The stewardess who comforts her on the plane and whom Rebecca calls for help when she overdoses in "I Never Want To See Josh Again" is the same woman who voiced the butter commercials in season 1. Maybe Magic, Maybe Mundane, but she's there when Rebecca is at rock bottom.
Donna Lynne Champlin has gone on record about being an award winning tap dancer. Paula taking the bar exam will be a wordless, high-intensity tap sequence.
- Jossed.
- Which is a shame, because it would have been ingenious.
During one of her later sessions with Dr. Akopian, as her memories about Robert dumping her after promising to marry her surface as she's about to marry Josh, she fully dissociates from reality for a moment, and Dr. Akopian flat-out calls it just that.
This suggests that Rebecca's musical numbers - especially since the flashback to her time in a psychiatric hospital showed that she sang constantly - aren't just quirky Imagine Spots a la J.D. from Scrubs. They're full-on dissociations from reality, which is very much NOT an ambiguous disorder.
- Confirmed, sort of, in season three when Rebecca gets her diagnosis for borderline personality disorder and they point out that frequent dissociation is a symptom.
The third season ends with Rebecca having decided to take responsibility for her actions - but notably, her way of doing so is by pleading guilty to a crime that she, for once, is not actually guilty of. For all her Character Development over the series, and the third season in particular, she's still prone to taking things too far and mistaking dramatic gestures for real progress. Season four (if we get it - knock on wood!) will show that there's a thin line between atonement and self-destruction, just like previous seasons have shown that there's a thin line between love and obsession.
- Confirmed. The season premiere has Rebecca try to stay in prison to atone for her crimes, but it becomes clear it's just performative and by the end she leaves and begins actually helping the prisoners instead with her musical theater program. Her growth continues throughout the season gradually (such as finally accepting that she needs antidepressants, and another redemption arc happens with Nathaniel as he learns to be a good person; the latter is also deconstructed with him realizing that he can't always get what he wants (in this case, Rebecca) just because he's a better person.
- With Valencia as well. By the last few episodes, she's still overtly attempting to pressure, beg, and whine her way into people doing things exactly her way. However, she's now with a partner who will stand up for herself and push back while reassuring Valencia that she still loves her, and we see that Valencia actually is learning to compromise - just, realistically slowly.
"Josh Has No Idea Where I Am" clearly shows how much love she found in performing, so on her path to recovery, she may recall Dream!Dr. Akopian's advice and use her love of theater to make herself happy. It may fail, or it may not; if it doesn't, maybe we'll see her perform a Triumphant Reprise of one of her songs (probably "West Covina") in reality, for an audience!
- Confirmed in a complicated sense. "I'm Finding My Bliss" has Rebecca rejoin a musical theater group, despite not being a great singer, but she struggles to fit in due to her distaste with the sexist lyrics of the song she must sing. She changes the lyrics, much to the director's dismay, and gets fired, but this serves as foreshadowing for her actual happy ending: becoming a songwriter based on the songs in her head.
- Seemingly jossed. The only cameo from the fourth theme song is showing Rebecca's dress from said song in The Eleven O'Clock Number.
In the episode where Rebecca thinks she’s pregnant she says that it would be a “miracle,” because she was on birth control and Josh used a condom. This could presumably be for double contraception, but when she has impromptu sex with Trent all she does is ask if he’s infection free and it’s implied that if he is she doesn’t need a condom. Could this mean that Josh had been with someone other than Valencia and may have picked something up that he would need a condom to prevent spreading?
- Valencia did not believe that they were on a break during the summer when he first hooked up with Rebecca. Given that he didn't remember it nearly as distinctly as she did, it probably wasn't the only time.
- This might also explain why she doesn’t trust Josh to be alone with Rebecca, if he has a history.
- It could also just be that Rebecca and Josh got in the habit of using condoms due to how frequently they had sex; while she assumed her birth control would be effective enough to secure a single night with Trent.
When Naomi visits California for the first time she reminisces about how Rebecca once got HPV from a member of the Cornell a cappella club. Could it be that Here Comes Treble lived on?
Think about it: 1. Both have the one-in-a-million ability to imagine full-fledged original musical numbers on the spot 2. Both make reckless and dangerous decisions that are indicative of mental health struggles 3. Both have reason to distrust the legal system as well as thrive within in it if past life memories of being part of a dishonest and corrupt-yet successful-murder trial have carried over.
