Finnegan

This is why you should not slough off the annual anniversary re-watch, as you did last year. Especially now that you have a better-visual-quality extra-long English-language version made by re-dubbing the French M6 version back into English!

I increasingly share your fondness of episode 5, by the way.

wolkenfuehlen

Well, I did rewatch the show last year, even though I didn't rewatch it all with you guys here

It's not even that episode 5 is my favourite, but it was the first one I taped when the show aired here, and in just the week between episode 5 and episode 6 I must've watched it a dozen times. and the next week, between episodes 6 and 7, I again watched eps 5&6 almost every day, and so on. (I still hate myself for not taping the first four episodes, btw. )

Finnegan

It's amazing how many times I can watched this show without seeing some pretty obvious things. For example: Why does Jake, upon or before arriving at Rawley, sign up to cox crew?

Apparently she has some clue as to how to do it -- maybe she's done it before, maybe she's just seen it done. But more importantly, it's a cover, like scamming a single room:

Participation in some athletic activity tends to be compulsory at prep schools. It's an integral part of the preppie culture -- the old "Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton" thing.

And cox on a crew team is one of the few athletic positions that does not require either appearing in public in scant clothing, or changing clothes and showering in a locker room with other team members.

In YA, the beauty and symbolism of the crew scenes, and the use of those scenes to articulate core themes of moral idealism, through Finn's habit of philosophizing and teaching literature to the crew team, can make one overlook the plot-device aspect of Jake's coxing: it's part of her cover for her cross-dressing, like hacking into the school database to get a single room.