One Tree Hill : After the Shooting, Characters are Jerks

One Tree Hill started with a funeral and before they said his name, you had to know Keith died. I don't get the point of bringing him back just to kill him off. But I suppose it was the only way to get the emotional response from the main characters without killing off someone important. Whatever. I felt he was a fuddy-duddy anyway. There are too many "moral centers" on the show as it is; killing one of them can't really hurt much. Everyone thinks Jimmy killed Keith, which adds some tension between Lucas and Mouth.

The division of the show into blocks subtitled with the stages of grief was interesting. It is good to have entertaining shows that have some semblance of reality to them. But I doubt Lucas could have gone all the way to acceptance in less than a week. Then again, this is television. They had to show how it affected everyone, but sucking up the rest of the season to do that would be too much like real life and then lose its appeal.

I get that people feel guilty about things, especially tragedies of this degree. And Lucas' feelings of guilt about being the reason Keith even went into the school is understandable. But any tolerance I had for Karen is out the window. I don't care how much you miss your loved one or how much it hurts, to blame your child — who is dealing with the same grief, mind you — is not acceptable. Yes, in times of pain we don't always say what we mean. And yes, I get that she was supposed to marry this guy. But that was a bitch move that makes her parenting more akin to Dan's than Keith's. Perhaps there is a reason for that.

I'm glad Nathan and Haley found Lucas. He needed someone to force feed him the news he wasn't to blame. Nathan made the point that Lucas had done the same thing Keith had done: gone into the school to save a life. But, does anyone else remember that Keith went in because he thought he could talk to Jimmy? Sure, it was ultimately to save Lucas, but Lucas wasn't the only reason he had been in the school.