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spinelli-gemelli · 20 days ago

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A Degrassi Essay Series About Rick Murray

(Part 5)

In the last post we looked at those students who antagonized Rick in their interactions with him. Let's now focus on those who served as his allies in what was otherwise a miserable school environment for him. This will be a fun post to write considering all of the following characters have different reasons for why they're interacting with Rick, yet they all seemed to have left a strong, positive impact on him.

Darcy

I'm starting with little Miss Edwards because she is the most neutral towards Rick out of everyone on the list. She agreed to kiss Rick for five dollars, Toby being the one to pay her. Because she's a freshman, or as they say in Canada, in Grade 9, she is unaware of who Rick is and why everyone at Degrassi hates his guts. It's her inquiry about Rick's reputation that earns her the five dollars to begin with. We watch this minor scene unfold in "Islands in the Stream" (4x06) as this ninth grader gets Rick's attention while he's walking past her in a hurry and compliments his glasses, causing him to pause and face her. For someone so young, Darcy was very smooth in her delivery. It helps when you don't care about the guy you're being paid to kiss. This prompts Rick to tell Darcy about the "game" he and Toby are playing. Darcy, armed with meta knowledge of the game already, asks what she can do to help him win, and that's when Rick replies with, "A kiss." He tells her he doesn't need a lips or a cheek kiss, but before he can finish his sentence, Darcy stretches up and smooches him on the cheek, and we cut to see Rick grinning from ear to ear afterward. Hell, his face is even a soft shade of pink. After all, he was losing this game in a humiliating (and honestly hilarious) defeat, so that kiss must have felt like heaven to him. It kind of shows us as the audience that Rick wasn't all there since he had the audacity to believe that women would be a fan of his after what he did to Terri and after the ribbon campaign that was launched against him just a few weeks ago. I mean c'mon, dude. I guess he assumed that just because the head organizer of the campaign softened her defenses against him, he believed that every other girl would too. Think again!

Here's a fun fact behind this scene. The actress who auditioned for Darcy (Shenae Grimes) read her Darcy lines while a woman in the audition room, who I'm assuming was Linda Schuyler, read lines for Rick. Grimes' audition was an extension of Darcy's scene with Rick. As Darcy is walking away after having kissed Rick, "Rick" (played by Schuyler) asks for Darcy's name, which she has no problem telling him. When Darcy then asks for his name in return, Rick is awkward and can only respond in verbal pauses. "Uhhh...d-uhhh...". It's as if Rick didn't want her to know who he really was for fear of her hating him too. Darcy closes out the scene with the line. "Guys are so weird." No, Darcy. It's just that guy who's weird. The rest of them are simply stupid (lol, just kidding).

Jimmy

Jimmy started off much like Spinner: he was understandably hostile towards Rick in the beginning, then began using every opportunity he could to meddle Rick at school after the protesting died down. We get the famous foreshadowing scene in "Anywhere I Lay My Head" (4x05) where Rick shows up to the Spirit Squad car wash in his mother's black Volkswagen. Jimmy walks up to the driver's window after he notices Rick talking to his girlfriend, Hazel, and threatens to shoot him with the water hose, telling him to "bounce." As Rick is driving away, Jimmy sprays the water gun at the back of Rick's car. Jimmy is also the one who is with Spinner as they both throw him in the dumpster in "Time Stands Still" (4x07).

Something happens though. By fate, Jimmy is Heather Sinclair's replacement on the Whack-Your-Brain team after she falls ill with mononucleosis. Now that they are forced to work together, Jimmy realizes that Rick isn't the worst person on the planet. Rick even gives Jimmy a compliment, as awkward as his speech mannerisms are. "Futility perfected." Rick says to Jimmy during practice drills the day before the finals. Now that Jimmy notices that Rick these days is just minding his nerdy business, he sticks up for Rick in front of Spinner, Jay and Alex.

What a shame that Rick assumed that Jimmy was the culprit behind the paint and feathers prank based on what Spinner and Jay told him. The scene in which Rick approaches Jimmy in the hallway with every intention of shooting him regardless of what Jimmy said is a mixture of frustration and dread. Jimmy, being the bigger person, decided to set aside his differences with Rick and move forward with the seemingly not bad person he was during the time of "Time Stands Still". He was the biggest supporter to Rick on stage as he answered all of the trivia questions correctly on stage. Maybe they wouldn't have been buddies in an alternate future, but similar to the crew that was featured in "The Breakfast Club Episode" of Degrassi (3x16), they would behave civilly towards each other. They would come to an understanding. Jimmy would defend Rick against the bullies in the halls as he promised to Rick before he decided to shoot him. "...and if those guys give you anymore problems, I got your back." Jimmy Brooks being the classic good guy. Sadly it cost him his legs, though none of it was the cause of his own doing. Rick was quick to believe the lie he had been told since Jimmy did resort to plain old bullying like Spinner and Jay after the protesting died down, and that was the Jimmy Rick had in mind as he approached him slowly, blinded by his incorrectly perceived injustice and rage. To Rick, in that moment, he was a fool to believe that Jimmy would really want to be his friend. He should have known it was too good to be true, and in his mind, it was. Jimmy betrayed him.

Emma

Yes, we're talking about Emma again. After she leads the charge against Rick, puts an end to it, sets the record straight about how she feels about him, Rick and Emma tolerate each other as classmates. After all, they seem to share at least three classes together as both of them are in grade ten. Then something happens in "Islands in the Stream" that changes the tone of their relationship. In a bet where Rick and Toby each try to get a kiss from Emma in order to win, she winds up kissing both of them. There's just a bit of...inconsistency in her behavior here. If you're a girl who learns from the upperclassmen about how Rick Murray beat his ex-girlfriend, organized a campaign to get rid of him with said upperclassmen, would you not be disgusted at the thought of kissing him? Being a woman beater is a major turn off. It's one thing if you buy into Rick's repentance and believe that he is different from last year. It's another if you just put up with the fact that he's around, like Emma originally did.

"Things got out of hand, and I stopped it." Emma tells Rick at the end of episode 4x04. "It doesn't mean I like you, and it doesn't mean we're friends." Then, two episodes later, she has no problem pecking him on the cheek? Maybe this was the moment Rick believed that Emma was into him. If you take away this scene in his character arc, then yes it seems like Rick developed this delusion of Emma flirting with him out of thin air, but the fact that she decides to kiss him suggests at the very least she can't dislike the guy the way she implied at the end of "Mercy Street". To Emma, perhaps her motivation to do so was that she didn't want Toby to believe that she was into him, which is why she discretely kissed him on the cheek. Isaacs then went and blabbed about it to his new friend, so Emma, being annoyed that Toby didn't follow her lead, evens the score by kissing Rick. "This is so you're not lonely." She says to Rick before she leans in to make her move. Her attempt to not show any favor towards either boy had the opposite effect on Rick. He seems to think that the fact that Emma kissed him does mean she likes him. She did make it clear two episodes ago that she wasn't his fan. Maybe he's making the implication in his mind after she pecked his cheek--and we're talking a smooch so light and so fast that if you blink, you'd miss it.

Ironically, he doesn't respond to Darcy's kiss the same way he responds to Emma's. In NotaVampyre's video essay, the uploader points out a small detail at the end of episode 4x06. Toby and Rick are plot B of that episode, and in it they have a little competition to see who can get the most girls to kiss them by the end of the day. We learn that Toby wins, managing to get eleven kisses that day, but Rick only had one, which was Darcy, and even that was only because she was paid to do so. In Rick and Toby's final scene, Rick says that Darcy's kiss has given him all of the confidence he needs before strutting down the hall with his supposed new confidence. When Toby asks "To what?", we see Rick's "confidence" is short-lived as Jay looms over him, successfully intimidating Rick to turn the other direction. Rick never goes into an explanation about what he meant, but NotaVampyre suggests that the confidence he's speaking of was meant for asking Emma to be his girlfriend. This suggests that Emma's affectionate gesture towards Rick meant more to him than it did to her. This explains why Rick thought that Emma being more pleasant towards him during episode 4x07 meant that she returned the same feelings he had for her. It wasn't just that she was being nice to him in this episode, but also because of the kiss she gave him in the previous episode. As I write about this, it sounds as if I'm creating a mountain out of a molehill, but from Rick's perspective, this is exactly the point. Any minute, friendly gesture that Rick receives from the opposite sex is inflated in his mind. Hell, the same is true with members of his same sex as we saw in his interactions with Jimmy.

I think the event that began Rick's crush on Emma was that in the beginning, she was the only person who rushed to his aid as the protesting got out of hand. It is suggested that Rick is into blondes after we see his list of his "Top Twenty" crushes at the school (episode 4x06), with Emma and Ms. Hatzilakos both being in his top three. This puts Emma in an uncomfortable and frustrating situation. She's trying to do the right thing and help support Rick on the Whack-Your-Brain team, but because she's smiling at him and being nice to him, Rick assumes that she's now into him, which encourages him to make the moves on her...if you want to call it that. Most of the viewers watching Rick find his tactics to be cringe, awkward, creepy, and uncomfortable. After Rick is humiliated on stage, Emma famously goes after him in the hallway to console him, but unfortunately, Rick misreads her actions yet again. He decides that this is the time to make his big move--he grabs her face and kisses her on the mouth, which causes Emma to pull away from him, shocked, repulsed, and upset. Rick says to her, "I thought you loved me." It's this simple line that lets us know as the audience that Rick doesn't have it all together upstairs. Emma scoffs at him, telling him to get a clue, that she only felt sorry for him.

Before Rick winds up resenting Emma for not reciprocating his love for her, Emma seems to come full circle in her interactions with Rick. This seemed to be very healthy for him until, of course, he was humiliated on stage, and his delusions of Emma flirting with him were shattered when he was forced to face reality. It makes me wonder what would have happened if Rick hadn't been pranked on stage and was still rejected by Emma. Would it have hurt as much if he got to win the tournament and receive positive feedback from all of his pupils? I'm inclined to believe that while, sure, he would have been hurt, he wouldn't have resorted to a gun. Emma's rejection was simply the straw that broke the camel's back, the icing on the cake of despair.

Toby

Toby's character becomes something of a glorified extra in season three all the way to season seven where he actually becomes a recurring guest role in season six. Sadly in t.v. shows that feature a large ensemble cast, some members get thrust into the shadows. The writers don't do this intentionally; however, it is hard to give equal screen time to multiple characters, especially when you're restricted by a tight budget and twenty-two minutes of showtime. That isn't to say that they don't have any significance. In this case, I'm referring to Toby's friendship with Rick. Toby is also the only character in the whole show who Rick remained friends with all the way to his tragic end. I don't believe Rick ever meant to hurt Toby. He was just unfortunate in being caught with one of Rick's targets: Emma.

I see some people say online that one of Toby's worst offenses was befriending Rick: a known abuser. I disagree. Throughout Toby's time at Degrassi, he and his closest friend, J.T., have been growing apart since the beginning of season 3. It is even mentioned in Google's episode description of "Gangsta Gangsta" (3x06), which reads "...while J.T. leaves Toby behind by spending more time with Paige and the popular kids". In season 4 you see the pair of them, along with Manny and Liberty, hanging out in Liberty's hot tub in her backyard, but it is still suggested that J.T. prefers to spend his leisure time with Danny Van Zandt over Toby, and since the cool kids reject Toby, he sees something of himself in Rick. It has nothing to do with the fact that he put Terri in a coma. Some fans say that Toby should have condemned Rick for what he did to Terri rather than form an allegiance with him, which I think is absurd. He's a teenage boy, for one, and adolescent boys don't make for very good activists of any kind. Again, Isaacs related to Rick being a loner, not an abuser, and Rick has since acknowledged how terribly he treated Terri in the past. They were both nerdy outcasts with shared interests in role playing dice and computers. Toby certainly doesn't condone what Rick did last year, but rather accepts who Rick is in the present day as good enough of a friend as he can get at this time. I think that Toby knew that something was off about him after he visited Rick's house the day of the Whack-Your-Brain finals and heard him inflate the truth about their relationship with Jimmy and Emma. Still: it isn't his duty to be an activist. He's a kid who just needs a friend.

I've seen another voice online saying that people underestimate the impact that Toby's friendship had on Rick, a statement that I agree with. While it was certainly a tragedy what Rick did, who knows how much worse it could have been, how much further he could have spiraled, how many more lives he could have devastated, if not for the presence of Toby. It would be unthinkable to bear the brunt of being bullied completely alone with nothing but your private thoughts to console you. There was a moment in episode 4x06 where Jay slams Rick into a locker, and shortly after he does, Toby is right there to offer Rick a hand. Something as simple as helping someone off of the floor after they've been knocked down can make a huge difference to a bullied victim.

It also tells you something about Toby’s character, someone who is boastful about his victories, that he goes out of his way to make sure Rick isn't humiliated at his own game. In this case, Rick deserved to lose in such a mortifying way. A guy with an abusive history needs to keep his ego in check. Still, Toby has a heart and wants Rick to get some satisfaction out of participating in their silly bet, so he pays Darcy to kiss his friend. He even lets Rick believe that the kiss happened organically as Rick is reminiscing about it the next day. Since Jay is around to witness this ordeal, he decides to punish Toby for it by shoving him into a locker. Fun fact: we get another bit of foreshadowing in this scene. Right before Jay pushes Toby into his own locker, he explains to Jay why he did what he did. "Look. Rick’s my friend. I was just trying to save him from humiliation." How sneaky of the writers to tell us what was going to happen to Rick in the next episode! Sadly, Toby wasn't able to save Rick from humiliation when it counted the most.

Rick has also stood up for Toby. We see this in part one of "Time Stands Still." Jimmy has just joined Whack-Your-Brain and is still at odds with Rick at this time. Jay and Spinner come after Toby in an attempt to find Rick. When Toby refuses to give away his friend's whereabouts, Jay punishes him by slamming his face into the water fountain he is drinking out of. When Toby meets up with Rick, Emma, and Jimmy in the gym, he has a bloodied lip. Both Rick and Jimmy know Toby had been attacked, and Jimmy tries to pry information from Toby. Instead, it is Rick who responds to Jimmy, challenging him to see the error of not only his ways but also the ways of his friends. The most poignant part of the dialogue is when Rick says, "Toby doesn't deserve this. Nobody does." This tells the viewers a couple of things. One, it shows that Spinner, Jay, and Alex are actually bullies at this point in the story since they've reared their aggression towards Toby, a kid who, unlike Rick, has done nothing wrong. Secondly, it shows that Rick is thinking of more than just his own suffering, as he is visibly upset at the fact that his bullies came after his friend. I point this out because people tend to say that Rick's return to Degrassi in search of forgiveness is only for the sake of his ego, arguing that he doesn't take into account anything else except his own problems and his own suffering. This scene with Jimmy proves that he is capable of feeling sorry for more than just himself. Abuser or not, Rick’s display of sympathy for Toby proves that he's not the "psycho" that everyone has branded him. Notice that Rick doesn't say "I don't deserve this," which takes the focus away from himself, but rather says that no one deserves to be tortured by other humans, and he is right. Granted, he does say right before how he has "...been suffering for weeks," which suggests that the viewers should garner empathy for Rick's situation, but nonetheless, Rick has the moral high ground for the first time in the series.

While this essay was dedicated to those who showed kindness towards Rick that most would argue he didn't deserve, it's a tragic irony that two of the people on this list are the ones he targeted at the end of his character arc. I remember watching the "Time Stands Still" two-parter and feeling a mix of emotions from indignation, to anxiety, to sadness. Toby could only watch helplessly as his friend was determined to kill his other friend since seventh grade. Before Rick pulled a gun, Toby tried to convince Rick to stay home after the prank, but Rick insisted that that was the one time he wanted to be at school. Toby tries to talk Rick out of it, but Rick isn't hearing any of it. The cold, malicious glare he gives Emma the entire time Sean tries to deescalate the situation is so unnerving. It's like he doesn't even see Toby standing in the halls with them, or doesn't care. Although Rick felt like he was betrayed by Jimmy, Toby was truly betrayed by Rick. I can't imagine being the person associated with a dead school shooter because I was friends with him. Rick might not have aimed a gun at Toby's face, and Toby might not have wrestled for the gun the way Sean did, but he was just as impacted by the shooting as Emma and Sean.

#degrassi #rick murray #degrassi the next generation #the next generation #degrassi confessions #rick murray degrassi #essay writing #essay #emma nelson #toby isaacs #jimmy brooks #darcy edwards

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