when they talk in person they just wind up fighting, so Jimmy advises her to write him a note on a typewriter (so he doesn’t recognize her handwriting). Guess neither of them are aware of the potential Alex/Cassidy developments…
Ashley deposits the note on Alex’s classroom desk without him noticing, then moves to a seat a few rows away. Alex doesn’t see the notice until Cassidy sits down next to him, so of course he gets the wrong idea of who it’s from.
In Ashley and Tamira’s cabin that night, when there’s a knock on the door, Ashley is sure it’s Alex coming to find her, but it’s Sean coming to escort Tamira to the coffeehouse for her shift. He gives Tamira yet another gift; when she tries to tell him he doesn’t need to give her a present every time he sees her, Ashley says, “Uh, yeah, you do,” - not every girl is Ashley, Sean!
Cassidy is chattering on about all the touristy things she wants to do in New York that Max would never be up for when, thinking about the note, Alex grabs her face in his hands and kisses her. Cassidy shouts, “Whoa, hold on!” and Alex starts to apologize, but she only wants to throw her gum into the ocean before she reciprocates. And who should come up on deck and find them but Max?
After closing up the coffeehouse, Tamira finds Max sitting on deck by himself. When she asks what’s wrong, he spills what he saw, and she tries to comfort him, but apparently she does it in a way that makes him think it’s okay to kiss her - does he not know about her and Sean?! And then instead of stopping, she kisses him back?!
The next morning, Tamira is telling Ashley about how the night before was better than the sweetest dream when Sean swings by to take her to breakfast and we can see on her face that she’s crashing back to reality. She tries to fake sick to get him to go away; he wants to try and help but eventually gives up. Once he leaves, Tamira asks herself, “What have I done?” and determines she needs to go find Max. Max wakes up on deck, not having wanted to go back to the cabin he shares with Alex, and Tamira does in fact come looking for him right as he’s scampered away.
In the cafeteria, Ashley looks quizzically at Cassidy and Alex sitting together. Alex runs into Max as he gets up to get more breakfast, and asks where he was the night before since he didn’t come home. Max tells Alex he slept on the deck and is otherwise angry, so Alex can tell he knows about him and Cassidy. Cassidy doesn’t care, so Alex tries to agree, but we can tell he has some misgivings.
In the classroom, we get a little insight into all the students’ minds. Tamira is conflicted over having found the perfect guy and then cheating on him with another, yet they’re total opposites. Ashley wonders what Alex could possibly see in Cassidy - “she’s all teeth and no brains.” Cassidy swears she’s over Max but wonders where he is. Alex berates himself for making out with his roommate’s girlfriend while she still has a thing for him. And Sean just thinks Tamira is an angel, while Jimmy makes faces at the class iguana.
Later, Sean finds Tamira in the coffeehouse, where he notes she’s moving quickly for a sick person, and he tries to give her a mixtape of their favorite dance songs. She says she can’t accept it because she doesn’t deserve it; he takes that to mean she thinks she deserves more and says it’s the best he can do, even though we all know she meant the opposite. Instead of telling him the truth right there and then, she just sits there looking like she’s about to cry and lets him leave.
Cassidy finds Alex on deck and, while she jokes, “You’re not about to pull a Max on me, are you?”, he does in fact say they made a big mistake the night before, having both betrayed Max. While Cassidy protests she’s not Max’s girlfriend anymore, Alex realizes that their kiss wasn’t about Alex, it was about Max. It’s exactly what he did to Ashley when things got tough - he jumped into a fling with somebody else. Plus, the way Cassidy looks at Max is the way Alex looks at Ashley, so he just doesn’t want her to make the same mistake he did.
In the coffeehouse, Tamira has evidently shared her situation with Denise. Denise is about to share some advice when Jimmy walks up, trying to continue his role as the “advice guy.” Given his best friendship with Sean, there’s no way Tamira and Denise want to include him in this discussion for real, but Tamira turns it into a hypothetical. From Tamira’s perspective, she knows the guy she has is head over heels for her and is unsure of the other guy, but she has to make her decision based on her feelings, not theirs. Denise is convinced that the feelings have to be returned, otherwise it’s nothing more than a fantasy. As for Jimmy, his advice is to just flip a coin. If it comes up heads and she’s happy, that’s the guy she wants, but if she’s upset, then it’s the other guy. He may actually have a point.
Ashley is in bed looking at a picture of her and Alex when she hears a knock and, assuming she knows who it is, says, “Go away Sean, Tamira’s not here.” But this time, it actually is Alex who opens the door. She acts mad over what happened between Alex and Cassidy, but makes it clear all she knows about was the flirting at breakfast, not the kiss. And it was all right after she poured her heart out in the note; we see the gears in Alex’s brain turning as he finds out she wrote it.
Holding a coin, Tamira dances by herself to a jazz record in the coffeehouse, when Sean asks if he can cut in, and Tamira smiles and says sure. Sean admits he thought he was losing her and that he might have blown it, to which Tamira replies, “I’m the one who almost blew it,” and kisses him, just for being himself. Max walks past and sees them dancing - I think he knows where he stands now.
Don’t change that channel! We’ll be right back on Teeny Bopper TV Breakdown.
