“Grown-ish” Season 5 picks up with Junior taking on the weight of balancing his new college life, with Junior finally relieved to follow in his sister Zoey’s (Yara Shahidi) footsteps as she begins to “make her way.” Does the emotional passing of the baton episode on Wednesday?
Schreiber told TheWrap, “Junior has now found an ally, someone who he feels he can talk to about these things because he’s been through the same things.” “I feel like it’s a kind of outlet for his stress. I don’t think the anxiety ever really goes away [but] it helps take him out of that anxiety spiral, at least a little bit.”.
Despite graduating from Cal U last spring, Zoey has made herself an inescapable presence in Junior’s first year of college and has never hesitated to upstage her brother, most recently with her brother’s friends. shares tickets to a special concert which leaves the friend group scrambling for Junior‘s trip to Disneyland.
Relationship ‘Grown-ish’ Star Marcus Scribner Says Junior ‘Gained an Ally’ in Emotional Passing of the Baton Episode: He’s ‘Taking Control’
“He’s feeling excited and hopeful for this new friend group that he’s created, and he’s just pumped to kind of finally be the big man on campus,” Scribner said. “He kind of sees it as if Zoe’s kind of swooping in and taking that thunder away from him. She has no idea that she’s doing that — she’s just trying to be a good sister and help out — but I think Junior is used to a lot of the central focus being taken away from him.”
When Zoey takes her overshadowing a step too far as she shares Junior’s childhood love for Dungeons & Dragons in front of Junior’s fraternity brothers, the comment triggers a panic attack as Junior’s pent-up anxiety comes to the surface and Junior excuses himself from the group and heads to a storage closet as his anxiety comes to a head.
Zoey immediately follows after her brother with advice to alleviate his panic attack, but Junior is initially hesitant to take her advice. “While she has positive intentions, I think Junior is just dealing with a lot mentally right now and it’s hard for him to kind of accept help when he wants to be the person to give other people help,” Scribner said.
Although he “pushes her away from a valuable source of support” in her sister, he eventually listens to her as he realizes her perception of his older sister as someone who copes with problems without being good. grades have her own business and maintain a healthy relationship, but that’s not the whole story.
“When she breaks it down for him all the hardships and hard things that he’s had to go through to get himself to where he is, I think he realizes, ‘Oh, shoot. , we are more alike than we could have ever imagined,” Scribner said, adding that the pair can’t walk in each other’s shoes.
As the brother-sister pair display a relief amount of honesty, their sibling relationship turns into a friendship as Junior realizes he has “gained an ally” in Zoey.
“It’s refreshing; It feels more like me and Yara having an equally communicating and equally mentoring relationship in real life,” Scribner said. “I think that’s what Junior would have wanted, and I don’t think Zoey has to. Realized she wasn’t delivering.”
To cement, this new beginning also chooses to change his surname from Junior, which was used to differentiate him from Andre, from his father (Anthony Anderson) in the “Black-ish”, moment. In what Scribner calls a “turning point” for him. Character.
“He wanted to break out and kind of forge his destiny — he’s no longer around his dad and his parents 24/7 [so] there’s no longer a reason to distinguish the two from each other,” Scribner said. “It’s more than just a name change — it’s kind of representative of him grabbing the bulls by the horn and just like taking control of his life.”
Scribner, 23, also drew from his own experiences to prepare for this emotional episode, pulling from panic attacks he’s experienced before going onstage to real-life stressors of living on his own.
Scribner said, “My life coincides with Junior’s” “I was just attracted to those moments when … [you feel] that overwhelming sense of dread and … you know in your head that you must be okay and everything is okay, but the way you feel Let’s do it, can’t stop it.”
While Scribner recognizes that anxiety leads people to get in their head about experiencing their struggles alone, he hopes the episode might help viewers realize “we all go through things, and that the people around you are just there to help you.”
