Summary
In the aftermath of his very public relationship with Claire, Eric, now in college, tries and fails miserably to live a normal life.
This recap of A Teacher season 1, episode 7 contains spoilers. You can check out our thoughts on the previous episode by clicking these words.
Claire is nowhere to be seen in this week’s episode of A Teacher, but her specter haunts the half-hour nonetheless. An unspecified amount of time has elapsed since her illicit relationship with her student Eric was made public, and now Eric is in college, trying — and unsurprisingly failing — to live a normal life of hard-partying excess with the boys of Omega Kappa Beta.
The problem for Eric is that his newsworthy love life has elevated him to legendary status among the fraternity, and his stand-in “big brother”, Cody, has told everyone who Eric is. Through snippets of dialogue about how awesome Eric is for banging his hot teacher, we learn that said hot teacher went to jail. Eric tries to play up to his reputation, but he’s visibly uncomfortable discussing it. What was a weird topic before is now extra weird since he’s obviously harboring some guilt over the judge throwing the book at Claire.
Despite Eric’s claims to the contrary, he’s not okay, and even in her absence, Claire keeps creeping into every area of his life. When he hooks up with a girl, even she brings it up, and Eric uses all the things Claire taught him to his advantage. But how much of an advantage is it, really? As we’ll see, not particularly advantageous at all.
Through a later conversation with Cody, who thinks it was harsh how severely Claire was punished given they were both consenting sort-of “adults”, we learn that Claire took a plea deal. Eric agrees she was punished too severely — that’s what he said, apparently, but seemingly to no avail. Now, he tries not to think about it, and the only reliable way he seems to have come up with for doing so is drink and drugs. When he’s in his dorm room alone, he Googles her, and the page fills with news stories and mugshots.
Eric’s mother understands all this, even if Eric doesn’t want to hear it. She wants him to go to counseling, especially with Claire getting out in a couple of days, which is news to Eric. He’s adamant he doesn’t need that kind of help but is doing a remarkably poor job of proving it. In fact, when he goes to see his latest hook-up again, he gets openly aggressive when she says that, as a feminist, she feels she should respect the fact he’s a survivor and take things slow. This time when he returns to the frat house he goes a little further, climbing onto the roof of a speeding truck only to be thrown a decent distance during an emergency brake. Predictably, the guys think he’s even more of a legend after this.
His face all covered in scuffs and bruises, Eric is inducted — is that the right word? — into Omega Kappa Beta. The traditional celebrations involve a stripper named Karen who selects Eric for the customary lapdance and gives him a hard time about being a teacher’s pet, which causes him to storm off in something of a panic. On his way out, he confesses to Cody that he doesn’t want to do “this. Any of this.”
At a loss, Eric returns to his dorm where he meets Micah, who’s sitting in the corridor waiting for his roommate to finish having sex. They share some mushrooms and lay outside gawping at the stars, where Eric tearfully confesses to missing Claire.
I don’t know about you, guys, but I don’t think he’s over it.
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