Logan, as you may recall, is both Mary-Anne’s boyfriend and a BSC associate member, meaning he babysits occasionally but isn’t really in the club. When the official club members are all booked out and Logan can’t help, Mary-Anne suggests that they extend affiliate membership to more boys.
But Kristy–is shockingly into gender roles. Like, Kristy, seriously, have some self-awareness. She doesn’t want to have the boys babysit, but the rest of the group convinces her.
And then they teach the boys how to diaper baby dolls. They also pretend to be screaming/crying children who want cookies, which is weird and kinda freaking me out. Mallory even wears a bib while a boy her age attempts to feed her baby food, which she refuses. WTF. WHERE ARE THE PARENTS.
I understand most people are like worried about their kids drinking or doing drugs, but if I ever find my teenaged daughter wearing a bib while a teenaged boy tries to feed her baby food, I will lose my *$%#ing mind.
Meanwhile, Kristy follows a boy around on a trial-sitting date, with a notepad, and a judge-y face. But this boy sitter teaches the kids to make french toast right on the counter and I think that’s chill as long as he cleans up because all of those germs are getting killed in the frying pan anyway, right? I dunno…I’m not a big cooker…so please don’t take my word on food safety…but it looks like they’re having fun!
TBH these boysitters seem like fun and none of the kids are sick or injured or failing school or whatever…so it sort of seems like the BSC members are being sticks in the mud for no reason.
Some of the kids climb on the roof while Kristy is sitting, so yeah, I see how that is a problem…um but maybe you should have been WATCHING them Kristy instead of talking to only one of the children while you didn’t even know WHERE the others were.
She tries to blame the boysitter for teaching them to climb, but the little boys tell her that he didn’t let them climb on the roof. EYES AND EARS, KRISTY, EYES AND EARS. All he did was show them how to climb a tree and Claudia was all like, “it could be dangerous.”
SMH. YOU’RE KILLING ME, BSC. I don’t want to side with the males, but like they’re right. There is nothing wrong with teaching a kid to climb a tree as long as you pay attention and don’t let them climb buildings because you’re chilling and not watching out. And you know what, teenage girls know that just as much as teenage boys. So, frankly, I’m mad at this TV show for acting like having fun while still being appropriately safe is a male-centric trait.
Vindictive bitch that she is, Kristy has the boysitters take the kids to an arcade for the day, hoping they’ll fail. Oh right, child’s best interest at heart, always, Kristy? Like this was all about keeping the kids safe??
The two boysitters loose the kids and they panic. It’s totally heart-wrenching to watch. Honestly, I’m not sure that two BSC members could have done any better. They probably have enough experience at this point to have a better sitter:child ratio and it’s sketchy and cruel that they set less-experienced sitters up to fail.
Luckily, the BSC happens to be walking by when the kids appear unattended, so Mallory and Dawn low-key swoop in to make sure nothing bad happens. But they don’t announce their presence to the boysitters and instead hover in the periphery because they still want to be self-righteous and mean…ahhh junior high school over-developed sense of superiority…
Kristy finally confronts the boys and tells them that no one could have handled the situation. Realizing that they’ve been setup, one boy asks why Kristy let them take the kids to the arcade on a busy Saturday when she knew it would be bedlam, but the other boy interrupts him and says they wouldn’t have listened to her anyway.
I mean…but that still doesn’t really make it okay…
Oh well, they all decide to be friends.
Very Special Lesson: When hiring new employees, criticize their approaches, set them up to fail, and somehow, miraculously, they will still like you and want to work with you.
Things start off ominously in this episode of The Baby-Sitters Club. There’s a sketchy haunted house and Claudia is being super cryptic about something. Actually, it turns out she’s failing out of middle school. Her mom’s set her up with a tutor but she’s going to have to miss out on some BSC meetings. No big deal though, she can just explain the situation to her friends.
So the baby-sitters decide to take the kids outside to investigate. Yep, that’s right, the people you trust to keep your children safe while you are at the mall are taking them on a literal witch hunt. They evacuate the woods when they find a sick looking dog and a hear strange noises coming from the general vicinity of Ms. Slade’s house.
Dawn, Jessi, and Kristy enter the house for the rescue mission. They make Mallory wait outside and watch the door. Claudia hears them poking around and tells them that Mrs. Slade is definitely not a witch. She’s a former vet who is now tutoring Claudia in biology. So now the BSC has sent a veterinarian out looking for a hurt dog and Claudia is basically like you jerks, she will stay out there all night.
Mary Anne asks Logan to babysit with her and all of the girls ooh and ah like it’s a “date,” which for them it probably is because I love The BSC but they’re not exactly the coolest bunch of middle schoolers. Kristy complains about how every boy at school is gross, but this isn’t shocking because I’m 99.99% sure that she’s in the closet.
Kristy observes this and makes a big deal about it to Mary Anne, who just like doesn’t really care. She completely trusts Logan…that is until Marci comes up to her at the skate park and says she’s looking for Logan. She says he promised to meet her there. The rest of the BSC decides to spy on Logan so they can figure out what’s really going on. But Mary Anne still trusts him and tells them all to chill.
Hm. So this is interesting. She didn’t confront him. But she also like pushed him away when he asked her if she still wanted him to babysit with her. She was all like “You go have fun at the party. I’ll be fine alone.” MARY ANNE. NO. ugh.
When she finally talks to him she realizes that he never agreed to go to the party with Marci. They’re lab partners and Marci just decided to tell everyone they were dating. Creepy. Then Logan and Mary Anne promise each other that they’ll always talk to each other if something bothers them. Omg. So freaking adorable.
So, what now? Well don’t expect JB Fletcher to disappear from this blog entirely. I am of course under an ethical obligation to review “A Murderous Muse,” featuring patron saint of The Very Special Blog, Jenny Lewis. And I’m pretty curious to see the 
After the mall, the sitters head on over to the hospital to throw a Christmas party for the kids. Everyone has markers and big pads of paper except for Mallory who gets the bitch job of sorting out the paper chain. Dawn wants to make Christmas cookies when she and Stacey babysit some obnoxious little boys, including little Pete from The Adventures of Pete and Pete. Dawn gets all self-conscious when she realizes that she’s totally disregarded Stacey’s diabetes. I don’t know how she forgot since Stacey mentions it like every other sentence.
Of course, Stacey ends up on the hospital because all she has eaten in the past day is cookies and chocolate. I knew (of) a couple of diabetic kids growing up and once they were old enough to realize that sugar could literally kill them, I never remember any of them tempted to gorge themselves on it, so I can only assume that this is some kind of risky adolescent rebellion on Stacey’s part. Drugs seem pretty hard to come by in Stonybrook, so it looks like everyone has to settle for a sugar high. Otherwise, this seems like a pretty serious cry for help. Why aren’t we talking about Stacey’s clearly self-destructive tendencies, instead of being all like “lay off the cookies, Stace.” Everything turns out okay though because Stacey gets to come to the party with all of the other children…which makes me wonder why the babysitters are only throwing a party for young children. Wouldn’t it suck to be thirteen and stuck in the hospital? I’m thinking that these girls don’t actually interact with their peers outside of this club. Would they even be friends if they weren’t also business associates?
Once upon a time in the ‘90’s, there was this little gem of a show based on Ann M. Martin’s classic book series about a group of middle school girls who spend their free time in a club devoted to babysitting. This show must have been filmed at Astoria Studios because even Dawn, who is supposed to be from California, sounds like she’s from the tri-state region. If you were a girl child of the ’90’s you could not escape this book series. There was bossy Kristy, artsy Claudia, fashionista Stacey, California Casual Dawn, good-girl Mary Anne, ballerina Jesse, and Mallory who had red hair, wore glasses, and other than that had no defining features. I hated this episode as a kid because I thought it was a flashback episode full of clips from episodes I had never seen. As it turns out, it’s a clip show full of new material. I guess these were ideas Ann M. Martin had but never felt like turning into a full length book, and the TV show decided that these random clips would make the best series finale, which just goes to show you that not all very special episodes are about terrible topics. It’s the last day of school and the BSC is having a slumber party. Jessie is nervous about going to dance camp, Kristy is excited about going to softball camp, and Mary-Anne is totally bummed that she see won’t see her friends every day for two months. All of these thoughts about their impending separation lead the girls to reminisce about how they first began the club.
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