Daphne's House Of Cards

Switched At Birth is done until January, sending us off with a pretty somber installment in which the only people happy (for now) were the ones I still maintain shouldn't have gotten married. I can't be too mad, though: the episode answered pretty much all the questions I asked at the top of the summer season.

Daphne (Katie Leclerc) got the most dramatic storyline by far, as her principled extortion of the effectively gross Senator Coto (Matthew Risch) -- threatening exposure of his affair with an intern to get him to reverse his position on an abstinence-only education bill -- finally came to light. Of all Daphne's unsuitable boyfriends, Jace (Matt Kane) was the one I liked the most, even after his penchant for street justice jumped from exploiting a political advantage to stealing cash from an anti-deaf bigot. What I especially appreciated about this episode is that despite the ethical differences that finally broke up Jace and Daphne, in the end we got to see that she still believed in what they did and didn't try to blame him for its having blown up on her. Shows produced with a teen audience must, I imagine, consider their impressionable viewers when they come up with dicey plotlines like this one, and I like that although there's no ambiguity about whether Daphne was wrong for breaking the law, it's equally clear that she did it for the right reasons. It is a bummer that Jace is apparently in danger of getting deported for his troubles, but since all the other guys on this show seem to get multiple cracks at the girls they like...maybe not.

As for Bay (Vanessa Marano): I understand why they zigged with the Ty (Blair Redford) plotline and invented another character to have been touched by post-war PTSD; it wouldn't do for Bay to lose her virginity (at last) with someone who might be mentally ill. And while John (D.W. Moffett) to be paternalistic with her, telling her a white lie about whether he can get Ty assigned out of his unit and spare him from returning to combat, I'm not wild about the way the show seemed to be endorsing Ty's idea of weaseling out of telling Bay the truth about his deployment by letting her think he cheated on her and tricking her into dumping him for it. That shit isn't noble, it's manipulative, and LISTEN UP TEENZ: if someone cares about you, he should respect you enough to trust that if he's honest with you, you can handle it. Unfortunately, the promo for the show's return in January suggests that she might be getting back together with Emmett (Sean Berdy), who is fine, but won't this be the third go-round for these two? Are there literally no other guys in Kansas City?

The resolution of the Angelo (Gilles Marini) baby storyline was...a bit easy. Of course Abby's adoptive fathers would want what's best for her, and wouldn't turn down the opportunity to recover custody, particularly if the guy who seized it from them now realizes what a mistake it was to do so, but under the circumstances, does Angelo even deserve to be part of an open adoption, regardless of his biological status? It's clear now that the only reason he pursued custody anyway was pure ego; the only surprise in his changing his mind was that he didn't hold out a little longer just to try to keep up appearances and make himself look like at least he'd tried. But I'll say this for Angelo: usually when a scumbaggy side character is brought into the fold of a show's cast the way Angelo has been, exposure to the show's other characters will change him in a fundamental way and, over time, make him as likable as everyone in the opening credits. The major shifts in his life's path have altered Angelo a little, but I am impressed that the show hasn't given him a total Chuck Bass-esque makeover: he's still basically a shit, as such a person probably would be in real life.

And as for Toby (Lucas Grabeel): he did finally have premarital sex with his Christian girlfriend, Nikki, and he did finally get (secretly) married anyway. Does anyone care about him yet? I thought not. When's he going to go to school out of state and never come back, already?