But Oh, Oh Those Summer Nights

Cheers to Switched At Birth for resuming its second season by resetting the action for summer! It's just like what they used to do in the early days of Beverly Hills, 90210, allowing for all kinds of summer-specific plotlines -- Beach Club jobs! Beach Club crushes! Summer school crushes! That really bad sunburn Brenda got that time! -- so obviously, I heartily approve. But I also have questions.

Is Toby REALLY going to go through with this wedding?

Admittedly, I was young when I got married too, so I can't judge that hard, but...you know, it was after grad school. Toby (Lucas Grabeel) just finished high school, and Nikki (Cassi Thomson) is possibly even younger than that. I have to assume that the differences of class and values between them and their families, which are starting to appear through the wedding-planning process, are eventually going to get less and less tractable until Nikki and Toby can no longer ignore them and break up, which is to say, I hope they will. If we learned nothing else from Preachers' Daughters (and WE DIDN'T), it's that getting married in your teens, to a Christian, because you want to bone him or her under circumstances God is cool with, is a series of bad ideas.

What's with this cocky British guy, and where will he end up in the pantheon of Daphne's bad boyfriend choices?

I guess I understand that it's probably a challenge for Switched producers to integrate new hearing characters into plotlines that revolve around Deaf characters -- hence this bro Jace (Matt Kane), who makes sure to tell us he is not autistic, but that he picks up a new skill -- excuse me, a "new thing" -- every month, so he has superhuman autodidactic powers. Fine. Will one of his self-taught ASL lessons cover why you don't refer to it as a "thing," as though it were something easy and inconsequential (like hacky sack) or an affectation (like trick card shuffling). And is there any chance that Daphne (Katie Leclerc) won't fall for his line of bullshit, like she did with Wilke (Austin Butler)? Or Jeff (Justin Bruening)? Because bullshit seems like it might be one of her favourite things.

Did Ty come back from military service...wrong?

I will say I'm glad the show isn't portraying Ty (Blair Redford) and his over-the-top freakout about his buddy's text prank on Bay (Vanessa Marano) as though it's nice or flattering when a guy is violent, as long as it's on your behalf, because it isn't. Presumably this is headed toward a PTSD plotline, because if The Client List can do it, literally anyone can.

How closely will Bay's summer job experience hew to the plot of Adventureland?

How will she customize her uniform t-shirt? Will she be Maui, Kansas's answer to Lisa P.? And how about that store-brand Dan Byrd they got to play the manager?

Where are they going with this storyline about Travis's virginity?

Travis (Ryan Lane), Emmett (Sean Berdy), and Melody (Marlee Matlin) seem to be doing pretty well with their current living arrangement: Travis has a cool wingman in Emmett, and Melody doesn't even particularly seem to care that they're hooking up in her house when she's not there. So naturally that whole thing where Travis pretended Melody was Emmett's ex with the chicas, and then admitted to Emmett that he had never Done It with a girl, was foreshadowing for when Travis eventually loses his virginity to...MELODY?! I'm just saying, things have to fall apart for some reason, and that would do it.

Is the show taking a hard line on the nature vs. nurture question?

In the world of the show, since the events of the last episode, Regina (Constance Marie) has been undergoing in-patient rehab for her alcoholism, leaving Daphne to seek parental attention from the nearest substitutes: Kathryn (Lea Thompson) and John (D.W. Moffett). Meanwhile, as her bitterness toward Daphne over that boy they both liked continues to grow, Bay is getting increasingly resentful of the ways Daphne is assimilating: enjoying the country club, sucking down smoothies, "managing" her mother with cool politesse when the dinner-table conversation gets too testy. As Daphne decides to move in with her biological parents, Bay is rejecting them: ditching her job at John's campaign office and staying over with Regina in the loft while Angelo (Gilles Marini) is out of town -- even reconnecting with Ty, a guy who, had Bay grown up in East Riverside, might have been her first boyfriend. The show has always dealt with the ways Bay never felt entirely at home in her family, but for Daphne to be pulling away from Regina is new; now both girls seem to be reconstructing the families of their births. But will they stick?