One Tree Hillis one of the longest-running and most adored teen dramas, largely due to its CW-esque ability to balance the fairly mundane with the totally bonkers. The teen turbulence on the show ranges from cheating on calculus exams to getting involved with knee-cap-cracking loan sharks, and every main character was, at some point, hit by a car. As the show went on, it only got more outlandish, with its characters being stalked and drowned and havingvital organs eaten by golden retrievers. However, with its shortened final season,One Tree Hillmanages to outdo itself in terms of going totally bizarre, and unfortunately, it does not pay off.
One Tree Hill
Half-brothers Lucas and Nathan Scott trade between kinship and rivalry both on the basketball court and in the hearts of their friends in the small, but not so quiet town of Tree Hill, North Carolina.
‘One Tree Hill’ Season 9 Starts With a Depressing Montage
WhileOne Tree Hillwas never afraid to push its characters — or its audience — to their breaking point, Season 9 brings with it a level of intense misery that we’d seldom seen on the show. In the season’s opening sequence, we see characters like Haley (Bethany Joy Lenz), Brooke (Sophia Bush), Julian (Austin Nichols), Clay (Robert Buckley), Quinn (Shantel VanSanten), and Chase (Stephen Colletti) in various levels of distress. Ourpoor Tree Hill gang is out here being beaten, screamed at, and loaded into cop cars, andeverybody’s favorite bad dad Dan Scott(Paul Johansson) is watching his diner go up in flames.
We don’t even get the relief ofOne Tree Hill’s iconic theme song, because the title simply spells out slowly on the screen accompanied by some somber piano notes. That’s right — they couldn’t even give usGavin DeGraw. One notable exception from the cold open-trauma dump, however, is Nathan Scott (James Lafferty). Save for some ominous narration at the beginning of the montage,Nathan is nowhere to be seen, making it all the more stressful when the scene ends with Haley walking into the morgue to identify a mysterious corpse. With this epic bummer of an opener, the ball is rolling on Season 9 ofOne Tree Hill.
Nathan’s Season 9 Kidnapping Is Both Bizarre and Confusing
What most fans first remember aboutOne Tree Hill’s final season is Nathan’s brutal kidnapping at the hands of some angry Russian basketball assassins, so we can start there. With Nathan now being a sports agent with his and Clay’s agency, he’s tasked with traveling overseas to recruit a young basketball up-and-comer because Clay is preoccupied with some very concerning sleep-walking issues (more on that later). When Nathan doesn’t return from his trip on time,Haley asks Dan for help tracking down her husband, and Dan sets up an investigative operation inside a trailer inside an empty soundstage, because apparently killing your brother one time makes you an expert on all things criminal.
While Dan stars in his own episode ofDatelineon hisquest to find his son, we learn thatNathan has been taken hostageby some ruthless thugs because he was unknowingly trying to sign a player that “belonged” to somebody else. Led by hitman Dimitri (Andrew Elvis Miller), (who is inexplicably obsessed with quotingShakespeare) and crooked Tree Hill cop Officer Stevens (Stephen Elliott), the underground basketball mafia is only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to Season 9’s unhinged creative choices.
Clay’s Sleepwalking Storyline Makes No Sense
While Nathan rots in a basement with his friendly neighborhood assassins,Tree Hill, North Carolinacontinues to bring the drama. Clay, refusing to be outdone in terms of stupid plotlines, begins sleepwalking around the city and waking up in the park. This leads to loads of tension with his girlfriend, Quinn, who thinks he might be leaving in the night to cheat on her. Well, the joke’s on Quinn, because Clay is, in fact, leaving in the night to unconsciously recover memories of a son he forgot he had with his dead wife. When the situation escalates and Clay gets aggressive, Quinn convinces him to get professional help.Clay enters a rehabilitation center and is immediately taken with a kid named Logan(Pierce Gagnon) who is also staying there, because onOne Tree Hill, rehab is where you go to make friends with children.
He connects with the little boy over their mutual love of comic books and model planes, and after some casual bonding and extensive therapy,Clay learns that Logan is his sonwhom he blocked from his mind after the sudden and traumatic death of his wife (Amanda Schull). Now apparently healed, Clay gets custody of this child (who was previously in the care of his maternal grandparents), and then leaves the facility with Logan in tow. Clay marries Quinn, and she adopts Logan after knowing him for maybe a few weeks max.
Lucas Scott Returns in Season 9 of ‘One Tree Hill’
Now, while Nathan learns about the seedy underbelly of professional basketball and Clay learns about his long-lost son, Haley is understandably stressed as she tries to raise her children, run a business, and get intel on her missing husband. When she learns that the situation might be more serious than she thought, she calls up her old bestie, Lucas Scott (Chad Michael Murray), whodepartedOne Tree Hillin Season 6. Lucas comes to save the day, meeting Haley at the airport equipped with his earnest, broody, Lucas-ness and the worst haircut of all time. He takes Jamie (Jackson Brundage) and Lydia home with him, gives his friend a little pep talk, and thenleaves our poor Haley(seriously, hasn’t she been through enough?) to deal with all this crap by herself.
Mouth’s Season 9 Weight Gain Storyline Is Unnecessary
Speaking of Lucas, his old buddy Marvin ‘Mouth’ McFadden (Lee Norris) is also given a much larger storyline this season. Mouth ambles intoOne Tree Hillseason 9 hoagie in hand, kissing his girlfriend, Millie (Lisa Goldstein) on the cheek and leaving a smear of mayonnaise in his wake. We learn that he’s gained a significant amount of weight due to a cooking segment on his and Millie’s talk show and that he’s in complete denial, which frustrates Millie to no end. While Mouth wasn’t always a perfect character onOne Tree Hill(particularly epitomizing the “nice guys finish last” sentiment inthe show’s early seasons), he was consistently kind and honest, usually acting out of loyalty and often being one of the smartest guys in the room. Cut to Season 9, andMouth is reduced to the butt of countless lazy jokes.
‘One Tree Hill’ Should’ve Ended One Season Earlier
…sigh. Bring on the Russian basketball mafia.
Refusing to acknowledge his weight gain, Mouth complains that the dry cleaner keeps shrinking his clothes, and even that clothes are being made smaller. While on the air, he then pushes Millie to her limit, when he obnoxiously says that if he wanted his shirts shrunk, he would have Millie wash them because she’s bad at laundry. This attack on her laundry-doing-abilitiesprompts Millie to flip out at him on live TV, exclaiming that his clothes are not shrinking, but that Mouth is “Fat, fat, fat!”Later in the episode, Mouth reads mail that he got from viewers of their show, and one fan says that as somebody who has faced weight-based discrimination his whole life, seeing Mouth berated on TV hurt his heart. Millie hears this upsetting revelation, and says that the guy’s heart probably hurts from the“carton of Twinkies he eats every day.”Oh…my god!?
Now, sure, Mouth has spent most of the show as a naturally skinny guy, so putting on a lot of weight in a short amount of time is not ideal. Millie helping her boyfriend realize that he’s in denial about his weight gain? Fine. Wanting to make sure that he’s as healthy as possible? Great. Beginning a cruel and demeaning tirade against him (and all plus-sized people) because of this? Totally not okay. Whether this plot was supposed to serve as comic relief in an otherwise grim season ofOne Tree Hill, or if it just came to be because the writers were truly out of ideas, most viewers can agree thatMouth’s weight gain contributed nothing to the storyother than showing that Millie… kind of sucks now.
‘One Tree Hill’ Season 9 Torments Its Characters
If you thought anyone was safe from this unrelenting disaster, you’d hope it would be Julian Baker, who we could previously count on to be aconsistent source of comedic relief and good vibes. Introduced in Season 6 ofOne Tree Hillas a suave filmmaker, Julian quickly softens and becomes a perfect love interest for Brooke, and a quirky goofball who lovesGrease 2and gives high-fives with adorable enthusiasm. Jump to Season 9 and, as new parents with demanding careers, Brooke and Julian are understandably exhausted. This exhaustion soon proves to come at a steep price, however, when Julian forgets to drop his son, Davis, off at daycare and leaves him in the family car.He emerges from a store to see his car window smashed and Davis being loaded into an ambulance.Davis is thankfully just fine, but Julian remains distraught that he could have potentially killed his child.
This storyline is often forgotten amongOne Tree Hill’s teen-drama shenanigans, but it’s one that’s worth remembering. While Julian’s guilt and trauma are understandable, the show takes this opportunity to capitalize on the drama, andJulian routinely gets in bar fights so that he can feel adequately punished. His guilt comes to a head when he locks himself in his SUV and cranks the heat up to maximum so that, like Davis, he feels what it’s like to be a baby in a hot car. It’s devastating watching Julian punish himself, and whileBrooke eventually finds him and convinces him to forgive himself, Julian’s Season 9 breakdown makes you wish that Clay’s therapy could have come with a two-for-one coupon. Honorable mentions for this wild ride of a season include Chase beating up Chuck’s (Michael May) abusive dad with a crowbar and getting arrested, rockstar Chris Keller (Tyler Hilton) returning after many years to run over an assassin with his car, and Brooke’s stalker, Xavier, (Devin McGee) returning and trying to kill her until he is tased in a parking garage by Brooke’s rival business owner.
At the end of the day, most fans can probably agree that Season 9 ofOne Tree Hillsimultaneously flew too close to the sun while also coming nowhere near it. By throwing out so many bizarre storylines in a condensed final season, there was no time for the upbeat filler episodes that used to make the show fun, and no reprieve from the onslaught of stressful plot points. While theshow had a great Season 8 that neatly tied everything upwith a nice little bow, Season 9 flew in like a bat out of hell, taking all this well-earned resolution, ripping it up, and feeding it to the Russian basketball mafia. Everything is, of course, eventually resolved, and we get a lovely flash-forward to our beloved Ravens, happy and healthy, watching a basketball game at their old alma mater, and probably feeling wholly blessed that they survived the hot mess that isSeason 9 ofOne Tree Hill.
One Tree Hillis available to watch on Max in the U.S.
