'Everything's Gonna Be Okay' Episode 7: Nicholas' mother makes a wild impression and Matilda gets into Julliard
This article contains spoilers for 'Everything's Gonna Be Okay' Season 1
The episode titled 'Blue Death-Feigning Beetles' sees the likes of Nicholas' (Josh Thomas) mother, Penny (Vivienne Walshe), shocking everyone with her audacious attempts at being a good mother. Sick, in a hospital bed, she video chats with her son as he's in America taking care of his orphaned half-sisters Matilda (Kayla Cromer) and Genevieve (Maeve Press.) This episode feeds on every character's storyline but Penny and Matilda seem to have the majority of the spotlight.
Nicholas decides that he can video chat with his sick mother on his TV in the house and take care of his sisters at the same time - satisfying both parties. His mother claims that her illness isn't serious and later reveals that she has a hysterectomy. Balancing a life of his own while trying to fulfill his obligatory responsibility of making sure his sisters are alright has proven to be hard. In the previous episodes, we see that he only has his mother to look up to for advice and even though Penny is erratic with her decisions as well as her advice, it seems to be a comforting bond between mother and son.
Penny, who is only Nicholas' mother, is asked by her son if she could show some interest in his half-sisters considering he is their guardian. When Genevieve and her friends, Tellulah (Ivy Wolk) and Barb (Lori Mae Hernandez) decide that catfishing Barb's mother was their teenage rebel activity for the night, Penny sets them straight as best as she could. Alex (Adam Faison), Nicholas' boyfriend, seems to have gotten close to Penny over jokes about Nicholas, and realizes where Josh gets his erratic behavior from.
In the background of all this activity, Matilda has her friend Drea (Lillian Carrier) over as they wait to see if Matilda got into Julliard, her dream school. Genevieve is worried because her sister isn't good with social cues or big crowds, because she's on the autism spectrum urges Nicholas to not let her go to New York. Nicholas calms Genevieve down, letting her know that Matilda has always exceeded expectations and this time it will be no different. If anything were to go wrong, Matilda will always have her family to fall back on. Even if Nicholas believes "parenting is constantly dealing with nothing interesting" he somehow manages to calm situations naturally - from teenage antics to worried sisters.
This was a fairly wholesome episode as Nicholas had to deal with the normalcy of repetitive disciplining of teenagers but had to take an important step in his Matilda's life. He chose to follow his father's footsteps and help Matilda overcome her adversities, instead of being selfish and nursing his doubts of if she'll be okay. From the looks of it, we're voting for Matilda excelling at Julliard, and beating the odds that society has put on people on the spectrum.
'Everything's Gonna Be Okay' airs every Thursday at 7.30 pm CST on Freeform