One-Night-Stand Yields Eighteen-Year Baby

Maddy is a cautionary example of why you don't pick a random guy on Facebook, spend an hour with him, and then have sex: because if he's inexperienced and doesn't know how condoms work, he'll probably get you pregnant. That's what happened with her and Cody, and getting through her pregnancy has been even harder than it normally is with (dumb) teenagers, because her family's never met him, and she could probably barely pick him out of a lineup. But now he's ready to get to know her family and start coming to her doctor's appointments -- just in time for MTV's cameras to arrive!

As trifling MTV teen dads go, Cody seems like a nice enough kid at first -- overwhelmed and kind of dumb, of course, but with good intentions. And since Jen, Maddy's mom, has told Maddy her whole life that if she ever got pregnant, Jen would kick her out of the house, and is now following through on her threat, Cody's even gotten his very nice parents involved: though Jen is giving Maddy until one month after the baby's birth to stay at the family home, Cody's parents Penny and Chad are okay having Maddy move in now, and even sleep in Cody's bed with him...though Maddy is not so cool with that part since she and Cody aren't really even dating now. But never mind that! Chad and Penny have a plan for adding a wall and door and turning their dining room into a room for the baby, and though they give Maddy a chance to kibosh that idea before they actually start the work and spend all the money to renovate and furnish it, she doesn't feel like she has any other options (other than her dad, who lives "an hour away" in another state), so she tells them to go ahead.

Maddy's willing to give Cody a chance as a boyfriend, belatedly, and accepts when he asks her out what will be their first date...or so he spins it. Once they get there, though, it turns out he's actually just ambushing her with the news that he expects her to give the baby his last name: "That's a big thing for me." He doesn't express any good reasons for this, other than that her name may change later in life if she gets married or whatever, so it's short-sighted of her to give that name to the baby. (It seems clear that his real rationale is that he knows Maddy's not that into him and he wants squatter's rights on the baby, but he doesn't say it.) This battle keeps being revisited over and over again, but to her credit, Maddy gives the baby her name at the hospital, and to Cody's (sort of) credit, he's right that this decision on her part coincides with the beginning of the end for the two of them.

But then, Cody doesn't really help himself after the baby's born by never coming around or helping Maddy at all, so even though I feel kind of bad for his parents when Maddy changes her mind about moving in with them after they've already spent a lot of money making room for her and their grandchild, Cody's really the one who did it to them by being so useless, and that's got to be at least a little on them.

In the end, we leave Maddy in Indiana, living with her dad, Brian. Since he seems nice (nicer than Jen, anyway) and has a whole big finished basement for her to live in, this is clearly what she should have planned to do all along. But she's not in school, and spends most of her time at home alone with the baby while her dad's at work. If she hadn't had a baby, she'd be playing basketball, enjoying school, and hanging out with her friends, none of which she can do now. I'm not saying she's ruined her life -- at least for now -- solely because she shaves her hairline...

...but we can't rule it out as a contributing factor.