The Fosters 'It's My Party' Review and Recap: Wyatt in Season 3

Wyatt The Fosters: what happens in "It's My Party"

The Fosters is a family drama created by Peter Paige and Bradley Bredeweg that ran on ABC Family, later renamed Freeform, from June 3, 2013, to June 6, 2018. It follows Stef Adams Foster (Teri Polo) and Lena Adams Foster (Sherri Saum), who raise biological and foster children together. Season 3 premiered on June 8, 2015, with 20 episodes split in two halves, and "It's My Party" was the sixth, directed by Kees Van Oostrum and written by Megan Lynn and Wade Solomon.

Alex Saxon played Wyatt, listed as Callie's first boyfriend in a recurring role. Searches for Wyatt The Fosters usually mean this stretch of season 3, when Wyatt moves from Callie's past to Mariana's present. Maia Mitchell plays Callie, Cierra Ramirez plays Mariana, David Lambert plays Brandon, Hayden Byerly plays Jude and Danny Nucci plays Mike. The review's description of Wyatt is affectionate and a little teasing: whatever you think of him, his hair is like an enchanted lion's mane.

Callie's car, Mariana's cash and a surprise party

The episode opens with family taco night in the Adams-Foster house and two revelations. Jude puts ketchup on his taco, a choice the review treats as a crime, and Callie's birthday is close. Callie plans to buy her own car with the $800 she has saved, and her moms are not keen. After a brief argument covering sexism, airbag safety and monthly payments, Brandon is told to share his car with Callie and the twins.

The next morning Mariana jumps on Callie's bed and showers her with $600 in cash as a birthday gift. Callie is weirded out for a moment, then proposes pooling the money to buy a previously owned car to share. They end up with a used green sedan from a semi-creepy middle-aged man. When they get home, there is a surprise party courtesy of Jude, with Girls United, Rita and Wyatt among the guests.

Wyatt, Mariana and Callie

Wyatt goes straight to Mariana and asks if they can go steady. She considers it, because if Callie is fine with it, Mariana has no reason to worry about the fact that she lost her virginity to Wyatt and lied about it for weeks, or days, depending on how you measure time in this season. When Mariana asks Callie, Callie's mouth says yes, while her body, eyes and mind say no. Mariana misses the social cues and declares the coupling a go.

Callie tells Lena she is not okay with it, and Lena has to handle the age-old problem of one daughter sleeping with another daughter's ex-boyfriend. Mariana goes back to Wyatt and announces that they have to break up, then says she is kidding, then says they actually do. Wyatt has had enough. He tells Callie she pulled him along like a sad puppy and that it is unfair to Mariana to keep their hookup secret. The review disputes that: Callie was dealing with trauma from earlier in the series and could not handle a relationship. Mariana's excuses then dig her deeper, including the argument that she omitted the truth instead of lying and that dating Wyatt might make her love him. The review finds it sad.

Brandon, AJ and the stolen phone

In the garage Brandon interrogates AJ (Tom Williamson) after seeing him talk on a cellphone. AJ says he was talking to Mike and leaves, and Brandon goes to Mike to ask for the dates, times and length of every call he has had with AJ that week. Sophia (Bailee Madison) joins in, and the two form what the review calls the Whiney-Duo. Sophia wants to slow dance up on AJ's pocket to steal the phone, Brandon draws the line at that, and then they notice the phone is charging on the counter. They steal it, find the records deleted, and Brandon answers when it rings. A fight breaks out, and Stef asks what he is doing answering someone else's phone.

Mike then talks to his son upstairs. He mentions that AJ was racially profiled and experienced police brutality in front of him, and Brandon replies by asking what about him. The review answers with a list of the things Brandon has actually been accused of, from selling fake IDs to plagiarism at a music camp, and notes that Brandon lived with Mike for a good stretch of the series, which makes his complaint hollow. It concludes that Brandon is the worst.

The bouncy castle ending

Jude's final surprise is a Little Mermaid bouncy castle, and everyone gets in on it, including Rosie O'Donnell. Even Brandon comes out of his room to take a few jumps. At the end of the night AJ lies down next to Callie in the castle and gives her a hand-drawn comic of her as Super Callie. They start making out, and Stef sees it all from the kitchen window, which sets up another foster-sibling dilemma for the moms.

Wyatt The Fosters: "It's My Party" at a glance

Wyatt The Fosters review: a lively ensemble hour

The verdict of the review is affectionate. This is a busy, very funny episode, with a birthday, a car, a love triangle and a bouncy castle all fitting into one hour, and it keeps the family at the center. Its best moments come from Mariana trying to talk her way out of a hole and Jude turning up with the final surprise, and its weakest from Brandon, who the review finds exhausting.

The Wyatt storyline is the strongest part of the hour. The conflict between Callie and Mariana feels like a real teenage problem: nobody here is entirely wrong, and nobody is entirely comfortable. Wyatt's complaint that he was kept at a distance comes from the right place and goes in the wrong direction, and the review's defense of Callie is one of the sturdier opinions in the piece. The AJ and Brandon story, meanwhile, plays as a mix of comedy and a more serious reference to the police encounter earlier that season.

A bonus is the exchange the review picks as its quote of the week. Mike jokes that if he had been a woman, he and Stef would still be together, and Stef answers with a laughing "Oh, god no." It sums up the show's tone in one line: former spouses who are close, a household that is messy, and a script that lets a joke land without an apology.

Wyatt The Fosters scenes work because the show gives each person a reasonable point of view. Wyatt wants to date Mariana openly, Mariana wants her sister's blessing, and Callie does not want to be the one who says no. The moms, especially Lena, end up as the translators between them, passing messages in both directions until Mariana ruins the delivery with her own. The format is classic family-drama farce, and the actors play it with enough conviction that the sadness under the jokes comes through.

Rough Cut Review's call: an episode worth revisiting for the Mariana and Wyatt scenes and the bouncy castle, with the Brandon story an acceptable sidebar. The series ran to the end of its fifth season and then continued in the spin-off Good Trouble, starring Maia Mitchell and Cierra Ramirez. For more recaps of long-running series, the TV hub has the full list.

Sources

• The Fosters (American TV series), Wikipedia — Network, cast, series run and spin-off
• List of The Fosters episodes, Wikipedia — Season 3 air dates, director and writers