Marcus Baker is Hurting, Too

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Marcus Baker (Felix Mallard) and Ginny Miller (Antonia Gentry) in the bathroom at an afterschool event, hiding from the “cruel realities” of high school. This picture was taken from season one after he had just helped Ginny fix her hair after someone almost ruined her curls.

De'Zaria Lucas, Multimedia Director

 Netflix released season two of their hit show, “Ginny and Georgia.” The show features a mother and her teenage  daughter who are best friends. This familiar dynamic can be seen in the show “Gilmore Girls”, except the drama in “Ginny and Georgie” is a little more intense. 

  Georgia (Brianne Howey) is a single mother with a troublesome past, while Ginny (Antonia Gentry) is her daughter who has her own struggles. Along with the duo, the show also has Ginny’s little brother Austin  (Diesel La Torroca).  More main characters in Ginny and Georgia’s circle are the twins Marcus (Felix Mallard) and Maxine ( Sara Waisglass).   

  In season one, Ginny meets Marcus at school when he is seen leaning up against the lockers. He was wearing a shirt that had the word “Tuesday” on it, only the day wasn’t Tuesday.  Since then, their interactions have been very peculiar; Ginny and Marcus are connected because they make sense to each other, however, Ginny does sometimes have a hard time seeing what’s really going on in Marcus’s head.

  In the newest season, Marcus is shown in a different light. Season two gets really dark as far as mental health goes. Throughout the show there have been scenes where Ginny was self-harming, and less commonly, it showed more of Marcus’s way of self harming, from him showing up to school drunk to  his motorcycle accident. 

  In the first season, there were a couple of scenes where Ginny was hurting herself. In the newest season, she tells her father and is sent to therapy. Meanwhile her boyfriend is suffering in silence. Felix Mallard (Marcus Baker) said in an interview with The Wrap, “It was super, super important to me that we did it honestly and authentically. It’s really close to my heart because there isn’t that much representation for guys.” It is not as common in the media to see men show too much emotion and a lot of times they are suffering in silence. In the show, Marcus mentioned how Ginny makes him happy but it’s not fair to her if she’s the only source of happiness, saying “one person should not be in charge of another person’s happiness.”

 Are Ginny and Marcus good for each other? Junior Danica Page says, “I believe they were good for each other after their relationship surfaced from secrecy, but the relationship was one sided in terms of being there for each other. Marcus listened and was there for Ginny when she was venting about her mom, but Ginny failed to realize what was going on with Marcus.” This leads to the next question: At what point should people have been paying attention to Marcus? He started to skip class more often than usual, and he brought a flask to school while drinking uncontrollably. Everyone else was caught up in their own lives; they didn’t see Marcus breaking in front of them. 

  The conversation with Page continues, “I realized that people should start paying more attention to Marcus when he started to be more distant from Ginny and started falling behind in his school work.”

  Maybe no one really noticed at first because Marcus is shown to be a loner throughout the series and he already kept to himself, however Max started to notice and voiced her concerns to her parents, meanwhile Ginny couldn’t see Marcus breaking in front of her. 

  At the end episode 8 in season two during the school’s musical “Wellington” Marcus and Ginny break up in the hallway. Ginny is hysterical and she thinks she did something wrong and Marcus is trying to tell her what’s going on but he can’t. He is basically crying out for help. “I feel like Ginny couldn’t really read the room about what was really going on with Marcus and she didn’t let him speak; he didn’t want to hurt her but she couldn’t see the full picture that he had his own stuff going on;” Page  says. 

 Mental health is very important because your happiness should always come first and trying to help other people with theirs can strain you. How can someone grow when the person they’re in a relationship with is still stuck? That’s what the writers were trying to demonstrate with Ginny and Marcus’s relationship.