Adolescence Recap: 80-20 Thing

What do you think of when you hear the word masculine? That’s the big question in episode three of Adolescence, which occurs seven months after Katie’s death.

This episode takes place entirely inside a children’s mental-health facility, which seems both intentionally cheery and notably depressing. There are screaming boys who came in covered in radiator burns, and all the staff seem all too blasé about the jobs they profess to hate. Guards are omnipresent, but independent psychologist Briony (the excellent Erin Doherty) is able to bring Jamie a hot chocolate (with “sprinkles”) and half of a sandwich for their interview, which takes place in a room full of books, games, and even a couple of computers. Still, for a teenage boy like Jamie, nothing good can come of losing control, either of yourself or of the world around you, and that’s only reiterated later.

What becomes quickly clear is that Jamie’s been convicted of killing Katie. Briony has been employed by Jamie’s family to come in and assess him to make an “independent pre-sentence offense report,” which she says “the judge will read in order to get an understanding of you and your understanding of the charges.” She’s on her fifth visit with him and seems to have developed a rapport.

Things really do seem to be going great between Jamie and Briony at the beginning. They goof around. They talk about granddads and being posh. But as Briony puts the pressure on and turns her questions toward Jamie, he instantly gets defensive. He thinks she’s trying to trick him into saying his dad is somehow at fault or that his dad’s abusive. While Jamie’s quick to note that his dad doesn’t really like hanging out at the pub and treats his mom fairly well, he also says that he “once pulled a shed down when he was in a proper rage” and seemed somehow disappointed when Jamie didn’t excel in sports.

Like his mom, Jamie seems to think he’s bad at everything. People, he says, think he’s ugly. Girls especially. Kids trip and spit on him at school, and he doesn’t seem to think he’s as smart as his sister. But he’s still adamant that he didn’t kill Katie or, more often, that he didn’t do anything wrong.

While in the Adolescence premiere you might have thought Jamie was just some dumb kid who made a mistake, in this episode he seems downright menacing. There are times when he acts his age — even during his freak-outs, which are pretty juvenile — but there are others, like when he stands over Briony, mocking her, when he seems like a full-blown adult. That wild vacillation between the two poles is part of being a teenager, but it also indicates the differences between how Jamie thinks he should be and what he thinks is the appropriate way to get there.

Take, for instance, when Briony starts asking him questions about girls and romantic situations. He’s initially panicked, repeatedly asking her, “Are we allowed to be talking about this?” But she presses on, pretty matter-of-fact, asking Jamie how far he thinks the “normal” 13- or 14-year-old would have gone sexually. Though Jamie’s answers seem reasonable — a little over the clothes petting, with maybe a hand or two below the clothes on the rare occasion — he lies to Briony about how far he’s gone. He backtracks on it fairly quickly, even though he’s not caught, ultimately admitting that really all he’s done is see two photos of girls in his grade without their shirts.

Instantly, Briony asks if one of the girls is Katie. Jamie seems astounded by her guess and says that, yes, one was. Katie had sent the shot to Fidget, whom she fancied, but he had, in turn, sent it around the class Snapchat. While Jamie seems to acknowledge that Katie must have felt pretty shitty about the entire world seeing a pic of her she didn’t want out there, he also says Fidget’s an idiot for sharing it without first gathering more pics of other girls first.

Enter another Jamie freak-out, which seems to come out of nowhere. This time, instead of flinging his cup, he hurls his chair. He’s too angry. He’s pacing. And he’s got Briony on edge. He’s also letting his true thoughts and words out, saying stuff like “When I did what I did,” before backpedaling and blaming Briony for putting words in his mouth.

And while that kind of lashing out might be understandable if you think about Jamie’s situation (who wouldn’t be angry about being in jail, with no control, having to walk through one awful moment of your life over and over and over?), it’s what comes next that cements Briony’s assessment of Jamie. After he shrugs off the bullying and explains to Briony what Katie’s emoji-themed attacks meant, he says he’s not an incel. He does see value in some of Andrew Tate’s “manosphere” stuff, like the “80-20 thing,” as he puts it, or the idea that “80 percent of women are attracted to 20 percent of men.” It might seem like that in middle or high school, when people are incredibly on guard about popularity, perception, and everything. But then he calls Katie a “bitch” and says, “I should have killed her, but I didn’t.”

“All I did was …” Jamie starts and then stops, creepily taunting Briony by saying, “Look at ya. All hopeful like I’m going to say something important.” But then he does, even if he doesn’t know it, admitting that he asked Katie out when she was at her lowest, saying that he thought it was pretty smart to offer to take her to the carnival when everyone else was calling her a slag. “I just thought that she might be weak,” he says. “I thought when she was that weak, she might like me.”

While he thought it was “clever,” he says Katie scoffed and quickly brushed him off, saying that she wasn’t that desperate even then. And while that might seem like a slam to him, it’s incredibly powerful to think of what that would have meant to her, knowing her worth and choosing to be alone and ridiculed rather than coupled up with someone who clearly didn’t know her worth.

Katie doesn’t come away faultless here — what Jamie did when he asked her out was abhorrent, but her Insta-bullying after seemed almost relentlessly uncalled for. Still, Jamie doesn’t understand or find fault in anything he’s done. He might hate himself, in a sense, but he hated her more, telling Briony that he did bring a knife to confront Katie but just wanted to scare her and that he should be commended for not touching her because he “could have touched any part of her body that [he] wanted to” but didn’t. “Most boys would have touched her,” Jamie says, “but I didn’t. So that makes me better, don’t you think?”

And with a crash, right there, the session ends. Briony has enough to make her assessment and tells Jamie she won’t visit him again. It seems unnecessarily harsh, and Jamie calls her out on what he thinks isn’t “a proper good-bye.” He wants to know if she likes him because he likes her, but Briony refuses to answer, either because she can’t bring herself to lie or because, as a professional, she really shouldn’t share much with him one way or another.

If she did like him once, when she was bringing him sandwiches and sharing about her Pop-Pop, it’s clear she doesn’t anymore — especially after Jamie turns on a dime again and starts freaking out, slamming into the glass outside the window and screaming as he’s escorted away. Briony starts to cry, then shudders and stops herself, taking deep breaths before she packs up and leaves the room. Jamie’s fate has been sealed, urged along by years of indoctrination or bad messaging about gender, masculinity, family, women, social media, acceptable emotions, and expectations for himself and others. It’s not one thing or person that turned Jamie into a killer but rather many ingredients coming together into a whole toxic soup.

Stray Observations 

• Every time Jamie seeks reassurance, the mom or people pleaser in me wants to give it to him. Like, “Tell him you like him, Briony! He’s just a boy! What does it matter!” or “Be nicer to him, cops!” But there’s a reason they’re not, that she won’t, and perhaps that’s what I’m learning from this show as well.

• One of Briony’s big questions for Jamie near the end is, “Do you understand what death is,” and while he seems to, I would also argue that most kids really don’t. They know that people or pets go away, but they don’t get that it’s the elimination of possibility and the culling of a branch of humanity that could have done great things, made great kids, and had great friends. I know that it wasn’t until I experienced a death in my own friend group in college that I really got it, that it sank in deeply in a way that felt different. I’m not defending Jamie. What he did was horrible, but I am saying that it’s got to be incredibly hard to parse what’s a normal egomaniacal kid’s belief and what’s malicious or maybe even sociopathic behavior. Long story short, I don’t envy any adult working in a real-life job that shows up on this show.