Welcome to Late Night Retro Television Reviews, a feature where we review some of our favorite and least favorite shows of the past!  On Sunday, I will be reviewing the Canadian series, Degrassi: The Next Generation, which aired from 2001 to 2015!  The series can be streamed on YouTube and Tubi.

This week, we have a very special episode of everyone’s favorite Canadian show.  Degrassi goes there!

Episode 2.16 “Message In A Bottle”

(Dir by Bruce McDonald, originally aired on August 1st, 2003)

The school’s basketball team is finally doing well and Jimmy decides to throw a party at his apartment to celebrate.  (As usual, Jimmy’s parents are out of town.)  Paige is having a spa weekend so she doesn’t come.  Ellie is too busy pretending to be Marco’s girlfriend to come.  J.T. and Toby?  Forget it.  This is so not their scene that they’re not even in this episode!

Ashley come to the party with Terri.  If nothing else, this reminds us that Terri is still a character on the show and she hasn’t suffered any school-ending brain damage at the hands of Rick Murray …. not yet, at least.  Jimmy is excited to Ashley.  However, romance will have to wait because Sean shows up drunk and accidentally breaks a liquor bottle.  Jimmy throws a fit.  That’s not a surprise.  Jimmy’s always upset about something.

For that matter, so is Sean.  Sean, however, has more reasons to be upset than Jimmy.  His parents are drunks.  His older brother, Tracker, cannot hold down a job, despite having a supercool name like Tracker.  In this episode, Emma tells Spike and Snake that Sean will be joining them for dinner without bothering to ask Sean beforehand.  Sean actually handles the first part of the dinner fairly well.  But then, during the second half of the dinner, he sneaks some alcohol and becomes convinced that Spike is talking down to him.  Myself, I’m more concerned about the fact that they ate a sushi dinner despite the fact that Spike is pregnant.

Emma comes to Jimmy’s party, looking for Sean after Sean storms out of dinner.  Emma assumes that it’s all her mom’s fault but Sean admits that he’s been drinking and he overreacted.  Sean is stunned when Emma calls her mom for a ride home.  Sean can’t imagine living with a parent who isn’t abusive.  That’s actually really, really sad.  Daniel Clark always did a great job as Sean and that’s certainly the case here.  Clark elevates this episode above being a typical anti-drinking episode.  I appreciated that the episode didn’t judge Sean and that it didn’t lecture him.  It’s as if the show understood that Sean felt bad enough without having every other character go off on him.  At least during the early seasons, that’s one thing that set Degrassi apart from other high school shows.

The episode ends with forgiveness, which was sweet.  Sean thinks Emma is going to dump him.  Emma tells him that everyone makes mistakes.  And that’s true!  This was a good episode.