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“Banana” recap (1.04): Happy Birthday, Helen

This week’s Banana begins abruptly: A sleeping woman is startled awake by a noise in her apartment. She grabs a knife and goes after her potential attacker, but when she sees him in her kitchen it’s clear that they know each other. The woman’s name is Helen and it’s her birthday. She tells the man, Eddie, to give her back her keys, because it is not okay that he lets himself into her place. He deflects and asks if she’ll open the gift. It’s a crappy re-gift-some police DVD that she obviously did not want. Eddie asks her out for birthday drinks, but she tells him she’s got a date. He jokes that he can’t wait to meet the guy, and Helen is definitely not laughing. She collects her keys and sends him on his way.

Helen gets ready for her day. She ignores a call from her parents, checks out birthday well-wishes online, messages with Ross (her date for the evening), and gets a video call from her mom. The video doesn’t connect well, and the audio is shaky, so Helen tells her mom that she’s late for work and she’ll call back later. But, you guys, her family is so adorable.

Helen makes it to work on time, but sees a server outside giggling on the phone. She taps the window to get her attention, and the server rolls her eyes at the interruption. The server, Grace, says she was talking to her sick grandmother, so Helen tells her to take the day off. On her way out, Grace replies, “Yes, sir.” Grace is fucking terrible, y’all. Helen is in the middle of her shift when Eddie shows up to apologize again for dropping by. She accepts his apology and asks him to leave, but he waits for her and watches her leave the restaurant. Helen meets up with her date, and they are really, really adorable.

Fucking Eddie shows up mid-kiss, claiming that Helen dropped her wallet and he picked it up to return to her. She immediately tells him that it’s not her wallet, but Eddie ignores her, pulls up a chair, and makes himself right at home at their date. Eddie attempts to out Helen as trans to Ross, but Ross already knows. Eddie is pissed and leaves. Ross very sweetly tells Helen that he really likes her, but it seems like something is unfinished with Eddie. He asks her to call him when it’s really over.

After Ross leaves, Helen finds Eddie and unloads all of her anger on him. She accuses him of sneaking into her flat and watching her sleep, potentially even jerking off to her there. She tells him that Ross was a nice man who didn’t need Viagra to take her to bed, unlike Eddie. A couple of guys overhear this and chuckle, and Eddie is pissed off. Helen storms off, telling him she’s sick of being his fetish.

The next morning, Helen wakes up to multiple messages and notifications on her phone. Eddie has uploaded a bunch of very inappropriate photos to a social networking site. The responses range from concerned friend to cold-hearted judgements about her body to one guy who just thinks it’s hilarious. Helen tries to de-tag herself and delete the images, but they are replaced as quickly as she can take them down. All of a sudden, Eddie uploads a sex video of her, which Grace, the terrible woman from work, immediately “likes.” Helen is a wreck.

Helen goes to work, though she feels like everyone around her knows and is laughing at her. When she arrives, her co-worker tells her she’s not on the schedule today, and, also, she’s going to have to tell their boss about the tape. She says that because Helen interacts with the public, it could have a negative impact on business. Grace comes up to Helen and does her best Mean Girls impression-smiling sweetly while telling her that she’s sure no one watched it all the way through, and that Helen looks better than she thought because she expected “scars and shit.”

Helen goes home to lay on the couch and tries to ignore all of the various phones and computer notifications that constantly ring and ding. She turns everything off and decides to take a bath. She’s about to get in the tub, when she hears a pounding on her door-it’s her family. She hugs her mom and invites them all in.

Her mom asks if she went to the police, but Helen says that they couldn’t do anything to help. Her mom then starts laying into her about how at first they assumed she was tricked into it, but then they realized that Helen knew she was being filmed. Her mom doesn’t understand why Helen would do something like this. It’s victim-blaming, for sure, but it also feels so authentic coming from a loving and worried mother.

The whole time Helen’s mother is going on about things, Helen’s dad is very quiet. Finally, he snaps and says that he’s going to “bloody kill him” before grabbing his coat and rushing out the door. He gets into his car, but Helen stands in front of it begging him to stop. Finally, she tells her dad that he can’t kill Eddie, because he doesn’t know where he lives. Helen’s father breaks down and starts crying inside the car, so Helen joins him.

She apologizes, but he just holds her hand. She tells her dad that there’s a bright side to the situation at least, because this is the first time he has not accidentally called her “Ken” when he lost his temper. They chuckle a bit, and it’s a really sweet moment. Back in the house, the family tries to figure out a way to fix the situation. Helen’s mother is adorably out of touch as she asks Helen’s little brother if he could hack in and remove the video. He tells them that even though he got an IT prize, he’s not very good at it and he’s already tried and failed.

Helen apologizes again to her family, and laments that this is the worst thing. Her mom disagrees, telling her that “watching your little boy be unhappy for 18 years, that’s worse.” She tells Helen that she felt so helpless for so long, and it was truly awful. Helen says that’s bollocks, because she and her dad have always been there, helping Helen through every single first of her life-first tooth, first date, etc. This is just the first time she’s let them do it as their daughter. She tells them that she has friends whose parents just disowned them when they came out, but she couldn’t get rid of her family if she tried.

These are the people that Helen blew off yesterday, and here they have dropped everything to come and be with her in this terrible moment. So many times, when we tell the stories of LGBT people’s relationships with their families, we focus on the tragic. And, please, don’t get me wrong-those are important stories to share. But there is something so wonderfully refreshing about this little band of imperfect humans caring so deeply for one another. The episode ends with Helen’s family pulling out the birthday cake they made for her yesterday, bickering about the fact that it got squashed on the car ride over. And Helen laughs.

This was my favorite episode of Banana so far, and the first one that felt all the way at home in the format of the series. Please check it out and let me know what you thought here in the comments or on twitter @jennalykes.

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