TVSquad

I wish CBS would wise up and give Joan of Arcadia a new time slot. I love the show, but my weekends are very precious to me, and I hate having to schedule my Friday nights around it. Why not put it on Monday nights, opposite Seventh Heaven or Everwood? It may involve moving a couple of those awful fat guy/hot wife sitcoms, but I think the fans of Still Standing could weather the switch.

Joan of Arcadia concievably appeals to the same audience as The WB's "clean soaps", but it's an infinitely better show. That's partly because there are no "very special episodes" - if someone is going to do drugs, have sex, lie to their parents, etc, they're going to do it because that's what their character needs to do, and they're going to do it when they need to do it - without any regard for sweeps. And don't be afraid of the God stuff - it's not at all heavy handed, it's actually handled very organically.

Okay, back to the episode at hand.

 
Previously on Joan of Arcadia, Joan's wheelchair-bound brother Kevin started dating their mother's friend, a punk-rock ex-nun; and Joan and Adam broke up when she found out that he had cheated on her with Haylie Duff.

Joan is pretty upset about the break-up, and God tells her she has to clean. "It's therapeutic," he says. "Can't I just go to therapy?" she anwers. Joan's cleaning leads her to accidentally set a chain of events in motion, causing a fellow student to file charges of "inappropriate" behavoir against their guidance counselor. The guidance counselor is a hipster man-child, prone to saying things like "high school boys are just hormones and car keys", all of which makes Joan wisely roll her eyes, but he's not a bad guy. The scandal resolves itself somewhat too-cleanly, but it allows Joan to step outside her own misery for most of the episode, and that's a good thing.

Meanwhile, The Punk Rock Ex-Nun (TPREN) - who is prone to saying things like "I want to live when it was okay to have hips and smoke" - thinks Kevin should move out of his parents house. He starts looking for places, and his mom freaks out, thinking he's moving out for the sole purpose of defiling TPREN. She's not far wrong, but when TPREN finds this out, *she* flips out. The episode ends without Kevin and TPREN having reconciled.

There's a little moment at the end of the episode where Joan is standing outside of Adam's workshop, after having had a "closure" talk. She just stands there for a while, and almost-cries as the camera pulls out. It was the kind of genuine teenage moment that Joan of Arcadia does exceedingly well.