Chasing Life - It All Hits the Fan (S1E5)

CHASING LIFE

REVIEW S1E5: The Family That Lies Together

"Either you tell them or I will"

Its date night and Boyfriend Dominic, and April decide to go see a psychic, and after an intuitive reading where the psychic hints that the key to Aprils health may lie with her "sisters" April is all shook up. The next morning April faints at the breakfast table and flashes back to a time when her dad was alive. Playing it off as nothing, April goes out to meet Beth, and then heads to work. After talking to Beth about what the psychic said, April begins to look for her mystery sister, Natalie Ortiz. She ends up getting information about Natalie through the car she rented. After getting Natalie's vitals, she digs through all of her dad's stuff where she finds a picture of her dad, Natalie, and her uncle George.

After giving her mom a BS answer about the pills, when her mom shows up at her work, April confronts zero Uncle George about Natalie. But Aprils Mom doesn't buy it, and she follows April to George's office, where she confronts him about "ruining" Aprils life. George takes it and doesn't say anything about April having Cancer. When April gets home she's faced with an intervention by her entire family, where Uncle George threatens that if she doesn't tell what's going on, he will. April admits to the family that she has leukemia. During the intervention George gets a call with the results of the biopsy. After finding out April has AML, her mom tries to run everything and get treatment started as soon as possible. But all of this information stresses April out so she takes off.

IN OTHER NEWS: Greer tries to play nice with Brenna at school but Brenna ignores her. As she tries to deal with the news about April’s diagnosis, she turns to her old friends from school for support, but they seem to not care enough to comfort her. When she got nothing from them she tells Ford but instead of comforting her he goes on a tangent about chemicals in the food, which doesn't help Brenna at all. During this conversation Beth stops buy Brenna's work hoping she will talk to her, when that doesn't work she invites Brenna and Ford to an outdoor movie, Pretty in Pink. Turns out Greer is at the movie too, and decides to sit with Ford, Beth and Brenna. After seeing how Brenna acts around Greer, and Brenna admits that she doesn't label herself, Beth suggests that Brenna be open to a relationship with Greer. After the intervention Brenna calls and meets up with Greer she finds the comfort she was seeking. Mom falls apart after hearing the April has cancer, its grandma who firmly reaffirms to April that everything will be ok. Grandma refuses for her granddaughter to die before she does. After both April and Brenna run away from the intervention Uncle George and Mom get into it again. It turns there is more to the story than everyone knows about. George didn't decide not to go to the funeral, Aprils mom asked him not to come. And it sounds as if she knows about Natalie as well.

REVIEW: Finally the mom and this family begin to act like one. After a fainting spell, bruises on her back and the noticeable amount of secrets Aprils’ been keeping I thought it was realistic that Mom decided to snoop threw Aprils things. It was an invasion of April’s privacy’s, absolutely, but still something that a worried mother would do in this circumstance. I have finally gotten what I begging the writers to do but somehow it almost felt like a letdown. Once again instead of fighting and facing her illness head on, April is running away again. I’m tired of the running I want her to stay and fight, that being said this was definitely one of Chasing Life’s better episodes this season. I have often been harsh on her, so it may come as a surprise that the one character/ actress in this episode that truly shined is Ms. Haley Ramm as Brenna , she played this feeling of scared- helplessness perfectly. Haley Ramm portrayed a young woman desperately needing comfort but not knowing how to ask for it, and that came across well on screen, I wasn’t sure that Brenna as a character or Haley as an actress could handle but she did it beautifully. Agree or Disagree with anything we've said, well tell us in the comments. Have nothing to say? Then catch us next week when Chasing Life continues.