User blog:Eikakou/Anne (CBC series), season 3, episode 6 - The Summit of My Desires review

Hahaha, after a big catch-up, I think I'm back on track this week? And wow, what a roller coaster of an episode.

There's a lot of hopes in the air, but a lot that drop very quickly back down to earth in this episode.

Spoilers ahead!

---

So it's county fair time and everyone wants to put up their best front: Marilla wants to defend her plum puff winning streak, while Matthew is hoping to get a prize with his very large radish and Anne wants to win making a cake she learned from Mary. But since the county fair is also an opportunity to meet people from out of town, Josie's mother wants to make sure her daughter keeps the eye of Billy, while Gilbert has invited Winifred and her parents.

As soon as I saw Anne had a terrible cold while trying to make her Mary cake, I knew what was going to happen. Breaking the vanilla bottle sealed it. The added twist is that Gilbert has dropped by to borrow cufflinks from Matthew and now poor Anne is even more confused. When she drops by Diana's house to borrow a dress, Diana suggests the unsaid possibility: Anne has a crush on Gilbert. Minnie May is more interested in making fun of Diana going to Paris for finishing school and also her new secret interest in reading Frankenstein. But now that the idea is in Anne's head, she's got to figure out if love is in the cards for her, specifically if it involves Gilbert.

The fair is as exciting as expected - there's even a hot-air balloon ride! Everyone is there, including Ka'kwet's family and the entire Baynard clan. Rachel sighs and tells some ladies about Miss Stacy, the trouser wearing sharpshooter who is honestly a wonderful woman, but just won't let Rachel find her a man. Prissy is back in town and she tells Jane how much she's enjoying college, as well as her plans to make business back home boom (considering both the sisters know that Billy is too stupid make the family business flourish), while Billy demonstrates that he is one of those people who talk big and fails to win the strongman game after multiple attempts to show off to Josie. Even funnier - Jerry tries next and wins on the first try.

While the Barrys finish discussing business with Bash and Gilbert about including their farm's apples in their exports, politely try not to get too friendly with the Baynards, and get distracted with Minnie May's (as her father proudly calls it) domination of the fishing game, Jerry sneaks over to give Diana the prize he won. She's delighted and he asks for a kiss. A very gentlemanly one on her hand. She gives him one on the lips. I'm not ashamed to admit, I squealed a little on the inside. But given that the Barrys are not comfortable with the Baynards, how far can their forbidden romance go? D=

Gilbert's been worried about making a good impression on Winifred and her parents. He tries to play it off as casual, but Bash points out that if a woman is introducing you to her parents, it's anything but casual. What's more, he asks if Gilbert is serious about Winifred - well, Gil says that Winifred is easy to be with, but that's not the same as saying he has feelings for her. But despite his nerves, Winifred's parents seem to like him (and Winifred's father has the same sense of humour as his daughter) and when Gil takes the leap to introduce Bash and Delphine as his family, the Rose family is very kind and welcoming to them.

So back to Anne - she finds a fortune-teller. In my belief, most of these people are just really good at reading people. Most of the fortune-telling consists of how much someone is giving away, and the rest is vague responses that the listener can interpret in anyway they think. But Anne hears what she wants to hear - that the guy she's thinking of is her true love. She's elated... until she sees Gilbert with Winifred. And then her Mary cake disgusts the judges because it turns out she put liniment in it. And when she runs off, Gilbert stops her at the tunnel of love, where she tries to congratulate him on his courtship with Winifred... only for him to say that he thought Mary would have thought the liniment cake incident would have been hilarious. She's crushed, because she knows she can't even compete with Winifred, who is lovely and nice and a young woman, while Anne is a girl who screwed up a cake.

Poor Anne. Her day started off with amazing expectations, and now she's down at the dusty ground. Matthew feels a little disappointed too - his friend Jack won the largest vegetable contest, though Jack points out that Matthew's radish won the "Most Unusual Prize" (it was nice seeing how Matthew has friends, and also that Jack shares farming tips). Marilla manages to defend her title and seeing that Anne and Matthew need some cheering up, she suggests riding the hot-air balloon despite her own fears of it, and figures out how liniment got into Anne's Mary cake. Everyone is all cheered up!

Until evening. See, there's that barn dance that everyone was practicing for. Anne pushes through it, despite feeling awkward that Gilbert likes someone else and even decides to dance with Charlie of the "women who think too much can't get pregnant", but what's really awful happens to someone else. Billy invites Josie outside and starts getting grabby. She says no and runs back inside, but Billy retaliates to the rejection by spreading lies about how Josie was the one who threw herself at him. Anne is the only one who stands up for Josie to Billy, who shrugs with his male privilege and nobody can claim otherwise.

And it doesn't end the next day, because she's seething that Billy gets a free path while Josie has the take the brunt of what she can tell are false rumours, and their friends just say that Josie's always been vulgar, so they assume Billy's lies are true. It's this anger that nobody believes Josie that gets Anne to print something using the printing press...

So I thought it was an exciting episode. I love how they managed to integrate the liniment cake episode from the original book (I don't remember if the L.M. Montgomery's Anne films got them in and the Sullivan adaptation combined it with the dead mouse in plum pudding incident). When Anne began considering if her feelings for Gilbert were romantic, I got the feeling that her dialogue was being adapted from Anne of the Island, especially when you consider the idea of Winifred as a counterpart of sorts to Christine Stuart. Also, it's nice to see Ruby's affections have been transferred Moody, who seems to actually notice and appreciate her

I was also surprised to see how the plot moved from Anne's hopes for love being sadly crushed, to showing the darker side of relationships where consent is not given. Josie's mother has been cultivating Josie's beauty as a commodity to make her marriageable. It's quite frightening and disgusting to see that Billy, the embodiment of male privilege who will never be punished in nearly every circumstance conceivable, treat Josie as a beautiful commodity for his own consumption. Because their parents are thinking of engaging them, he acts as though it means he can do what he wants with Josie's body and retaliates without a thought as to the extent of how negatively it will impact Josie in the long run. What's more, Anne is the only one acutely sensitive to how unfairly Josie is being treated. It's hard to stay what Anne was planning at the end of the episode, but Anne's always been a fighter, even when she's been dealt the worse blows, and she's certainly not planning of letting her friend go unavenged.