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"Faking It" 2.09: "I Am Liam! I Am Liam!"

Previously on Faking It, Liam spilled the T to Karma, Lauren came out as intersex to Theo, Amy and Reagan did the deed and Duke traded in Shane for a more lucrative brand of chicken.

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Not naming him "Duke Evans" was a real missed opportunity

Amy wakes up next to Reagan but her next-morning post-coital bliss is short-lived when she finally checks Liam's text.

That morning at school Principal Penelope is planning a day-long social experiment: HESTERIA! She's dividing the students up into four castes: The ruling Cloud Spinners; the servant Rain Dwellers; the untouchable Mud Movers; and the enforcer Fire Dancers. Certainly nothing can go disastrously wrong with this scenario!

As she's setting up, Shane and Lauren check in. He's confident that Duke will be texting any minute and she's sure that Theo is on board after her coming out. Amy joins them and reports that Karma knows. Shane is sure Karma will be forgiving but counsels remaining in a public place just in case. Lauren disagrees, stating it wouldn't stop her from "going all Solange in an elevator".

Amy spots Karma and confirms it's true she slept with Liam and apologizes. Karma goes in for a super awkward hug.

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She puts the blame on Liam for "taking advantage" of Amy's vulnerability and "manipulating" her not to tell Karma. Amy's all, yup, that's it, that's exactly what happened. They draw their caste assignments. Amy gets Cloud Spinner and Karma gets Rain Dweller. Amy exercises her absolute Cloud Spinner power and mandates a swap; Karma selects Amy as her personal Rain Dweller servant.

Liam catches up Shane on his side of things and, seeing that Karma has apparently forgiven Amy, hopes he can be forgiven too. The two of them wind up as Mud Movers, as do Lauren and her sidekick Leila (Courtney Kato). Theo draws Fire Dancer along with Brandi (Kara Royster), whom IMDb assures me has appeared before despite my having no memory of her. Lauren tries to engineer a switch between Leila and Theo but he declines, trying to spin it as a Fire Dancer/Mud Mover star-crossed lovers situation.

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Liam approaches Karma and Amy but Karma's having none of it, ordering him to stay away from both of them. Liam refuses but under the rules of the experiment Karma Cloud Spinner can have him "killed" by Nerf arrow and banished to the sub-basement to watch state-mandated abstinence films. Liam retreats.

This temporary setback does not weaken his resolve and he begins bombarding Karma with texts with no response. Shane, similarly textless, blames solar flare activity. All Liam's efforts garner is a decree from the Cloud Spinners, delivered by Amy, that all Mud Movers must relinquish their phones for failing to control their "textual impulses".

As the Fire Dancers gather up the phones, Liam grabs Amy and demands to know why she's letting him take the fall alone when they both wanted to hurt Karma. He thought she had more integrity.

"Zen and The Art of Pagentry"

The Mud Movers are getting gruel for lunch and Lauren is not having it. She approaches the Cloud Spinners' lair but is barred by Brandi. Lauren tells Brandi to, ahem, "back" off and that Theo will not be sharing any of the pot brownie Brandi offered up earlier. Brandi: "It's looking like he prefers brownie to blondie."

Incensed, Lauren foments rebellion with Shane and Liam. She laments not being able to pull a Trojan Horse. The boys don't get it despite being in the class with Lauren that is reading The Iliad right now. Suspecting the rest of the school might be equally clueless, Lauren implements the stratagem.

Inside the Cloud Spinner HQ the Spinners under the leadership of Lauren's other sidekick Lisbeth (Breezy Eslin) are plotting ways to make the MMs suffer. Amy suggests maybe easing up on the MMs and is about to spill to Karma but at the last second diverts to fetching her a diet root beer. At the snack table fellow RD Vashti (Shakira Berrera) warns Amy about the dangers of power, name-checking the Stanford Prison Experiment I linked to above. Students at Stanford were divided into prisoners and guards and the experiment had to be cut drastically short because of prisoner abuses.

As Amy ponders this, Leila hauls in an ice cream cart as "tribute" to their Cloud Spinner overlords. Amy immediately clocks this as a Trojan Horse but her warning goes unheeded. The MM rebels spring from the cart, seize Nerf weapons and demand their phones.

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Lisbeth orders Lauren's execution but after being reminded that she will be returning to the usual social order tomorrow declares the tiny blonde one is under her protection.

Liam tries again to convince Karma to listen and Amy to back him up. Amy tries but every time she tries Karma cuts her off. Liam declares his love for Karma but her response is Nerfing Liam and dispatching him to the sub-basement.

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The MMs continue their protest and Shane transforms Liam into a martyr.

"Zen and The Art of Pagentry"

Karma intends to out Liam as a hypocrite for leading the protest against Fauxgle when he himself stands to inherit the company one day. Amy notes that trashing Liam after he's already "dead" is "the literal definition of overkill". Karma does not care, declaring it her mission to make Liam so despised that he has no choice but to transfer out. She tells Amy to have Principal Penelope to call an assembly.

Lauren approaches Theo again, asking if he ate Brandi's brownie, "literally or figuratively". Gross. He gets that she's worried that his knowing she's intersex will change how he sees her but he sees her as the "strongest, sexiest, most amazing girl" he's ever met and nothing can change that. She still feels like he's pulling away. He's about to explain everything when the assembly announcement interrupts him. They arrange to meet after school.

The MMs have hijacked Karma's assembly with chants of "I am Liam! I am Liam!"

iamliam"I'm Liam, and so is my wife!"

Karma grabs a megaphone and begins to denounce him. Amy's pleas for her to stop go unheard so Amy has no choice but to Nerf her.

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A Fire Dancer denounces Amy as a traitor and Nerfs her as well. The chanting resumes, escalating into open revolt. Lisbeth orders "Kill them all!" and a full scale Nerf/gruel battle erupts.

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After 15 minutes of uncomfortable silence, Amy begs Karma to say something. Karma's furious about the Nerfing but Amy insists it was for her own good, that she was serving to rein in Karma the way Karma reins her in. Liam is shocked that Karma would reveal his Fauxgle connection but she counters that he's the one who's so pro-truth while being filled with secrets. Amy interjects that Liam's family situation is extremely complicated. Karma wonders how she would know and accuses them of having been together more than once.

Amy insists she only went to Liam's to stop him from telling Karma about them. Liam says that Amy only wanted to spare Karma pain but Amy admits that no, she was being selfish. She had done the worst possible thing she could do and couldn't face it. Karma can't forgive her and not Liam. Either she forgives them both or she hates them both. Karma: "Fine. Then I hate you both."

With the experiment over Shane has reclaimed his phone and wiped most  the gruel off. he reports to Lauren that he didn't get a text from Duke but he did get a news alert that Duke signed with Chik-Fauxl-A and "grew a beard. And not in the sexy way; in the Taylor Swift dating Taylor Lautner way." He invites her for Pinkberry but she declines in favor of meeting Theo. Unfortunately Theo fails to show up, leaving Lauren alone and devastated in the courtyard.

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So it looks like our fears last week that this might be it for Duke may have been warranted. No appearance, no text, not even a dick pic. If Duke really has started dating women that may be a bridge too far for Shane. If Duke doesn't come back I'll be looking forward to Shane's rebound guy. You know, Liam has a history of drunken hookups in season finales...

I'm really ready to find out what the hell is going on with Theo. All we have had to go on for weeks is his mysterious phone call and that isn't much to hang a character on. Out with it already, Theo!

As usual the Amy/Karma drama interested me the least. Based on the preview we could get some resolution or the dangling heart necklace could foreshadow a cliffhanger to the back half of the season.

Can we talk for a minute about Principal Penelope's ill-conceived social experiment? While it provided the humor for this episode and Nerf vs. gruel is never not funny, there is just no way a school wouldn't be aware of the Stanford Prison Experiment and would approve the exercise to be run on a school full of underage children. Also slightly uncomfortable was the use of the term "Mud Movers" for the lowest caste what with "mud people" being an actual racist slur. It was a poor basis for an episode that was nonetheless a successful execution.

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