Master Debater
The Debate Tournament
Episode 6 of Teenage Bounty Hunters begins with Sterling sleeping through numerous messages from Luke checking up on her. However, she’s awoken by Blair excitedly chatting about sex. As she looks at her phone with bleary-eyes, Sterling realizes that Luke has not taken her request for space well. At school the debate tournament looms and both April and Sterling discuss how close they used to be and how different they are now. For now, they decide to set aside their differences for the sake of the team. After that though, they’re back to being enemies. Not long after, Blair and Sterling discuss sex and in particular, Sterling’s lack of climaxing. She suggests Sterling should pleasure herself instead. After school, Yolanda gathers the squad as Bowser briefs them on upcoming skips. He’s going to be using coupons to entice their targets in. Only, Blair and Sterling start goofing around with a bulletproof vest outside… just as their Mother drives past.
Is Debbie Lying?
When they head home to explain what’s going on, Blair realizes Debbie is lying. Sterling however is not so sure. The two take very different stances on this, prompting Sterling to walk away. Blair instead invites Miles over to her house. When Debbie leaves, Blair seizes her opportunity and heads out with Miles to follow her. Eventually Miles has enough and heads home. Left alone, Blair watches as her Mother becomes angry and flustered on the phone. When she hangs up, she sends Blair a message telling her dinner will be late as she’s stuck in traffic. Only… she’s not stuck in traffic so what’s going on here? Sterling starts growing in confidence at the debate tournament, partly thanks to kissing some of the different boys there. Unfortunately this confidence wavers slightly when she gets to the final against the excellent Craig Wu, the master debater at the tournament. April entices Sterling to play guilty and use that as ammunition to take Craig down. April insists too, admitting that Sterling was the reason their friendship broke down. In the past she “gave her away” to another group of friends. This is why April has grudge against her. However, Sterling decides not to help April and throws the competition.
A Plot Twist
April is not happy though and tells Sterling any hope of salvaging their friendship is now lost. In order to deal with her stress, Sterling pleasures herself…while thinking of April. Meanwhile, with all the skips rounded up Yolanda and Bowser take to the road. Only, their camper van breaks down en-route. This prompts Bowser to ring Miss Cathy and have her pick them up on the side of the road. Eventually they make it to the police station where Bowser and Yolanda discuss their past. As the episode closes out, Blair continues to follow her Mum, watching in shock as she picks up a shotgun from a junkyard.
The Episode Review
As we move into the second half of this drama, it appears the bounty hunting is taking a serious back-seat to the teen melodrama. Given this show is called Teenage Bounty Hunters, seeing Bowser single-handedly take on all these skips without the teenage girls seems like a bit of mis-branding for this show. It also doesn’t help that the debate class is so completely random. This randomness is something that’s taken up a lot of the run-time and this episode tries to juggle three different narratives with questionable results. Seeing Blair stake out her Mum is interesting, but do we really need the whole debate class thrown in the middle to offset the pacing? The angle with Sterling actually being bisexual comes completely out the blue too. While I think the idea of her and April getting together is a good one, coming off the back of Sterling pressuring Luke to have sex in episode 1 is not. Still, the ending does leave the door wide open for the rest of the series and it’ll be interesting to see quite what Debbie is hiding.
