BY DC CUEVA
Right about now, it's that time of year again where hundreds of thousands of college students will be thinking about that week in the coming weeks where they can just run out of school and just be free for a change. Spring Break is approaching for the many of you millennials who check out this website to escape reality for our view of MTV Reality - in fact for some of you, it's just begun down in South Padre Island, TX as Challenge vet "Big Easy" Eric and Real World alum (and Catfish guest star) Jay G. again handling partying duties. And this year MTV itself is bringing back its sacred March tradition with Cancun hosting the return of MTV Spring Break weekend this month.
Along with those two towns, Florida has long been a destination for college students to party down, whether it's in Daytona Beach, Miami or anywhere else on the state's many beaches. Florida has become an MTV hotbed in the course of the past two years, with a longtime Spring Break town of Panama City Beach having just hosted its second season of Floribama Shore, and down the way in a suburb of Sarasota which has been host to an addictive MTV guilty pleasure.
Season 2 of Siesta Key has no doubt seen the level of drama amp up a bit in the sun, and where the modern-day Laguna Beach has certainly offered plenty of high stakes among its elite clique. During the course of its sophomore season, we've had more awkwardness at the annual over-the-top gala of the Kompo house becoming an Egyptian mecca (which this site featured here last year), a music video causing two relationships to be in dire jeopardy, and this past week seeing Pauly get arrested again for a marijuana charge which could spell trouble ahead.
And while the other main characters have had their time in the spotlight, as always the main storyline has been the seemingly perfect but now not-so-perfect relationship of the royal couple of Juliette & Alex. And it has unraveled just as much as the Paulie-Cara-Danielle triangle, spurred on by the town's resident authority on eliteist gossip and who loves to stir the pot more times than you can say the show's name three times fast, Chloe, and a BFF friendship she's forged with one of Alex's many exes, Cara Geswelli. What's transpired with him and the rest of the cast in the past month has no doubt changed the complexity of the clique, and there may be more too if the midseason trailer is an indication.
Just as it was when the series began in summer 2017, Season 2 began with Alex's birthday party in his house's backyard, which coincidentally has the feel of a weekend rager at Spring Break, and where Rich Homie Quan got to perform. But while everyone else gathered to kick off another Siesta summer, both Jared and Cara came uninvited to the party, with her tagging along with Chloe, and him coming for the ride along with Brandon and Garrett. And it was when he got next to the birthday boy and Pauly that ignited a massive brawl, along the lines of what we've seen a lot of in PCB.
And the week after the first of many big blowups in Siesta, and at Brandon's 70's-themed outdoor birthday barbecue, Jared decided to stir the pot a little when he convinced Madisson's best friend, Kelsey, to have some alone time despite her having a boyfriend. They snuck off from a night at the disco for some nighttime fun by the beach, and they even got flirty too in them hooking up. This led a girl he got to go fishing with this past week, Canvas, to call him "the talk of the Key," all as he took the news of that hookup in stride with a smile, all as he initiated a love square of sorts among the OG's and newbies in Kelsey's ex Garrett getting close to Cara.
Ask anyone who has served in the Army, Navy, Air Force and the Marines -- which includes Ryan Conklin from Real World Brooklyn of ten years ago, and they'll likely tell you that there is more to their job than just serving a duty as hard as anything on earth, most especially when veterans who return home suffer from post traumatic stress syndrome, best known as PTSD. When Madisson asked him what the transition was like, Jared told her, "What's another word for... awful? Before, I felt like I was doing something. Like, I was actually doing something, you know, like, I was somebody. Some people want to get out, I didn't want to get out. I just had to."
Madisson apologized to him for not being there when he needed the most, and asked him what the transition back to civilian life has been like, where he revealed that he drank every day to escape the haunting memories of his time in uniform. His answer echoed the sentiments of many who have found life back home from the home front so tough: "I get, like, terrible nightmares, I can never sleep. I'm okay with being depressed all the time. It became normal that I just feel like s___ every day. I don’t like people thinking I'm crazy. I don’t like the fact that someone looks at me and that's what they think — that that guy’s going to lose his mind every second now. I feel broken."
Being diagnosed with PTSD, later in the episode Jared went fishing with Canvas where he told her of his plans to see a local therapist in the Sarasota area who specializes in working with military veterans like him, and her adding that they would now look at doing other activities other than engaging in wild alcoholic binges, and doing whatever they can to support each other as he adjusts to post-military life. Also in the episode, Pauly was locked up for being a no-show for a court date after being caught having an open container of 20 grams of pot in his car, a potential felony that will see him face the music with his family this coming week.
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If you watched Season 2 of Floribama Shore both last summer and then in the winter and continuing to the week of The Challenge: War of the Worlds premiere (and of Gus making his way from PCB to Africa), Kortni Gilson certainly had a summer to remember. She dealt so many times with an abusive ex-boyfriend who lurked everywhere in town like an alligator, and making out with an elderly woman at the club, to violating girl code with Nilsa two times in snuggling with Gus and even a brief pregnancy scare... and even giving a new definition to saying sorry by having that word spelled out in a pizza, of all things.
When Kortni and Jared crossed paths at a local bar in the Florida panhandle last week, they instantly bonded with them appearing in each other's stories on Instagram and Snapchat, and posted the above photo on everyone's IG timelines. She captioned, "What’s better than cute men? 🤷🏻♀️ @jkelderman #siestakey #mtvfloribamashore," and he wrote in his description, "When worlds collide #siestakey #floribamashore". With Gus telling the Floribama gang in the Season 2 finale that he may not return for a Season 3 due to wanting to improve relations with his family, perhaps a spot could be open for Jared to join Kortni and company in Panama City Beach. Imagine what that could be like.
In another Siesta/Floribama crossover, Kortni's roommate (and fellow PCB local) Nilsa has been conducting biweekly debriefs with the Siesta Key cast on the key moments of the season from the local prison... check out those Siesta Key Interrogations on the show's Twitter and Facebook pages - including the premiere version where she grilled Jared, Pauly and Alex on their fight.
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