Abbott Elementary Premiere: Janine Meets A New Teacher... And Faces An Identity Crisis (Plus, Grade It!)
Things are changing at Abbott Elementary this season — and Janine is not feeling it.
Wednesday's Season 5 premiere sees the Abbott staff reunite to kick off the school year with Development Day (aka Janine's "second favorite holiday after Christmas"). She's thrown for a loop, though, when Ava introduces a new fourth-grade teacher, Dominic Clark, played by Shrinking's Luke Tennie. At first, Janine is worried that Dominic's arrival will make Barbara feel old, since he was a kindergarten student of her years ago, but instead, Barbara happily takes Dominic under her wing. But Janine's always been under that wing! If Janine isn't Barbara's eager mentee, who even is she anymore?
That's not all that's changing: Ava is actually blissfully in love with O'Shon (and announces that at every opportunity), and Melissa is going from teaching second grade to sixth grade — which Jacob and Mr. Morton warn her is a big step up in cruelty. Amid all this upheaval, a guy named Craig from the district (played by SNL's Mikey Day) shows up to lead the staff in mandatory team-building exercises. The team is falling apart fast, though — Janine tries on a bunch of new personalities for size, and Melissa freaks out when Jacob and Mr. Morton taunt her like a pack of mean middle-schoolers — and the building is falling apart, too, with a collapsed ceiling and a gas leak forcing the staff to do their exercises outside.
When Mr. Johnson admits that he doesn't know how to ride a bike, Gregory volunteers to help teach him, but that just leads to him taking a nasty spill. It all looks pretty dire, but Barbara convinces Melissa to embrace middle school with a pep talk, and Janine realizes she can now be a mentor to young Dominic. She's reinvigorated: "I'm gonna put the 'me' in 'mentor.'" The staff rallies together to help Mr. Johnson complete his first successful bike ride — and an exterminator tells Ava he had to kill a bunch of mice in their walls. Why do we have a bad feeling this "Abbott is falling apart" theme is going to haunt them all season long?
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