Will and Em's Romance on Rescue HI-Surf Is Incredibly Frustrating

It’s time to get real about Will and Em.

Rescue: HI-Surf‘s fast-paced rescues serve up plenty of action every week, but the action in the personal lives of the lifeguards has been ramping up in the most recent installments.

While rookies Hina and Kainalu dance around their burgeoning chemistry, old flames Will and Em have rekindled their romance, but it’s been far from a walk in the park, as the two have a complicated history and an unknown future.

The series has slowly rolled out information about Will and Em’s past relationship, which is a bit curious considering how central the plot point has become this season.

We know they once dated, and it ended badly, but that time has healed (most) of their wounds and led them to a place where they’re co-workers and close friends.

When we meet the pair during Rescue: HI-Surf Season 1 Episode 1, you can tell there’s something there, as evidenced by the longing looks, but we learn early on that Will is engaged to someone not named Em, though it’s hard to tell if he even likes his bride-to-be, Julie.

I don’t hate the idea of making the audience earn their insight into a fresh set of characters. It can be fun to see things play out before your eyes instead of having everything dumped on you via dialogue in the pilot episode.

But at a certain point, it can get frustrating to still feel out of the loop when the storyline continues to progress, and you feel like you’re missing one too many steps.

When Will and Em kissed during Rescue: HI-Surf Season 1 Episode 8, it was the jolt the storyline needed at that time because it wasn’t much of a will-they/won’t-they thing when it was so obvious they were always going to give in to their attraction.

I had hoped that they would do something interesting with the two, something beyond your ordinary television affair.

But from there, things have meandered between the pair, and instead of something fun and interesting happening, we’re getting a variation of a story we’ve seen a thousand times over.

Exes can’t stay away from one another and give in to temptation, engage in an affair, and one-half promises to break things off with their significant other, only to be unable to do so in the end, leaving the other heartbroken.

The heartbreaker then gets exposed as a cheater and ends up alone, not with the person they genuinely love or the one they led on.

This is where that lack of prior backstory gets frustrating because we don’t fully understand why Will is so hesitant and Em not so much. We don’t know why they can’t get it right because we don’t know exactly what they’ve been through.

Since we don’t know enough of their history, it’s been hard to get fully invested in their drama, especially as it continues to be as cliché as possible.

Will seemed very uncertain about ending things with Julie and being with Em, but all it took was Laka sticking his nose where it didn’t belong during Rescue: HI-Surf Season 1 Episode 11 for him to break Em’s heart, which just proves that whatever happened in the past must have scared Will badly.

Not bad enough to resist the temptation to fall back into old patterns, but bad enough to have him sticking to an engagement he loathes.

The thing about Will, though, is that not only is he stuck in this boring story, but his character must be the most unlikable of the bunch. And that’s saying something considering our introduction to Kainalu.

Not only is he a coward, but he’s dull on top of it. It’s hard to see what Em or Julie see in him. The most passion we’ve seen from him is when he talks about his surfing business, but outside of that, he’s a very one-note person.

And that’s at odds with Em, who’s also professional and passionate, but she’s also fun, flirty, and strong-willed. You can tell these two have a past, but it also feels like they may be living in that past and not realizing that they’re not the same people anymore.

There is a lot of love between the two, but love isn’t always enough, and as it stands right now, these two are not in a place where they should be together.

They’ve gone about everything incorrectly, and unless they do some serious soul-searching and talk about the past and what they want for the future, they seem destined to make the same mistakes over and over again.

Namely hurting one another.

And this time, they hurt other people as well.

Speaking of other people, Em and Sean weren’t engaged like Will and Julie, but they had something good going on. While Sean seems like a decent guy, he should recognize he’s stepping into murky waters with Em right now.

Whether or not he took Em up on her invitation to stay with her in the aftermath of Will’s dumping her, he should probably give Em some space to get her head on straight.

He was unknowingly dragged into the drama, and he deserves much better than that.

On the other hand, it goes without saying that Julie needs to let Will go. As previously stated, I’m not sure Will even likes Julie all that much. What should have been a fling clearly took a turn somewhere, and it got out of hand.

He had no business proposing when his entire soul was still Em’s, and like Julie or not, she didn’t deserve to have her heart and life played with.

Will and Em made decisions they’ll have to live with, and for the time being, that should very much be doing that living apart.

If these two ever want to try for real, they’ll need to forgive each other and themselves for what transpired in the past while committing to better communication and complete honesty in the future.

But as it stands right now, they need to give one another a wide berth, which will admittedly be difficult considering they work alongside one another.

That’s the price you pay when you rendezvous with your co-workers!