Love Is A Battlefield
Season: 7
Episode: 3
The-N Airdate: 10/12/07
CTV Airdate: 5/19/08
PLOT A SUMMARY: Paige has finally gotten back on her feet and found a job in fashion working as an assistant. Alex is staying with Paige, and thinks Paige’s job is silly despite having no job or plans of her own. Paige’s license is expired, so Alex volunteers to drive Paige anywhere she needs to go. However, one day Alex gets high with Jay and is too stoned to drive, and she leaves Paige stranded. Alex tries to “apologize” by modeling one of the dresses Paige brought home, but it enrages Paige because of how expensive the dress is. Alex is given one final chance to make up for it by delivering chocolates for Paige, but she never delivers them because she was annoyed at how expensive they were. Paige, fed up with Alex thinking her job is a joke, breaks up with Alex and kicks her out.
Out of all of the couples to ever be on Degassi, for me Palex is one of the best….I put them in the top 3. So it pains me watch them suffer such a disappointing demise. It’s just so weird, because if you never watched an episode before this one you would never believe they were ever compatible. They went from hating each other in Season 4, to falling for each other in Season 5 to not giving a crap in Season 7 despite everything they’ve been through.
The thing is it all happened so quickly…Palex is on the rocks and Alex, who was incredibly focused in Season 6, reverted back to slacker mode for no real reason. And Paige’s reaction to Alex’s actions seemed “extreme” in a way. She had every right to be upset, but Paige was mad in the way people are when they’re looking to break up….every thing that person does annoys you. But since when did Palex reach that point?
A positive is that while Alex is unsure about her future, Paige is fully back to being her solid, confident self, and has finally found her calling. But in the case of Love Is A Battlefield, Lauren and Deanna (two fantastic actresses) are given material that feels forced. And with this being Deanna’s final episode, it felt like the show had no choice but to hastily give Palex the axe.
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PLOT B SUMMARY: The school plans to vote on whether or not Degrassi and Lakehurst should merge their school activities/clubs. Manny is for it while Damian is against it, putting a huge strain on them as they look to rekindle their romance and are deemed the faces of Degrassi/Lakehurst unity. They decide not to get together and joke about race with one another, and their conversation is overheard by Holly J and Anya. This leads to Holly J and Chantay accusing Manny of being a racist. Damian sets the record straight that Manny isn’t racist, and that they didn’t work out because of their different views on the school’s potential merger. In the end, the school does vote to indeed merge Degrassi and Lakehurst’s activities.
This could’ve been a good plot had the show decided to keep it focused on Manny and Damian’s relationship, and the fact they could go toe to toe intellectually. But the second they tried to interject a racial issue into the fold it immediately destroyed this plot’s momentum.
What were you people thinking?
I mean yes, I know what they were thinking….they were trying to correlate racial segregation to the potential segregation of Degrassi and Lakehurst activities. The problem is that didn’t work, at all. It made no sense that Holly J’s nosy ass would disregard the tone of Manny and Damian’s conversation and think Manny is a racist, and it makes even less sense that Chantay would be duped into believing that as well (SEEING AS HOW CHANTAY IS BLACK AND ALL, AND MANNY’S A FRIEND WHO HAS NEVER DISPLAYED RACIST BEHAVIOR BEFORE). After Damian tells everyone Manny isn’t racist, Holly J responds by saying “Then why did she dump you?” I’m pretty sure if Manny were racist she would’ve never tried to date Damian in the first place, but what does it matter when logic and common sense have been thrown out the window by both the characters and the writers?
Kary's Degrassi Blog 
Your review of the subplot is just another reminder to me that Degrassi needs to do a real race plot soon… that subject’s already avoided in the media enough as it is.
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I’m surprised they didn’t go there with Sav and Alli at some point. Someone teasing them at school or something for their race.
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I always thought it’d have been great if a race plot could involve a teacher. I once thought of a fantasy plot in which Clare and Alli work together on an assignment, do the same amount of work, but Alli is given a lower grade because of the teacher’s “issue” with her cultural background/religion.
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Didn’t they sort of do that with Mr. Perino and Danny/Derrick. I mean it really wasn’t based on race though.
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Why would you review any episode from the 7th season? That season sucked as a whole.
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Of course Season 7 sucked, but the goal is for me to (eventually) review every episode. And I don’t feel like reviewing the old ones in order because that’d be boring.
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I still say Season 7 was better than 6 and 8.
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I loveddd season 7! haha
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S7 was when I began to lose interest in Degrassi… but S8 was when I almost gave up on the show altogether. Thank God for Landon Liboiron in S9!
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Damien was such a pointless character and only became interesting in the final episode of the season when he hooked up with Liberty behind Emma’s back.
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Why does everyone hate season 7!? I mean it wasn’t the best but it had some really strong points. I loved Darcy’s rape/freakout/suicidial storyline, Simpson’s ‘pedophile’ storyline, the beginning of Spinner and Jane, Spinner’s cancer/fighting storyline, the introduction of Holly J and Anya and their storylines, Graduation/Prom, Emma’s purple dragon storyline, Mia drinking with Isabella at the party, Sean’s stress from being in the military, Darcy at brat camp, Jimmy’s surgery and dad cheating, Paige’s possible HIV storyline (although I hate that they just dropped that) and more.
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I hated Paige’s out of the blue Degrassi Wears Prada plots. They were just dreadful.
Why could Palex not have broken up as a result of Alex going to a university or college across the country? It’d have been much more consistent with her character development up to the end of season 6.
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I loved season 7, much needed breath of fresh air after 5 and 6. New characters, some more introspective looks on the characters, it was what the show needed.
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Damian was just a pointless character, I think it should be a rule of thumb that unless they have their own A-Plots, they shouldn’t be considered main characters.
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Anyone else notice that Damian is in that Snickers Commercial with Joe Pesci?
Sadly, that’s bigger work than a majority of the cast has done since their departures.
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I saw the guy who played Marco on a helpline commercial, and Jake Epstein was on an episode of that Disney show My Babysitter’s a Vampire (my little brother watches that show. Ugh) and the guy who plays Sean (I completely forgot his name) has like, two lines in the movie Juno…
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Thats not the him. Its just a black dude, ARE YOU SAYING THEY ALL LOOK THE SAME :p
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It’s definitely him.
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I’m telling you, its not him. Take a good hard look at him, then look at the commercial, Mazin is not only much darker, but he has smaller eyes and isn’t that tall. If that doesn’t convince you google “Mazin Elsadig snickers commerical.” Nothing shows up, That isn’t him.
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In hindsight Season 7 was needed, since in introduced characters like Holly J, Sav, Anya, and Jane…but at the time it sucked. No one cared about these randoms characters randomly doing stuff while the older characters were in mostly stupid and boring plots. Same for Season 8, I didn’t really care about Clare, Alli, KC, Connor, etc, and the older characters once again got stupid and boring plots.
Hopefully in Season 11 we’ll see how they balance it out with older characters and the niners and it won’t be as bad as S7 and S8.
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It’s probably going to be significantly worse than Season 7 or 8.
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I just didn’t like how half the cast was more or less dropped after the 6th or 7th season. These are characters that people grew up with for 5 or 6 years; you don’t let them fade or disappear without some decent explanation. You give them a good send-off.
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