Tru Calling’s "Star Crossed" Lovers Sarah Warn, December 2003

The new Fox series Tru Calling, starring Eliza Dushku, featured its first lesbian-themed episode last week, in a story about a forbidden high school romance that almost ends in tragedy. Dushku (Buffy, Bring it On) plays Tru Davies, a morgue worker and recent college graduate who has recently (and inexplicably) begun to live each day twice in order to help the newly-deceased avoid the events that caused their death. In its sixth episode, called "Star Crossed," Tru is called to the scene of a car wreck that killed two teenagers, Adam (Johnny Pacar) and Jen (Rachael Bella). She sees a gold necklace with a diamond pendant around Jen’s neck and immediately assumes Adam and Jen are lovers.

Shortly after the corpse of Adam opens his eyes and begs Tru to "help us!", Tru finds herself back at the beginning of the day, with only a handful of hours to determine what caused the accident and try and stop it. She begins her investigation by visiting the private school Adam attends and going "undercover" as a prospective student, where she befriends Adam and his girlfriend Amy (Melissa Lee). Tru is confused because Amy is not the girl in the car wreck, and her confusion only deepens when she runs into Jen in the cafeteria at lunch and discovers that Jen and Adam barely know each other.

Later that afternoon, Tru interferes in a drag race between Adam and Jen’s brother Derek (Brendan Fletcher), thinking that’s what caused the accident. But later she realizes Jen wasn’t wearing the gold necklace during the drag race, and rushes back to find her. In the woods, Tru discovers Amy giving Jen the necklace as the two girls declare their love for one another, then kiss twice.

Unfortunately, Adam also witnesses this exchange, and, stunned and upset to discover Amy’s deception, he flees the scene. Amy and Jen, meanwhile, are freaked out that their relationship has been discovered, and Amy tells Jen that they must leave town immediately, since they will be treated like lepers once word gets around. Jen protests, but Amy wins out, saying "you know how people in this town talk," and the girls finally agree to go home and pack separately before meeting up in a few hours to leave town.

But before Amy arrives to pick Jen up, Adam shows up at Jen’s house and asks to talk to her in his car. Jen reluctantly agrees, but Adam takes off as soon as she gets in the car, speeding angrily up the winding roads. Unbeknownst to Adam and Jen, Jen’s brother Derek and Tru are following them, because Derek angrily believes that his sister is running away with Adam, whom he despises, and Tru is trying to prevent the accident she knows will kill Adam and Jen.

During the car ride, Adam and Jen have a tense conversation about Jen’s relationship with Adam’s girlfriend, in which Jen tries to calm Adam down by explaining that Amy lied to Adam because she was afraid of losing his friendship:

JEN: She didn’t know how to tell you. She loves you. ADAM (bitterly): But she’s in love with you. When Adam finally stops the car near a cliff to talk with Jen, Derek pulls up right behind him with Tru in the passenger seat and in his anger at his sister and Adam, proceeds to ram Adam’s car into the guardrail. Adam and Jen try to get out of the car but are pinned in between Derek’s car and the guard rail, while Derek continues to ram into them as Tru realizes the guard rail is starting to give way and begs him to stop. Just as Derek’s about to deliver the final blow that will push the car over the edge, Tru tells him that his sister is sleeping with Amy, not Adam, and Derek stops, surprised. Jen and Adam climb quickly out of the car windows just as Amy’s car pulls up behind them, and when Amy rushes over to embrace Jen, Derek realizes that Tru is telling the truth.

Later that night, when Tru recounts the events to a fellow morgue worker, she ends by saying that Amy and Jen decided not to run away after all, but to stay and face the gossip about their relationship. When her coworker comments that it all ended well for the girls, Tru corrects him, saying that "they’ve still got to deal with life now that their little secret is out."

The show’s portrayal of the relationship between Amy and Jen is mixed. One one hand, Amy and Jen appear more level-headed and likeable than either Adam or Jen’s brother Derek, and interestingly, Derek is less upset at the idea of his sister sleeping with Amy than with Adam. Tru also does not appear fazed by the girls’ relationship, once she gets over her initial surprise, and her error at automatically assuming the victims were heterosexual is obvious to both Tru and the viewer.

But the girls’ relationship is also the source of a great deal of fear and deception. Their plan to run away when their relationship is discovered implies both that the girls are involved in something shameful, and that they believe their relationship is so unusual and deviant it could not possibly be accepted by the townspeople. Tru’s repeated references at the end to the girls’ "secret" only reinforces this negative association.

Part of the perceived objection to the girls’ relationship is rooted in class issues: Jen is a scholarship student at the school, and according to the school’s unwritten social rules, rich kids like Adam and Amy are not even supposed to be friends with scholarship students, let alone fall in love with them. "It’s always fun to grow up in the middle of a cliche," Amy comments wryly when Adam explains this dynamic to Tru in the school cafeteria earlier in the day.

Amy clearly doesn’t believe in these class divisions, but she is also the one most afraid of facing disapproval of her relationship with Jen. It is Jen—the one who has less power in the social structure of the town/school—who is willing from the beginning to face the disapproval of the town. Perhaps this is because Jen has less to lose, but it is also likely because Jen has had more experience with adversity than Amy.

Neither girl’s sexuality is identified in the episode—whether Amy is bisexual and just fell out of love with Adam when she met Jen, for example, or whether she was never really attracted to Adam in the first place, is never addressed. Nor do we learn how Amy and Jen got involved in the first place, only that they’ve been in this "secret" relationship for a few months.

Both omissions are understandable given that the series had only forty minutes in which to unfold the entire storyline, but the absence of this information divorces Jen and Amy’s relationship from its context in a way that makes it a little less interesting than it might otherwise have been.

Overall, "Star Crossed" reinforces some negative associations with lesbian relationships, but ultimately delivers a message of tolerance and support for unconventional relationships—whether the relationship is unconventional because it challenges class or gender norms. And despite Jen and Amy’s fears, the truth ultimately averts tragedy (when Tru tells Derek about Jen and Amy), instead of causing it, and helps the girls realize they need to stay and face the potential disapproval of their peers rather than run away.

This makes "Star Crossed" one of the better lesbian episodes so far this season, even if there’s still room for improvement. http://www.afterellen.com/TV/trucalling.html