"Wayward": A troubled youth school in 2003 and 2025, with gay teases, annoying misdirections, delinquent muscle, and Patrick's penis

 

The 2025 tv series Wayward (one of those annoying Netflix one-word titles) is set at a school for troubled youth, so there's bound to be a lot of 30-year old fitness models playing juvenile delinquents, working out in the gym, lying shirtless in their bunks, and forming gay-subtext buddy-bonds.  I'm in.

Scene 1: A teenage boy (John Daniel), with a bloody shirt, breaks through a window and runs away from the Tall Pines Academy, while spotlights, dogs, and armed guards chase him, and a brainwashing chant plays "You're on your back, crying for your mother.  Your mother's face is a door..."  

Running Boy is trapped by a lake.  He tries to hide under the water, but the brainwashing chant is too much.  He sees a door and screams.

Scene 2: Toronto, 2003.  A lesbian couple, free-spirit Leila and her responsible Girlfriend, are sitting on the roof of their school, smoking and discussing their futures after they break free.  They pledge allegiance to the Beatles, escape from the roof, and are called into the headmaster's office (Patrick J. Adams, left).  He tells Leila that she is failing her classes due to her traumatic past, and dragging the Girlfriend down with her, so she is going to be sent to Tall Pines Academy in the U.S.

Patrick's d*ck after the break

Scene 3: Tall Pines, Vermont, now. A butch/femme lesbian couple, the femme extremely pregnant, head through town.  Butch Alex complains about how old-fashioned and dinky it is, and when they get to the house, complains about its retro 1950s look.  But they have no choice: Detroit turned out to be a shithole, and the Wife grew up here, so they can get a house easily.  Alex decides that she can endure it, and they start making out.

Two lesbian couples?  Nice representation, but how about some gay men?  John Daniel is quite femme in real life.  If Riley isn't dead, maybe he'll be gay.

The 2003 and 2025 timelines are interspliced, but I'm separating them to make the plot easier to understand.

Toronto, 2003:  Leila and her girlfriend are raiding the refrigerator and discussing shrooms.  Girlfriend doesn't like Kyle (Donald Maclean, Jr): he never hangs out, and he's way old, like 26.   In other news, Eli is totally horny for Girlfriend.  Wait -- these girls are straight?  But they're hanging all over each other and discussing their future together.  Sounds like queerbaiting.

Suddenly Girlfriend's Dad Brian (not listed in the IMDB) and the rest of the family appear, all irate.  After kicking Leila out, Dad complains that Girlfriend is going to fail all her classes this year to hang out with a criminal.  Back story: Everyone thinks that Leila murdered her sister.

Leila goes home to a horrible house in Toronto's ghetto, where her mom is watching a tv show about out-of-control kids that terrorize their parents.  Up to her room to get high and burn the Tall Pines Academy brochure.

The next day, the history class is watching The Thomas Crowne Affair with Pierce Brosnan?  The teacher is starting to cry; two hetero students are making out right at their desk. Girlfriend wants to know what this has to do with Canadian history -- it's not even set in Canada.  Uh-oh, Eli  (not listed in the IMDB), starts flirting and proffering pills.  He saw the exams in the staff room, so Leila and Girlfriend are going to break into the school so they can steal the answers. 

When Girlfriend gets home from school, she finds Dad entertaining Bill from Work and his wife, who criticize her outfit and interest in social justice. The parents order her to go upstairs, change clothes, and help with the entertaining, "and pretend to be our daughter."  This causes her to blow up.  Dad grounds her, but she escapes and runs away. 

Left: random guy with no connection to the show.  This review was getting a little beefcake-light.

The girls and Eli sneak into the school, take some shrooms, and frolick before stealing the test questions that will allow them to pass.  Then Leila dumps the Girlfriend to hang out with her boyfriend Kyle. At least she left Eli for you to do stuff with.

Later, Girlfriend tries to sneak back into the house, but the whole family is still up.  Her sister hugs her. Who died?

She goes to bed, but is awakened by men with flashlights, who tie her up, put a bag on her head -- with the parents' permission -- and drag her to a sinister white van. That's hardly a legitimate way to enroll a teen in a troubled youth academy.  

The sun is just coming up when they arrive, and are welcomed by headmaster Leanne.  Wait -- how did they get through American customs with a screaming, tied up girl?

2025 Vermont after the break. Caution: Explicit.

"Decline and Fall": Theology student sent down for immorality in 1930s Oxford, with Oxfordian dicks and bums

 

After Brideshead Revisited appeared on television in 1982, everyone thought that Evelyn Waugh was a gay writer, and started buying up the original novel from 1945, as well as his other novels, Decline and Fall and Vile Bodies.  Turns out that he was straight-ish, regretted the gay romances of his Oxford years, and thought of same-sex love as decadent and immoral, or at best adolescent experimentation that you give up once you are old enough for the "real love" of a woman.   So I don't expect the  2017 BBC adaption of his Decline and Fall, streaming on Amazon Prime, to have any gay characters. 

Or maybe not.  Waugh derived the title and central theme from The Decline and Fall of the West, by Otto Spengler, which theorizes that societies inevitably decline into moral decadence.  Including LGBT people.  So maybe there will be some homophobia.

Scene 1: The Bollinger Club at Scone College, Oxford -- har, har -- is trashing their common room.  Meanwhile, quiet theology student Paul Pennyfeather  (Jack Whitehall, top photo) is sitting quietly with his friend Potts (Matthew Beard, left), who wants to go to a church tomorrow and "make some rubbings."  He means rubbings of tombstones, but...har, har.  Paul refuses, whereupon the friend says "I'll make some rubbings for you."  I'll bet you will...

On his way home, Paul runs afoul of the Bollinger Club, who strip him naked and force him to run across the quad.  Although he is not responsible, he is expelled from Oxford for "moral malfeasance."  

Scene 2: Generally men sent down for moral failings become schoolmasters, and there's a position available in Llanaba, Wales, to teach English, French, German, Latin, and coach cricket.  Paul doesn't speak German, but the job agent tells him to fake it.

Scene 3: Paul arrives at Llanaba, finds his way to the school, which is actually quite ornate, and is introduced to Captain Grimes (Douglas Hodge),  just as he is disciplining a student for whistling.  The other students were whistling, too, but "it makes no difference."  He gets 100 lines, and next time a beating. 

Then the Headmaster  and his daughters, whom Paul snubs.  Not into girls, are you?  He's in charge of the fifth form (15-16 year olds), games, carpentry,  and fire drill, and he'll be giving Best-Chedwyth organ lessons.  "But I don't play the organ."  "You do now."

Scene 4: The shabby Fifth Form classroom.  Headmaster advises Paul not to mention why he was sent down, and rushes away.. The students make fun of "Good morning" and role call, lock his desk drawer, and give him trick chalk. 

Scene 5: After the first class debacle, he rushes to the common room, and meets the hard-drinking Prendergast:  "You'll hate it here.  I do.  We all do."  Then to his room to unpack his stuff and be depressed.

Cut to dinner: teachers have to eat with their students. Paul is still depressed, the students still disrespectful, the food greenish slop.  

Afterwards, Captain Grimes escorts him to the pub. They discuss the Headmaster's two daughters; Grimes is engaged to "the haybale," leaving "the male one" for Paul.

About the Fifth Formers: Don't try to teach them anything, just keep them quiet and beat them.  Grimes isn't cut out for teaching; he keeps getting sacked at private schools for "doing things," but fortunately he's a public school alumnus so he always gets another job. In Britain, "public schools" are like the private schools in America.  

During the War, he "did something" that almost resulted in a firing squad, but because he was a public school alumnus, they just transfered him to Ireland, where you can "do things" without penalty.  Same-sex acts?  But they wouldn't get you a death sentence in Britain at the time

The leering Philbrick (Stephen Graham, left) approaches and asks if either of them would fancy a woman tonight. You got any men? They refuse.  Grimes says that he doesn't really fancy women.

More after the break