Camp - Season 1 Finale - Recap: Summer Send-Off
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Recap and review of Camp - Season 1 Finale - Last Days of Summer:
I haven't exactly been subtle about my love of Camp, even at its most uneven moments. It's a rare kind of show in its relatively effortless mixture of comedy and heart, adding in an equal measure of drama when necessary. "Last Days of Summer" is far from the series at its best, but it's still a great summation of what works about the show. As usual, there's a central, summer camp event around which the storylines are organized, but this time there's more of a focus on where these people will be headed once the summer ends. It's a last hurrah before everyone ventures off into their uncertain futures, and from that standpoint, while it's not a very heavy episode, it's still remarkably poignant. There's honesty here about the intense yet ephemeral nature of love, both young and old, as well as the gaps in understanding faced between friends and enemies of all ages.
So it's the inter-Camp Olympics, and Ridgefield has an unbeaten streak against Little Otter. But the events themselves serve as a window into the individual stories the series is telling. For example, in the episode's strongest story, Buzz (Charles Grounds) is a shadow of his former self. Gone is the happy-go-lucky Buzz of episodes past, replaced by a dour, self-hating Buzz who wears sunglasses to cover up the remnants of the beating that 19-year-old Ridgefield counselor Ryan gave him last week. Matters are made even worse for Buzz once Mack (Rachel Griffiths) embarrasses him in front of the whole camp by going after Ryan. Roger (Rodger Corser) tries to encourage Buzz, and get Mack to back off a bit, but Buzz remains depressed -- at least until Grace (Charlotte Nicdao) confesses her feelings for him, in a terrific scene that showcases the kind of erratic outbursts that Nicdao has proven so capable of carrying off. She kisses Buzz when he stands there, dumbfounded at her confession, lamenting that she has to do everything herself. It's that confused kiss that slowly starts to bring the old Buzz back. After he witnesses Grace demolish Ridgefield's champion eater in the Hot Dog Eating Contest (ignoring the eye-rolling cliche of the camp's only Asian being their entrant into the contest), Buzz is re-energized, and he challenges Ryan in the final event of the games: The Eliminator.
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Of course, it sounds more threatening than it is. It's a decathlon of sorts, involving three events followed by a mile-long sprint through the woods. Mack is mortified to learn that Buzz is competing, but Roger has things covered. Earlier in the Olympics, Roger and Mack have it out during the archery competition: Roger is trying to convince Mack to come with him to Tuscany, while Mack is furious at Roger for employing Ryan and failing to reprimand him for what he did to Buzz. I feel it's pretty clear throughout the episode that Roger is inevitably going to fire Ryan, and is only waiting to teach him a lesson by humiliating him first. With The Eliminator, Roger seizes his chance to make things right. He rigs the first three events by making them competitions at which Buzz will excel (Dizzy Bat, Tea Cup Obstacle Course, and One-Legged Hop). Buzz gets a huge lead in the mile-long sprint as a result. However, the athletic Ryan quickly catches up and taunts Buzz by talking smack about Mack. Pushed to his breaking point, Buzz attacks Ryan and sends them both tumbling down a hill. While we don't see what happens between the boys, it ends with Buzz, covered in leaves, running for his life towards the finish line. Though Ryan tries to catch up, he isn't fast enough to beat Buzz to the finish line. The Ridgefield win streak is over, and Buzz is vindicated in his feud with Ryan. In addition, Roger finally lowers the boom and unceremoniously fires Ryan. It's wonderful stuff, and it's punctuated by the further question of whether Mack has rediscovered her interest in Roger.
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On the subject of Mack's love life, Sheila (Genevieve Hegney), Todd (Adam Garcia) and Raffi (Christopher Kirby) bring her to the realization that she's actually in love with Cole (Nikolai Nikolaeff). Mack still entertains the idea of Tuscany with Roger, but she ultimately can't deny that she doesn't want to lose Cole. For his part, Cole is having trouble deciding on what he wants to do once he learns about the Tuscany offer to Mack, as Roger had sworn that he was over her. This leads to the two men amusingly bickering over Mack, crashing their car in the woods and having a slap fight, after which Cole quits the Alaska job. However, Roger eventually goes grovelling back, saying he needs Cole for the Camp Ridgefield Alaska, and so Cole agrees to come back on for the job. Unfortunately, this comes right as Mack has made her decision to choose Cole. When he reveals to her that he's taken the Alaska job, Mack decides to keep her feelings to herself, particularly after Cole takes the opportunity to thank her for giving him the initiative to make something of himself. And like that, Mack goes from having two romantic options to having nobody.
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And that isn't the only romantic entanglement to face complications. Though Robbie (Tim Pocock) has made amends with Sarah (Dena Kaplan), christening their reignited love with a quickie, there's still a lot of tension between the two. That tension ends up coming out during the swimming event, as Robbie offers to team with Sarah, only to become bitter after the actual event when he learns that all of Camp Ridgefield knows about the affair between her and Miguel. The friction between them causes the team to lose the race, and when Sarah tries to talk to Robbie, he angrily pushes her into the pool. At the final bonfire of the summer, Robbie reveals that he's eager to see the world, and Sarah recognizes that he feels the way now that she did at the start of the summer, before she blew everything up. "Are you going to be mad at me forever?" Sarah asks, sadly. "I hope not," Robbie responds, with a smile. He takes her hand, and it's the most I've liked a storyline between the two all season. It just feels like two adults working through their issues and finding middle ground, even if that middle ground is "I'm not sure we can work right now, even as friends." It's not as if they're saying "never" to a future together, but the summer has taxed them too much to consider it in that moment. And that feels like an honest route for the story to take.
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However, for once, the Sarah/Robbie storyline isn't the most melodramatic. Tonight, that honor belongs to the story of Kip (Thom Green) and Marina (Lily Sullivan). It's a storyline that's fairly overwrought, yet it still works thanks to the goodwill built up by the relationship between the two characters, both of whom are immensely likable. In this storyline, Marina learns that her mother is facing a year in jail for smuggling drugs for her new boyfriend, meaning that she must go live with her aunt in Canada. Of course, as is typical in a storyline like this, the aunt is a judgmental nightmare, immediately believing the worst about Marina and assuming that she's every bit as promiscuous as her mother. And so Kip and Marina decide to run away together, plotting to stay with Kip's cousin in California until they can afford their own place. It's an ambitious plan, the kind only desperate teenagers in love could cook up, and it becomes quickly apparent that it's just not going to work, particularly once Marina catches sight of all the different medications Kip has to take to keep his leukemia at bay. She tells Kip she loves him, and that she cares what happens to him, and so instead of trying to fight things, they should just enjoy the time they have together. Thus, Marina's fate is pretty much sealed...at least until Mack sees Marina's aunt slap her across the face simply for wanting to say goodbye. Mack intercedes and offers to take Marina in as her own. It's a storyline that takes an outpouring of drama and turns it into something genuinely heartfelt. As the summer comes to a close, we have Buzz and Grace becoming the world's most adorable couple, Sarah and Robbie embarking on separate, uncertain futures, Roger and Cole going into business together and leaving Mack behind, and Kip and Marina finding a way to continue their budding relationship.
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As Kip tells his father in the last shot of the season (but hopefully not the series...PLEASE NBC!), Kip tells his father this was "the best summer of my life." While Camp was never perfect, it certainly made for some of the best summer viewing in recent memory. Sure, the stakes were always pretty low, but when a show deftly combines comedy, drama, honesty and heart, stakes become secondary (against all narrative logic) to simply enjoying spending time in this world with these characters. I loved Camp, and it's biggest strength will always be that it was hard not to.