At My Whit’s End: The Mind Crushing of Connie Kendall

(Photo: Connie, moments before she tumbles into the abyss of Whit’s sins. By Bruce Day, Focus on the Family. Image courtesy of The Odyssey Scoop.)

42 episodes. It took 42 episodes for Adventures in Odyssey to become what is finally, officially, recognizably, Adventures in Odyssey. Three proto-pilots. 13 Family Portraits episodes. 22 episodes of Odyssey USA. Four episodes that ended with Officer Harley written out.

AIO’s done messing around. No more growing pains. No more “who is this for?” No more making fun of cops (the biggest sin of all!) AIO is now a central part of Focus on the Families ministry, classified as “our outreach to children.”¹ (More like outreaching to beat their asses, amirite?) The tapes are selling. We’ve got a hit!

The production and writing team now have to buckle down and just make as much of it as possible to make more money! Oh, and get people into the Focus on the Family bubble so they can give Focus more money. And uh, I guess save souls? Yeah, bring people to the Lord… So we can then tell them how to worship which includes giving Focus money! In that exact order. Genius.

Co-creator Steve Harris recalls this time as one where, “we were writing policy for the show as we did it.”² And this leg of the show was a grind, with the range of 24 episodes we’ll be discussing in this post (and the next) pumped out in the short span of six months. Basically one episode a week. At least now, with the show’s format and characters in place, the writing team could start to refine the concept. Focus more on “policy” than just getting the damn thing to work. Let’s start with what Phil Lollar called the “the main story line of 1988.”³

Connie’s salvation.

To give the writers of AIO the barest amount of credit, I respect they didn’t have Connie show up to Odyssey and, within a single episode, convert to a full on Jesus-stan. It respects that non-believers need more than just a single conversation to commit their entire life to a new faith. It could be a compelling way for the show to have a reasonable dialogue with non-believers and, most importantly, develop Connie. What really makes her tick, her core values. Learn why she might want God to have a place in her life. The understanding of the universe and life that a belief in God would fill the gaps of.

But we’ve already seen that isn’t what AIO is interesting in doing. We knew it wasn’t from Connie’s first episode, where Whit chewed her out for merely talking to a young boy about what it’s like to live in California. We saw Whit destroy Connie’s life points and send her to the graveyard for merely suggesting humans are good deep down. So it isn’t a surprise that this batch of episodes continue down that path but the way they push her toward God are… Uh…

Episode 34: Stormy Weather

Connie’s fed up with Whit and all his preaching about God, but when a violent storm rips through Odyssey, she relies on his faith to save them both.

Up to this point Connie hasn’t been on the receiving end of much God talk from Whit or the other characters. This is down to AIO reairing a collection of Family Portraits episodes, writing out Harley, and introducing new characters/concepts to pick up on later. Here though we’re told all the preaching Connie’s been forced to endure is finally getting to her. Tom offhandedly mentions he’s heard Connie’s judging the upcoming “Bible Drill” at church, an event Connie didn’t even know was happening! Whit, apologizing, explains he meant to ask earlier since all the kids want her to do it. This sets Connie off.

Connie: “I'm not interested in that stuff. Why does everybody keep trying to make me interested in it? Always preaching at me.”

Tom: “Preaching at you?”

Connie: “You, the kids, everybody! I have to listen to all this stuff about the Bible and, you know, I never said that I-”

Tom: “It's all right, Connie. All right. I meant no offense.”⁴

While I wish this frustration with all the God talk had been seeded into previous episodes, Connie’s rant paints enough of a picture to get an idea what it’s been like over the past few months. She describes how her job at Whit’s End (which, lest we forget, was advertised simply as “help run busy soda fountain”) includes, in her words, “ALWAYS babysitting these little kids.” This isn’t just at Whit’s End but also with Bible Drills at the church and, presumably, elsewhere in Odyssey. She’s doing it so often that she doesn’t have any time to spend with kids her own age. Storming off from Whit’s End we see just how true that last statement is as she meets up with Debbie, a (non-Christian) friend from school. She comments how rare it is to see Connie these days.

Debbie: “I mean, a bunch of us from school were getting worried about you. We thought you were getting religious or something.”

Connie: “Is that why you don't ask me to do things anymore?”

Debbie: “Yeah. I mean, you kept saying no, so I got tired of asking.”⁵

Connie wasn’t overreacting or exaggerating, working at Whit’s End has taken over her whole life. Work that, we should take note, includes supervising children outside of Whit’s End. Which, ya know, seems hella illegal to me. What with all the activities being focused on religion (though in our current political climate it won’t be for long!)

This paints Whit hiring Connie not as simply as needing an employee to help around the shop, but as a deliberate tactic to isolate her from peers her own age. To remove any secular influences out of her life. To pump her as full of “the word” as he can. She’s being forced into religion in order to keep her job/please her boss. It’s all the more sinister when you remember Whit hired her after discovering she came from a broken home. The moment he identified her as vulnerable he pounced. Full-on cult recruitment style.

Debbie panics when Connie suggests sticking around to hang with their group of friends. The very idea that Connie’s “religious” makes her a social pariah. Dejected, she leaves.

I can’t tell you this has never happened to a Christian teen ever in the history of all mankind. What I can tell you is that in my high school, right around when I was Connie’s age, I was openly Christian and no one gave me shit about it. I’d mention it to friends who were secular or had another faith and you know what their reaction would be? A shrug and a, “cool, bro.” I wasn’t preaching or being a wierdo at people, so they were chill with it. Connie isn’t even a Christian! I guarantee you if she explained all that “Church stuff” was for work, Debbie would understand. It makes Debbie’s panicked reaction seem silly, overblown, and unrealistic.

But in the context of AIO? It makes complete sense because this isn’t meant to be realistic. It’s all propaganda, made to drive young believers further into the arms of the Church. Despite this being a “convert the non-believer” storyline, this is meant for those who already believe. It’s a reminder that, like Bobby in “Connie Comes to Town,” if you’re a Christian and even consider leaving your Evangelical community? You’ll be ruining your life. Debbie’s reaction to Connie serves as what Evangelicals want to make their kids believe. That secular people will treat you horribly for your faith. Hell, they’ll treat you bad even if you aren’t actually a Christian! They just get one scent of Jesus on you and BAM, you’re cast out to the wolves. So why take the chance of being an outcast? There’s a group who unconditionally love you already! Just never leave the faith and you’ll be fine.

Because if you do… Well, let’s just say the only people at my high school who were weird about me being Christian were the other Christians. Specifically a teacher that attended my Church who, during lunch one day, pressured me into attending a meeting of the Fellowship of Christian Athletes. Despite my protests that I was not an athlete (unless doing Naruto runs counts) she shoved me into a classroom with all the lights switched off where another teacher preached about God. All the other teens sat there in silence. Did they want to be here? My eyes darted back and forth. I didn’t want to be here, I wanted to talk about anime with my friends! The teacher who put me in there probably thought she was saving my soul but I just felt violated. I avoided her for the rest of my four years there.

Connie, pushed to the breaking point, begs her mom, June, to let her go back to California. Back to her friends. Friends who know her. Friends who accept her for who she is. Friends who aren’t insidious representations of what life outside the Evangelical sphere is like. June can’t understand why Connie wants those friends back in her life. Aren’t Mr. Whittaker and the kids at Whit’s End her friends? Connie rightfully balks at the suggestion.

Connie: “How can they be my friends? I'm 15, Mom. All those kids are so young and Whit’s so-”

June: “Careful.”

Connie: “Mature.”

June: -eye rolling grunt-⁶

Connie’s logical and correct point is immediately backhanded by June with the single most creepy thing said (so far) on AIO.

June “You should never put an age limit on friendship, Connie. Well, when I was growing up, some of my best friends were a lot younger and a lot older than me.”⁷

My reaction to this can be summed up thusly.

Can a teenager have platonic relationships with people outside their age group? Of course, older mentors can help younger people in a multitude of positive and appropriate ways. But the suggestion here is that a teenager having extremely young and very old friends is equivalent to having friends their own age. Which… No.

I don’t need a psychology degree to know how unhealthy it is for a teen to have NO FRIENDS their own age. And it’s doubly unhealthy for their “friends” to only consist of “kids you serve at your job” and “your boss.”

This is when I was forced to conclude the goal here isn’t Connie’s “salvation.”

It’s to groom her.

Now I don’t necessarily mean “grooming” in the sexual context most associate with the term these days. I mean it in the way former anti-sex trafficking worker F.D. Signifier explained it as someone who identities, “vulnerable and impressionable young people and they take advantage of that vulnerability to extract some type of benefit.” In this case it’s Whit exploiting the power he has over Connie to force her into becoming a Christian for his own benefit. It’s also Connie’s mom supporting that level of control Whit has over Connie’s life. That’s the grooming here.

After Whit and Connie get stuck in the storm where Whit suffers a nasty blow of shattered glass to his leg, Connie helps bring him to the hospital. Whit, recovering in bed, seemingly apologizes for the way he’s treated Connie.

Whit: “With the thought that I might lose you, I realized how much I take you for granted. I'm very selfish about you.”

Connie: “You? Selfish?”

Whit: “Yes. See, I depend on you so much around the shop and with the kids. And, well, I need to give you more time off. I realize that now.”⁸

Ah, the classic sort of apology where you technically say sorry, but you’re really using it to talk yourself up AND excuse what you did. It’s the way he tosses in “how much” Connie means to him along with that creepy “I’m very selfish about you.” That’s wildly inappropriate but by cloaking it all in an apology he makes it harder for Connie to reject it.

Whit promises that if Connie stays (both working at Whit’s End and Odyssey itself) he’ll giver her more time off to be with friends her own age. Whit has yet again moved the goalposts and promises her more freedom. But he can’t and shouldn’t be in control of that! Connie should have had that from the start! But now he gets to offer it up as some kind of perk… A perk Connie doesn’t accept.

Connie: “My mom says you should never put an age limit on friendship, Whit.”

Whit: “Oh?”

Connie: “It's funny you'd say all that because when you were in here getting your leg stitched up? I was thinking about losing you.”

Whit: “My leg wasn't that bad.”

Connie: “I know, but I was thinking about it anyway and I realized how much I take you and the kids for granted to.”⁹

Connie’s been mentally beaten into taking on June’s belief of “not putting an age limit on friendship” as her own. Which leads her right into internalizing the idea Whit just presented, that she takes him and the kids for granted. Not the reality of the situation, that Whit took her for granted. But it’s too late now, Whit’s groomed her to stay at Whit’s End and continually sacrifice her life for his needs. She calls Whit and the kids her friends! But that’s not the worse part. Connie questions why she ever thought they weren’t her friends and Whit, seeing just how well his grooming’s worked, refers to her doubts as, “thinking about things the wrong way.”

No she isn’t, Whit! Connie’s a teenager, she’s still figuring life out! Thinking about things is GOOD. Listening to your doubts and concerns is healthy! But of course, the idea you can “think about things the wrong way” is the kind of mind policing taught to you in Evangelical spaces. It keeps you constantly in fear of being “wrong.” Constantly praying for forgiveness after not just every perceived “wrong” action but every “wrong” thought. This is a system that wants to dictate when and where you can feel “right.”

Connie agrees to judge the Bible Drill, putting her into a position of authority over her supposed child “friends.” She’ll now never be, as writer Amber Cantorna-Wylde explained about her own history growing up in the Evangelical church, “one of the girls.”¹⁰

The way Whit treats Connie also calls to mind Cantorna-Wylde’s description of a traumatic religious event where “nothing explicitly sexual happened” but it still made her “feel as if I’d been assaulted.”

“I didn’t know that I could walk away and leave, rather than stay captive in a spiritually and emotionally unsafe situation. I didn’t know. I didn’t know because no one taught me to trust my inner Knowing. I didn’t know because no one told me that boundaries were healthy, even with people in authority. I didn’t know because no one taught me that even church could be unsafe.”¹¹

“Even with people in authority.”

Whit should have boundaries with Connie. Not just as her boss but as an older man. It shouldn’t be her responsibility to define or enforce them, that work should be on him. Yet his position as a “man of faith” is used to disregard any concern. That faith is then used as justification to put her mind in a cage and crush it within.

Connie’s a teen and isn’t equipped to understand why this is all so horrifying. Like I said, grooming doesn’t have to explicitly sexual to be-

Whit: “Connie?”

Connie: “Yeah?”

Whit: “Since I'm not allowed out of bed right now, would it be inappropriate to ask you to come over here and give me a hug?”

Connie: “No, I don't guess it’d be inappropriate at all.”

-the two hug-

Connie: “Thank you for being my friend, Mr. Whittaker.”

Whit: “Well you’re very welcome, Ms. Kendall. It's my pleasure.”¹²

Yeah it’s inappropriate! Especially after the way you drilled into Connie’s mind to keep her away from anyone outside your sphere of influence!

That’s when Whit makes his move and steps things up physically. The moment she agrees they shouldn’t put an age on friendship? BAM! He immediately talks to her as if she’s an adult, the whole “Ms. Kendall” bit, AS he hugs her.

And they say queer people are grooming children! To appropriate a comment from an article demonizing Drag Queen Story Hour from Focus on the Family themselves, what Whit does in this episode, “is grooming, straight up.”

While none of the other episodes in this batch get to that level of grooming, they do take perverse delight in knocking Connie down a peg every chance they get. There’s, “What Are We Going to Do About Halloween?” which, yes, is about why dressing up for Halloween glorifies demons but having a Bible themed costume party is totally fine, I guess. Connie goes to a Halloween party with her secular friends where “the guys dressed up as a gross looking witches” (THE HORROR!) She eats a ton of candy and, somehow, develops a cavity in the span of one night. Which is impossible. Whit invites her to come to his bible party the next year, which she more or less agrees to. She wouldn’t want to get punished by the universe for daring to step out of Whit’s Christian circle again.

“The Shepherd and the Giant” has Whit mercilessly dunk on Connie for thinking Bible stories aren’t “exciting.” He offers to let her try a new invention in the Bible Room (a newer location in Whit’s End that’s basically an interactive biblical kids museum) that’ll prove her wrong.

Whit: “I need a guinea pig and you'll do just fine.”

Connie: “Well, I have to clean up the room.”

Whit: “Now, oh, what’s the matter now? You afraid you might actually like it?”¹³

It only gets worse when Connie, overwhelmed by Whit’s “Environment Enhancer” (think an interactive audio story), refuses to finish listening to the story of David and Goliath. Whit chides her for not being able to handle such an “exciting” story.

Connie: “Oh, alright, gimme the headphones.”

Whit: “Good girl.”¹⁴

…If God is real, would he really make one of his own children go through the pain of listening to this groomer nonsense? Asking for a friend.

While Connie’s story arc was intended to “move (her) toward accepting Jesus”¹⁵ the only thing I’m seeing is a teen girl manipulated into not believing her own feelings, forced into inappropriate relationships with people outside her age, kept away from those who might question these actions, and just generally mind crushed into oblivion.

That’s the thing. Mr. Whittaker may not be allowed to (openly) beat kids anymore, but he’s still getting that control through other means.

And Connie’s story line isn’t the only place where this happens. We’ve got to talk about the rest of this batch of episodes.

(Which, of course, I thought I could do in one post but the horrors of Mr. Whittaker snuck up on me once again!)

Next Time: The Hollowed Out Husk of Mr. Whittaker.

Note: Friendly reminder to all the readers, I have a Patreon where you can support the show! You can either pledge $1 a month or simply sign up for free to get reminders of when the blog updates in your email. I’ve also posted some exclusive mini essays, rambles, and other little tidbits there as well. Thank you for checking it out!

Sources:

“Focus on the Family: Celebrating Twenty-Five Years of God’s Faithfulness, Tehabi Books, 2002.

(1) Pages 85-86

“Rewind from 1000 to 0001 with Steve Harris and Phil Lollar,” The Official Adventures in Odyssey Podcast, Focus on the Family, 2024.

(2)

"The Complete Guide to Adventures in Odyssey” by Phil Lollar, Focus on the Family Publishing, 1997.

(3) Page 73

(15) Page 59

Stormy Weather: Written by Paul McCusker, Directed by Paul McCusker and Phil Lollar, Production Engineer Bob Luttrell, Focus on the Family, 1988.

(4)

(5)

(6)

(7)

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“Out of Focus: My Story of Sexuality, Shame, and Toxic Evangelicalism” by Amber Cantorna-Wylde, Westminster John Knox Press, 2023.

(10) Page 20

(11) Page 46

The Shepherd and the Giant: Written and Directed by Phil Lollar, Production Engineer Dave Arnold, Focus on the Family, 1988.

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