Dead to Me: The 7 most shocking moments from Season 1
By Mads Lennon
6. Judy goes to jail for Jen.
Jen’s anger issues are shown from the very first episode. She is extremely snarky and prone to biting the head off of anyone who so much as looks at her funny. The most obvious example of her difficulties controlling her rage presents itself when a yellow mustang continuously zips through her neighborhood, almost hitting her at one point while she’s out for a job.
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Understandably, seeing someone driving reckless near her home is highly disturbing to Jen. She tries to get the driver reported to the police but they aren’t of any help. Eventually she confronts the man and he spits at her.
That’s basically the equivalent of punching Bruce Banner in the face. Jen unleashes her fury on said mustang with a golf club. This time the cops do show up – to arrest her. Except Judy takes the blame instead! This begins a chain reaction of Judy’s willingness to do anything for Jen to make amends for what she did.
5. Ted was cheating on Jen.
Dead to Me does a great job at foreshadowing. Most of the twists in the show I was able to predict before they occurred but I admit this was one that threw me for a loop. By the end of episode three, Judy discovers Ted has been cheating on her with a much younger woman named Bambi. Apparently, he met her on an online video game he frequently played with their son, Charlie. Jen being Jen, wants to go punch this Bambi in the face and forces Judy to tag along.
They find her place of work, a weird culturally insensitive restaurant where she waitresses, and discover that Ted had been seriously dating this woman for more than a year. Suddenly his death seems much less sad, doesn’t it? To make matters even worse, Judy pretends to be Jen and confronts Bambi and learns Ted told Bambi Jen died of breast cancer.
AND to make things even WORSE (as if that’s possible) we learn in a later episode that Ted had stopped being intimate with Jen because he was disgusted by her mastectomy scars (in case you forgot, Jen didn’t have breast cancer but her mother did and she took pre-emptive measures after learning she had the gene). Horrific. Ted was, essentially, a complete monster.
4. Judy’s pregnancy scare.
After finding out about Judy’s miscarriages, I didn’t anticipate her potentially having a pregnancy storyline this season. She doesn’t exactly, but she also sort of… does. Judy breaks up with Nick when she realizes she may be pregnant with Steve’s child. Having slept with him while she was technically seeing Nick, it was for the best she broke things off and admitted she still had feelings for her ex.
She and Jen anxiously await the results of the pregnancy test but they come back negative. She’s not pregnant. But wait! The test changes. She is pregnant! Wait, wrong again. She goes to a doctor and she is officially not pregnant. And to pour salt on the wound, her estrogen levels are so low it would be virtually impossible for her to get pregnant again. There is a possibility she may even be exhibiting signs of early onset menopause. Knowing Judy will probably never have a child, despite it being the one thing she wants more than anything else, is devastating.