Neel Shah's Articles

Drum role, please: the award for "Most Ludicrous-but-Totally-Awesome T.V. Exchange of The O.C. Season"� goes to...Sandy and Kirsten Cohen! Well done, guys"”competition on this episode was stiffer than Marissa's early-morning vodka tonic. (On a side note, does anyone not like Drunk Marissa? Anyone? Would there be any objections to her spending every onscreen moment in a blacked-out haze, throwing deck chairs into the swimming pool and calling her mom a whore between swigs from her trusty flask? We need to petition Josh Schwartz about making this happen.) Anyhow, if you missed the aforementioned exchange, here's a recap: Sandy gets call from Shady Lawyer Dude regarding the potential location of unknown entity "Rachel Bloom." Evidently, Sandy and Ms. Bloom were quite the Jewerific power couple back in the day, much to the chagrin of his WASPY Nordic wife, Kirsten. Which leads to the following:

Kirsten: Who's missing?
Sandy: Rebecca Bloom.
Kirsten: As in the love of your life?
Sandy: She's not the love of my life.
Kirsten: Sandy, you were engaged to be married.
Sandy: We were engaged to be engaged.
Kirsten (completely deadpan): Yeah, until she burned down a nuclear lab site.
Sandy (inquisitively): We don't know if she did that for sure.

Touché, Sandy. As for you, O.C. scribes, give yourselves a nice pat on the back: nothing gets a show back on track faster than a little touch of Chernobyl. Could that line have come further out of left field? I would have spit my drink out all over the floor in laughter if I was actually drinking something when I heard it.

Granted, this episode was more foreplay than actual penis-in-vagina. But foreplay has never been so fun! Or at least that's what I read in Cosmo. Let's tackle the non-Sandy/Kirsten plot lines one by one:

1) Caleb refusing to acknowledge his bastard daughter's existence: To be honest, I'm willing to cut the guy a break on this one. How else are you supposed to deal with an illegitimate kid other than to pretend it doesn't exist? I mean, depositing it in a back-alley dumpster is sooo Senior Prom.

2) Alex and Marissa as lesbiatrons-in-training: We learn early in the episode that the two budding love birds have been hanging out every day since, um, last week's episode. What a coincidence! But can they just fucking makeout already? I mean, simultaneous Interpol listening and gay (hehe) heart necklaces are all well and good, but unless this turns out to be Where the Boys Aren't #18, we're going to have one very anticlimactic consummation scene on our hands. An interesting question does come to mind, though: Who's the butch and who's the bitch? Hard to say at this juncture"”popular money is on Alex (riot grrrrrl), but Marissa certainly has her fair share of pent up anger. E-mail your thoughts (neel.shah@dartmouth.edu) and we'll publish the answers next week.

Which leaves us with:

3) Seth and Summer, potentially back in the saddle (or, to get all Latin on your ass, a return to the "quid pro quo."� That means "normal"� in case you're retarded.) However you slice it, this was inevitable. I mean, what self-respecting hipster Jew wouldn't continue to blow his Matzoh balls over a girl who drops a "Kavalier and Gay"� joke? It couldn't have happened a moment too soon"”Zach was slowly approaching "I, the viewer, want to smash the T.V. with a pool ball every time Zach opens his stupid mouth" status. But will Seth and Summer actually go through with it? And is Caleb actually going to croak next week, as the preview indicated? And will any O.C. viewer actually donate money to the Tsunami relief fund? (That commercial was touching, Benjamin McKenzie and Peter Gallagher, but I think you guys targeted the wrong demographic. Where the fuck is Sri Lanka, anyway?) Till next week.

Memo to the beloved face explosions, guns, prescription painkiller ODs, schizophrenics, and sleazy potential Mexican rapists from The O.C.'s first season: no need to come back for a second go-around. Stay at home, smugly counting your cash and screwing groupies, and watch as The O.C. devolves into a saccharine gangbang of boring melodrama. No seriously, don't worry about it"”you've already been replaced! In your humble stead we've been given water-polo playing douchebag Zach, who couldn't act his way onto a 2.a.m Cinemax soft-core porn flick; Lindsay, who can't manage to look hot for more than three consecutive shots; and Alex, who actually would be really hot if the retarded purple streak in her hair made me want to have sex with her instead of punch myself in the face (good thing that totally awesome butterfly tattoo makes up for it. Idiot.) And people wonder why ratings have been declining all season.

Well, it looks like we'll have to keep waiting for that upswing: another episode gone by, another 60 minutes of relative tedium. I mean, was I blacked out for the first 56 minutes (until the final "4 minutes of Girls Night Out"�), or did nothing even happen? To re-cap: the girls decide to strap one on and go get wasted. Lindsay almost drowns, although not really because she's actually passed out inside the club, even though everyone wishes she really had died if for no other reason than to facilitate a Ryan/Marissa 10-day Jack and coke (the white kind) binge. The boys, on the other hand, do their part to complete the gender role reversal: they sit at home, bitch and moan about their feelings and shit, and then yell at their significant others/exes for being emotionally closed off. Fantastic stuff, if you like your T.V. terrible.

Which brings us to the budding Seth/Marissa/Alex love triangle"”the only remnant of "Vintage Season One O.C"� we've seen all year. First, though, it should be noted that Seth has officially become the gayest purportedly heterosexual character of all time. Dude, you just found out your girlfriend used to date chicks, and your gut reaction is to throw a hissy fit about it? In high school, meeting a real live lesbian"”a ridiculously hot real live lesbian at that"”was the stuff of pure fantasy (a fantasy subsequently ruined by going to college and actually meeting real live lesbians, at which point it became apparent that lesbians are just fat, smelly vegans who rarely shave their legs.) As for Ryan"¦I'm speechless. You discover that your best friend's ex is a chick. Not only do you not tell him this immediately, but you proceed to make zero effort to get him to finagle a ménage out of the situation (which, even if completely unsuccessful, would have still made for quality television.) Someone call the homo police and take these kids in for questioning.

The final four minutes of the show, which, coincidentally, were also the final "4 minutes of Girls Night Out"� (give Mr. Schwartz another life-imitating-art brownie point) gave us Marissa and Alex spooning on a couch, sharing a blanket and trading doey-eyed glances. The chemistry wasn't exactly Gertrude Stein and Alice Toklas, but it was certainly palpable. Would they hold hands? Kiss? Perform super-attractive cunnilingus on each other and then paint each other's nails? Guess we'll find out next week"¦time's up! Ah, the gays: they cost us an election, but at least they're good as plot crutches on floundering teenage soap operas.

In any case, at least the scenes from next week's O.C. look decent. Then again, they always do. Memo to the coming attractions: stop fucking with my emotions and give me a solid episode for once, will ya?