Hit The Floor Is Kind Of Phony

So Devil Girls Director Olivia (Charlotte Ross) is trying to get to the bottom of what happened to Mia, a Devil Girl who's suddenly disappeared. Exactly why she is so invested is not really clear -- from what we've seen thus far, the Devil Girls are treated as pretty disposable commodities, such that even established veterans have to re-audition for their positions every season. My theories are that either Mia is Olivia's secret daughter -- even though the show's already had one secret-daughter reveal, why not two? -- or that she suspects that Mia's been murdered by someone she would need to protect, like Olivia's ex-Devils star husband, Chase (Rick Fox).

Anyway, regardless of the reason, Olivia's in her car, trying to track Mia down using her last-known contact info, which turns out to be a landline at the place Mia was crashing "for a while." The giveaway that it's a landline: the woman at the other end actually picks up even though she doesn't recognize the number, which, come on, when was the last time you did that with your cell phone. And logically, if you think it through, it has to be a landline: presumably the primary number Mia would have given Olivia would have been her cell phone, and presumably Olivia's tried and failed to reach Mia on that number already, and if Mia was going to give a backup number, it would be for the place she might be, not for a person who may or may not have been anywhere near Mia in the event that a cheerleading emergency were to arise.

Next, Olivia calls her old friend Sloane (Kimberly Elise) and gets an outgoing message that identifies it as belonging to Sloane and Ahsha (Taylour Paige), Sloane's daughter. For story purposes, Olivia has to be calling a landline, because she and Sloane aren't on friendly enough terms for Olivia to have Sloane's current cell number, whereas she'd be able to find a number for a landline that Sloane would have no reason to have unlisted. But...Sloane is a young woman who also has no reason to have a landline anymore; hearing an outgoing message that mentioned both herself and Ahsha made me certain that any moment Sloane was going to hear the message being left on her answering machine and pick up to cut Olivia off because if Sloane is still a user of one dead telecommunication medium, why not all of them? I mean, has Olivia tried her pager?

I get that the realities of contemporary technology make it harder to tell a story like this. In real life, if someone like Mia were to disappear, either willingly or not, all she'd have to do to shake someone like Olivia (that is, not a cop or a private investigator) is cancel her cell phone or just stop answering it. And since the story is that she's disappeared, the show can't get away with the TV convention that characters only ever talk to each other face to face. But when not one but two landline calls are placed in the same scene, which is set in the present day, it's a bit of a clue that the writers on your youth-oriented drama are just a bit older than their target demographic. Hit The Floor takes place in 2013. You can't move the plot forward the same way you might have on Mannix.

All that said, I can't stay mad at a show that ends with this.

True, in the absence of Randy Jackson Presents America's Best Dance Crew, I have to take what I can get, but the Devil Girls can dance, y'all!