Oh Hey, Toby. You're Still Here?

Last night's Switched At Birth explored a novel conceit: how might the Vasquez and Kennish families have evolved if Regina (Constance Marie) had contacted John (D.W. Moffett) and Kathryn (Lea Thompson) as soon as she found out that her daughter had been switched with theirs? During a heated argument in the previous episode, Regina had accusingly speculated that John would have sued for custody of both girls, to which John readily replied that he would have...so in the latest episode, during a moment when John's had what seems to be a heart attack and Regina is trying to revive him, the show presents an alternate reality in which that's what happened. Regina, as an active alcoholic when the switch is discovered (the girls are both three) who's had two DUIs, including one with Daphne in the car, is easily discredited as a parent, so that the Kennishes do retain custody of both Daphne and Bay and have a restraining order taken out against Regina preventing her from directly contacting either girl. Flash-forward more than a decade: Daphne (Katie Leclerc) is a typical Buckner Hall richbot, hiding her cochlear implant under her hair, while Bay (Vanessa Marano) feels like a superfluous appendage the family got stuck with because her biological mother was such a fuckup. And Toby (Lucas Grabeel) is...also there. Barely. Not much different from the reality we know.

I can imagine the conversations that led to the creation of the Toby character: though most of the show's drama would focus on the girls who were raised by each other's biological parents, it could be interesting to include the perspective of a sibling who experienced no such disruption. In the absence of any actual middle child, would this other kid be it -- overlooked, forgotten, muddling along without parental oversight?

Turns out...not really. After an early plotline that found Toby in serious gambling debt (resolved by John, accompanied by a stern talking-to, and so obviously still one of the few interesting things Toby's ever done that it comes up in the alternate universe, too), Toby's really had nothing noteworthy to do. He dated a bad girl who jerked him around. Then he met a nice girl whose only apparent "fault" was that she's born-again, and intends to remain celibate now until marriage, so he's going to marry her. That's it -- and that covers forty-five episodes' worth of time we've spent with it (though if you told me that Toby had actually had no lines in half of those, I'd assume that was true).

Toby's engagement to Nikki (Cassi Thomson) seemed like it might be the key to making his character worth watching: it created conflict between Toby and his parents; more recently, it has caused conflict between Toby and Nikki, in that he seems to have no religious convictions at all, never mind any that would clash with hers. Toby's guilting John into appointing him, a total dilettante, the manager of John's car wash over the much more qualified yet Deaf Travis (Ryan Lane), also rife with potential bitterness and recrimination, has apparently gone over fine with everyone involved, except to make Travis consider getting a cochlear implant in order to improve his job prospects.

In fact, you know who's gotten more to do and is intrinsically more compelling than Toby? Travis. An ambitious Deaf high school student estranged from his hearing family and pondering his future is a character I haven't already seen done to death on TV. The bland, inoffensive son of privilege has a thousand TV brothers, and it's enough already. Toby needs to break off his engagement, go away to Berklee School Of Music or somewhere else far from home so the producers don't have to pretend to try to write for him, and devote more of their attention to Travis. They can start by giving him the job he actually deserves. And maybe he can start dating Nikki.