Get ready for your trust falls, y'all: it's time for "Superteen Bonding."

As the episode opens, everyone is still adjusting to the new seating arrangements, which Mrs. Weiss thinks have succeeded in smoothing out some of the more open hostility between Amanda and her two friends, and the more vocal factions of anti-Amanda sentiment. But things probably will not get any less tense this week, since it's time for Amanda to get to work on her early-decision application to NYU: "I think New York City is that place where I do, in fact, belong." Really, she just needs to get to any college, and meet some more high-achieving nerds like herself.

But SPEAKING of high-achieving nerds, I had forgotten that this was the episode with The Legend of Michael Jan. Mrs. Weiss challenges the newspaper staff to find a smarty-pants student at Cypress Bay who isn't just a total academic grind, and Adam and Giana start talking up this Michael Jan, who got perfect SATs, participates on several sports teams, draws, plays violin, probably helps old ladies carry groceries out to their cars, and is generally the perfect teenage specimen. He's even cute. Amanda tries to downplay his many gifts, but her jealousy of him is pretty transparent, and when she starts working on her own story, about what college admissions officers are looking for from applicants, it's clear she's rattled by the idea that she may not be well-rounded enough. (What we don't see is that in addition to having worked on the newspaper all four years of high school, Amanda also starred in the school play! As Rizzo! AMANDA! God, I wish we could see that.)

When Mrs. Weiss suggests that the staff go on a team-building trip...I'm sorry, but that screams MTV set-up to me. She does her best to seem natural, but it's clear this isn't something she's ever done for any other group of students she'd supervised, and the fact that the day they decided to do it happened to fall on the weekend before Amanda's NYU application was due is suspiciously convenient timing for the purpose of the show's storyline. I certainly understand that Amanda's priority is to get into NYU and leave these bitchy jerks behind forever, but I can't imagine that she's SUCH a bad manager that she can't see the importance of going to the exercise and being a leader, even if it means asking Mrs. Weiss to reschedule the event for the following weekend. But regardless: she doesn't go, the superteens do bond, we get to see Amanda's weirdly awkward typing posture, and nothing much changes after all. "The back row" (thanks for that nomenclature, Mrs. Weiss) probably would have moped around about Amanda ruining their day if she'd gone; she didn't, so they can snark about what a rotten leader she is.

Best lines of the episode:

"This bitch better have switched my grade. I was like an 80 MICHAEL JAN!"

"This story is about--" "How amazing you are."

"I'm pretty sure people still hate each other."