Gonna Learn How To Fly - Part2

The Kids and particularly Doris struggle to adapt all the changes at the School.  The new students Holly and Chris struggle to fit in at the school and Chris is caught in a rivalry with Leroy. However when Chris struggles with classical dance, Leroy reluctantly agrees to coach him.  Morloch exerts his authority and manages to upset everyone.

Meanwhile Shorofsky finds Bruno a job as a waiter at a coffee shop where he can also play his music. However the job is threatened when the Kids from the school turn up and start to party. 

After such a fantastic opening episode the conclusion to the story, although still good, isn’t quite as satisfying for me.

The emphasis of the story has now moved to the new characters and their attempts to try and fit into the school. Morloch provides us with some great humour particularly in his attempts to set up the PA system, which causes conflict for all the teachers. 

I like that Morloch doesn’t come round to everyone else’s thinking by the end of this episode and it’s obvious that this conflict is set to run and run and the school is in for a bumpy ride. Which for me is a good thing. 

Leroy is fighting with Chris, but wasn’t the room they are fighting in the sick room/ nurses room last season? Then Leroy becomes Chris’ mentor and this leads to a lovely scene between Leroy and Lydia when Leroy says he will be responsible for Chris, showing just how much he has grown up since the series started. 

Leroy talks about Chris as being the first person he teaches and how he's too good a teacher for Lydia to flunk Chris out. Which is a great nod to Leroy becoming Lydia's assistant in season 5. Although I'm sure at this point in time the writers and producers didn't know how Leroy's story lines would develop. 

However, I have to say I’m a little confused by the Chris story line, presumably he got into the school because he was a good dancer but now we have him struggling with the classical stuff and he is being moved to another class. Well as he’s supposedly younger and only just started at the school surely he shouldn’t have been in the same class as Leroy and the older advanced students anyway. After this episode we never see him in any other dance class apart from with Leroy and the advanced students. So it makes me question what the point of the story line is.

If there is this “Shuffling Buffaloes” lower ability class isn’t that where we should see the likes of Doris, Danny and Dwight, instead of them having to always compete with the best dancers? 

After the cliff hanger of what happens next, Bruno’s story tends to get wrapped up very quickly in this episode for my liking and I think I would have preferred to see him struggling for a few episodes and doing different jobs. 

Although the kids have good intentions of trying to show support for him, they nearly get him fired but that is resolved quickly too. In a way Caruso is a replacement for Bruno’s Dad and someone for him to disagree with.

The idea of taking Bruno out of school is a good one and gave the show more variety of story lines although I’m not convinced that the writers really made as much out of this as they could. Straight away he’s found a job and most of his scenes will be as a waiter with very little scope for further development. I really feel this was a missed opportunity, although that’s more a complaint about future episodes rather than this one.

The excellent songs for this season continue with “Midnight Celebration” which is a great Coco song. Although Danny’s voice sounds a little weird as he counts into it and Danny has suddenly become a drummer. I also love the duet between Doris and Holly of "By My Side" from "Godspell", it's a shame we don’t really hear very much of it. 

Doris is acting weird and we aren’t exactly sure what is wrong. There is a lovely scene near the end where Danny comforts her and tries to get her to talk. The two seem so close then and Danny so caring. Danny then takes her to see Bruno and it is great stuff when Doris talks about how she feels and all the changes that have happened. I just feel this is very realistic and something we can all identify with. Then for great continuity they reprise “Once In Awhile” as a duet and the 2 of them sound great together. Her problems do seem to get solved very quickly  and after the song everything  seems to be back to normal.

Production Number 2763

The previous episode was billed as part 1  but this episode was simply billed as:  "Gonna Learn How To Fly".

Executive Producer William Blinn. 

Filmed Wednesday 7th to Thursday 15th September 1983

Original  air date in U.S.A 22nd October 1983

Original  air date  in U.K. 22nd February 1984,  Repeated on The Children's Channel  Autumn 1992

Original air date in The Netherlands  27th January 1984

Original air date in Australia 24th February 1984

Original air date in Italy 24th  March 1985

Original air date in Belgium  14th April 1988  

Original  air date in France 17th September 1988