Without Emily

 I was very excited to find after a year-long hiatus that Make It or Break It would be returning to television this spring. As disappointed as I was in the direction they had chosen to take the show in since one of the actors got pregnant, I held out hope that they would be able to turn things around somehow, given a second chance. Emily, because of her underdog status and determination to be strong on her own, is my favorite character and I was deeply hurt that the show's writers responded to the pregnancy of the actress playing her by, in turn, making her character pregnant. As upsetting as it was to see the one known to defy her critics' expectations fall into the most obvious stereotypical mistake of a stupid teenaged girl, I at least comforted myself with the opinion that, if she comes back from this failure, there's surely nothing Emily can't do. Fool that I am, I assured myself that there was no way they could just drop her. Fool that I am.

The actress who played Emily Kmetko has given birth to a beautiful boy, lost her baby weight, and returned to work. She will not, however, return to the Rock. She confirmed herself that she would not be returning to the show and every promotional shot for this season has been of the remaining trio. It's official. Emily is gone. We're back at the status quo.

I can't express enough my disappointment in the writers for taking this path. Although they had to deal with the absence of one gymnast for a significant time period somehow, making Emily get pregnant and run away was a complete cop-out. For one thing, it completely disregards the ever present reality that she is a gymnast and constantly at risk for serious injury. She could have fractured her spine doing the vault, had to be sent to  special rehab center in the Himalayas, and been ready to train again by the time baby Hobbs popped out. It wouldn't be the most creative solution, but neither would it be so ridiculously shameful. Emily, a girl who never had a boyfriend before, was born to a teenaged mother and dreams of going to the Olympics, decides, pretty much out of the blue, that she'll give her love interest her virginity to hold him over for the next two years. Aside from the fact that it's a completely shallow take on what the network is trying to pass for true love, it completely contradicts Emily's assertion that she's spending her life trying not to become her mother. How does she think her mother got that way? Did she not realize sex was involved?

I was irritated, but difficult as it was, I bravely swallowed the pregnancy addition to the storyline and watched the season unwind without one of its principles because I knew they couldn't just throw her away. And yet they continued with the season giving her less than five minutes of attention in the episode following her departure and pulling in another key player to fill out the foursome. Although they tried to revamp the focus of the drama, one can hardly fail to notice that they've essentially tried to fool the viewers into thinking the show is simply going on in a reasonable direction. It's ridiculous to think that the show will thrive without Emily. Cat fights and boyfriend drama aside, she was the reason the show happened in the first place. For five years, Payon, Kaylie, and Lauren were best friends making up the top tier at the rock. They worked hard, they struggled in training, but none of their struggles affected their equilibrium until Emily came along. Emily broke the status quo. Emily changed the paths of their lives. Emily is the reason that they are where they are today, and to go back to being the three top Rock girls with every expectation on making a splash in the Olympics after all that is to pretend that Emily was never there at all, that the "1, 2, 3" that Lauren said was the way it always had been in the pilot episode really is the way that it should be to the end. That they not only succeeded without her at World Championships, but are now heading to the Olympics without so much as a glance back, is a complete disregard of the impact that Emily's presence made on their lives. Lauren was always a good gymnast, but she never would've pushed herself to get gold against her two best friends if she hadn't felt her position in the top tier challenged. Neither would Kaylie have been pushed to choose her gymnastics over everything else and deal with the fallout from her mother's affair if her defense of Emily at the qualifiers hadn't led her to jeopardize her relationship with her boyfriend. As determined as Payson was to win and beat her longtime rival, her deference and trust for her coach would have kept her from endangering her body in the weeks leading up to nationals were it not for having to prove to the coach that abandoned her that she was still a winner. Everything about where the girls stood at the end of Worlds was reflective of the impact that Emily had made on their lives, and yet the choice to exclude her from the climax of the season sends the message that she was never really a part of the team. All because she got knocked up.

Even though I was angry when I first found out that Emily was pregnant, I didn't see it as a career-ender even though the coach insisted in a discussion with Emily's mother over her condition that she couldn't return to gymnastics, that her body couldn't recover from a baby. After all, Payson had come back from a supposed career-ender to win  medal at Worlds in less than a year after proclaiming that a gymnast has between 14 and 20 years old to accomplish anything. There has been among them from the start of the show the idea that they will only be able to survive one Olympic cycle before having to figure out what else they can do with their lives. Up until now, I have forgiven the writers the occasional liberties taken with reality, but I cannot reconcile their determination to build giants in the field of gymnastics with their determination to place such limits on them. While most gymnasts peak in their late teens, one need only look at the record of multiple-time medalist Oksana Chusovitina to see that age doesn't determine winability, nor does a major hormonal change. She's still winning medals in international events despite having a child and at least ten years on all of her competitors. Granted, her situation is not typical, but what about the sport is typical? The very nature of gymnastics dictates smashing through the glass ceiling of human potential, defying every dogma and transcending every obstacle that appears. If the people that competed adhered to the same restraints as regular folks, they'd never be able to throw themselves in the air or pull themselves over those bars. Herein lies the heart of my disappointment, my anger. Emily has had everything against her from the time she was conceived and still excelled beyond expectations for the simple fact that she wanted it and she fought for it. The show now tells us that she's stopped fighting. She can't fight anymore. Every step she's taken towards success has just been a means to the same end. It didn't matter how hard she fought, ABCFamily tells us. She wasn't strong enough. She didn't have the athlete father to push her. She didn't have the rich single parent to devote all his time to her. She didn't have the loving nuclear family to support her. She fell because she had nothing to stand on but her own two feet.

The show without Emily is about three girls who are very different, but very much the same. Their situations are far-fetched not because of what they do, but what happens around them. They all work hard with the guidance of the coach who was acquired for them by one of the parents. They all hit bumps in the road, but end up coming out on top with people who love them to see that they do. They all present a pretty, but distorted view of what it is to fight for your dreams. The show without Emily is not a drama. It's a fairytale. Fairytales are not to be believed.