Tricks and Treats (Freaks and Geeks)

As you move through adolescence, it seems that year after year you surrender a different part of your childhood. There comes an age when you begin to suspect that a large man in a red suit does not, in fact, break in to your house every year to give you that scooter you so desperately wanted. Nor does a comically large bunny cleverly hide baskets of sweets around your house. These revelations all come as we lose our youthful innocence, and as we grow older we choose to abandon the naiveté of our younger days and accept the much less fanciful reality.

However, rejecting Santa Claus will not affect Christmas that much going forward. You will still get presents every year, whether they’re given to you by family or if they’re given to you by a certain St. Nicholas. The one holiday that does dramatically change with age is Halloween, and the moment a kid decides to stop trick-or-treating their annual bounty of free candy disappears forever. Which year a kid should stop trick-or-treating remains a touchy subject (I can't recall the exact year I stopped, to be honest) and if you go that one year too long, you may be in for the nightmare of your life. “Tricks and Treats,” the third episode of Freaks and Geeks, puts Sam Weir and his geeky friends in the midst of this uncomfortable predicament: do they go trick-or-treating one last time, or do they admit that they are, perhaps, too old for this ritual? They choose the former, and suffer the consequences.

Sam Weir, in general, is a character who is far more comfortable remaining in his youth. Every time he is faced with something more mature, he shies away from it in fear. Unlike everybody else around him, he doesn’t want to grow up. However, there comes a moment when he realizes he has to grow up, even though this realization tends to come after he is embarrassed in the most painful way possible. How a high school student as fragile as Sam Weir could survive the things he has is beyond me.

As the geeks cling to their childhood, Lindsay and her band of freaks decide to drive around and get themselves in all kind of mischief. This is another interesting thing about Halloween, in that as one grows older the holiday means different things. While for children Halloween signifies a new chance to develop diabetes, for those slightly older it provides a chance for debauchery. Lindsay, having never been a pumpkin-smasher in her past, decides to go out for a bit of a joyride with Nick, Daniel, Kim and Ken.

She finds herself seduced by the vandalism, that is until she is handed a few eggs to throw at some random trick-or-treaters. However, in a Babel-esque development, Lindsay ends up nailing her brother Sam in the face with an egg. To make matters worse, Sam and the gang had just been beaten up by the bully Alan. The geeks just wanted to go out for one last Halloween, but in return they got picked on and egged. This is nothing new in the universe of Freaks and Geeks, a show which seems obsessed with breaking their characters down as much as possible.

Sam and Lindsay are two siblings who have different goals but always seem to wind up at the same ends. Sam wants to cling to childhood and ends up getting punished for it, while Lindsay wants to escape childhood and she ends up paying for it. However, it always seems to be Sam who takes the most physical abuse, and he just can never be okay with it. His friends Neal and Bill are infinitely more assured of themselves (Bill in particular never gives a crap what anyone thinks of him, and I don’t even think he’s aware of it), and they are more willing to move forward. Sam prefers the idealized world that a child sees, and it becomes harder for him to comprehend that sooner or later he’s going to have to grow up.

Most Freaks and Geeks episodes can have their plot summarized in two simple sentences, despite the fact that it’s an hour long show. What makes the show so rich is that each episode is rife with small moments of behavior that teach us something new about each character. It takes a premise and simply sits back as the characters play it out. “Tricks and Treats” contrasts a brother and a sister having trouble developing their identities. Lindsay needs to stop being in such a hurry to grow up, and Sam needs to start learning how to, and the show teaches these lessons in such a soul-crushing but ultimately real way.