Make It Or Break It S1xE6 "Between a Rock and a Hard Place"

[babydraco]

While the real gymnasts tumble in the background, Sasha gives Lauren new moves that will add more Degrees of Difficulty on her beam. Sasha refuses, however, to let Emily add a new difficult move to her bars. She’s not yet top ten material.

“Marty thought I was,” Emily counters.

Enter Marty, who braves the suspicious looks of the gymnasts to go into Sasha’s office, where they jovially insult each other before making an agreement to host an invitational between Boulder and Denver. On the way out, Marty adds that Kelly Parker is now a member of the Denver gym.

Marty and Ronnie have a bittersweet meeting in the parking lot.

Kaylie wants reassuarance from Carter that she’s the only girl he wants to have sex with. Carter insists that’s true. They briefly grasp hands and part. Sasha has seen the whole thing from the mezzanine.

Two gymnasts are talking “I can’t believe Kelly Parker’s coming here,” says one. “Yeah, but we’ve got Payson Keeler,” the other says. Payson runs by and executes a perfect vault. But after she lands, she presses a hand to her lower back as if she’s in pain.

At home, Kim Keeler finds Payson icing her back. Apparently, she has injured it before and her mother wants to warn Sasha about it, but Payson refuses. Sasha calls her into his office anyway, and tries to convince her to sit out the Denver meet. Payson wants a cortisone shot, but her parents will only allow it every few months.

“Other kids parents let them!” Payson argues. Hahaaha…oh, it’s the “my kid wants another cortisone shot” argument all families have.

Lauren tells Summer that “my dad will never marry you” (because early, Steve tells Lauren that “marriage isn’t on the table yet”).

Sasha calls Carter to his trailer (Sasha lives in a trailer outside the gym) and threatens to ruin him if he keeps dating Kaylie, because male gymnasts peak in their twenties, but the girls are peaking now and can’t afford men messing with them.

Kaylie’s father is weighing her and lecturing her about gaining two pounds. After Kaylie leaves the room, her mother comes in and tries to convince Alex to go on vacation with her. Alex insists that now is the time to focus on Kaylie (he intends to keep the scale in the living room as motivation). Ronnie tries to hint that maybe Kaylie wants to be like other sixteen year old girls, but Alex shuts her down with “Kaylie isn’t like real girls, she’s special. She has a dream, don’t you remember what it’s like to have a dream?”

Ronnie wistfully remembers that. And I could go all Jacob Clifton and write five loquacious paragraphs about how gymnastics is a sport that really doesn't allow girls to be real people. I mean, look at these girls. Did you know a gymnast can lose points if the judges spot a bra strap peeking out of her leotard? And because so many of them hit puberty minimally or just very late, they often don't have their periods or fully grown breasts or anything that traditionally marks adult womanhood. Because if they did, their careers would be over.

Summer and Steve have lunch. Steve insists he never told Lauren he didn’t want to marry Summer, that he only downplayed the seriousness of their relationship in order to not psych Lauren out for Nationals. Summer finds it insultingly unmanly that he won’t stand up to Lauren, and makes moves to leave for good when Steve gets down on one knee and proposes in front of the whole café.

Ronnie is sniffling on the phone to Marty, she doesn’t know what to do and needs a friend.

“I’d give anything to have your arms around me right now,” she says just as Kaylie comes home and overhears them from the doorway. “I miss you, Marty.” Kaylie marches in and confronts her mother.

“This is between your father and me,” Ronnie argues.

“How can it be, when he doesn’t even know about it?” Kaylie demands.

“There’s a lot of things your father doesn’t know,” says Ronnie. “He doesn’t know about you and Carter.” Which is just so low, and a definite indication that Ronnie is so desperate to recapture old glory that she regards her own daughter as a threat to that.

Kaylie storms out and drives to some random place, where Carter is waiting in his SUV. She climbs in and he tries to comfort her. She tells him that her mother has basically implied that if Kaylie tries to warn her father, her own indiscretions will be revealed. “You’re the only person I feel like I can trust,” Kaylie sniffles. Carter presents her with his late mother’s necklace, that she told him to give to the girl he wants to spend the rest of his life with, and makes Kaylie promise that “whatever happens between now and then, remember that”.

The Invitational. Summer breaks the news to Lauren that she’ll be sticking around for the foreseeable future. Kelly Parker and the Denver Club arrive. She’s a petite, olive skinned brunette with her hair in two buns. All the other Denver gymnasts have done their hair exactly the same way. I bet that’s how they all wear their hair, all the time, because that’s the sort of hair and wardrobe cliché this show would love. The Rock girls are all wearing the same scrunchy but otherwise, each have an individual way of tying back their hair (Lauren in a fancy French braid, Payson in a ballerina bun, etc).

They hold their own for the first few rotations. But then Payson has a twinge of back pain and steps out of bounds on her final landing in the floor routine. It gets worse from there, after a great vault, she’s moving gingerly and when Sasha asks what her scale of pain is (1-10) she admits it’s a nine. Sasha wants to pull her from the competition, but Payson begs her mother to allow a cortisone shot instead. Kim Keeler finally agrees.

Lauren slips up in her routine, but gets back up and finishes perfectly. It’s Emily’s turn, and Sasha warns her to only do what they practiced. I don’t know if she did or not, I can’t always tell what the subtle differences between the various moves are, but she has a humiliating (although non painful) fall. Boulder loses to Denver by something like three fourths of a point.

Lauren and Steve argue as she gathers her things. He knows she can do that move.

“I learned a new move, Daddy,” Lauren snipes. “It’s called giving up. Like you did when you asked Summer to marry you. You gave up on our dreams, so I figured I could to.” Steve is like what? but Lauren continues, “Who knows. I might give up on our dreams again. In Boston. At Nationals.”

Volunteers to punch her?

Sasha bans Emily from Nationals, and at home, Damon shows up with a postcard from Razor while admitting he is thisclose to wanting to be more than friends with Emily himself.