As I go back and write thoughts posts on every episode from season three of 90210, I have to say that this particular episode stands out as one of my top-favorite episodes of the season. I remember being very skeptical about how much I would be able to enjoy this episode as soon as I saw that it had been written by David S. Rosenthal, because I hated what he did with Gilmore Girls when he took over as the show runner for the show’s final season. I thought that he made the show have too much angst and show lost a lot of the lighthearted nature that I had come to expect and love about Gilmore Girls in terms of the tone of writing for the show, so I thought his writing for 90210 would be the same way. However, I found myself pleasantly surprised by how lighthearted and funny this episode was while having an appropriate amount of drama too since this is a teen drama. After I saw this episode, I became excited whenever I saw that he had written or co-written an episode with one of the other writers on the writing staff. Not only is this episode fairly lighthearted, all of the episodes that he wrote this season were fairly lighthearted. I don’t know why his writing for 90210 is so different from the writing he did for Gilmore Girls. Perhaps his writing style is simply better suited for 90210, I’m not sure. Regardless of why the tonality of his writing for 90210 and Gilmore Girls is so different from each other, but David S. Rosenthal should consider himself forgiven for how much I hate what he did with Gilmore Girls. Anyway, onto my general thoughts on this episode.
This episode picked up pretty soon after where the last episode ended. Naomi woke up in hospital after having been treated by her drug overdose, and Silver told Naomi that she could take her home now. I find this very unrealistic. I’m pretty sure that hospitals aren’t allowed to release anyone Naomi’s age from the hospital without a parent’s or a guardian’s consent. Since the last we heard, Naomi’s mom, Tracy, was traveling in order to recover from the discovery that a con artist had posed as hers’ and Harry’s son that she gave up for adoption when they were young back in the first season, and Naomi didn’t want to live with her dad and his mistress, maybe they hadn’t heard about Naomi’s overdose. I’m guessing that the writers simply chose to overlook that issue. Although, Naomi is eighteen now, so maybe she doesn’t need a parent’s consent. I’m not too familiar with hospital regulations, but I would think Naomi would be required to talk to a counselor about her overdose. Since this is a teen drama, I think we’re supposed to overlook these details.
I’m not quite sure who to side with when it comes to the way Annie was acting toward Naomi in this episode. On the one hand, Naomi did call Annie a murderer because of the hit and run in the season one finale, but on the other hand Annie didn’t know that Mr. Cannon actually raped her. Silver told Annie that Naomi was going through a hard time, but Silver didn’t say anything to Annie about Naomi until the end of the episode. My main pet peeve about Silver telling Adrianna and Annie about Naomi is that we didn’t actually see the conversation. At least Annie and Adrianna ended up comforting Naomi who was initially upset about Silver telling them about her being raped for real because she didn’t want them to look at her with pity. They assured her that they weren’t looking at her with pity, but love for their friend as Annie put it and anger toward Mr. Cannon for raping Naomi. While I hate the fact that they didn’t show them finding out about Naomi, I really do like the scene where Silver, Annie and Adrianna go comfort Naomi. I thought that it was an all around well-done scene.
I love that we got a fair amount of material between Annie and Liam. Dixon offered to let Liam stay with their family for a few days. Liam said that he would stay out of Annie’s way, but it was quite obvious that he wanted to be around Annie. I love how Liam was constantly saying that he needed to go get a glass of water, but he was really just saying that so he could have an excuse to go talk to Annie.
The scene where he kept talking to Dixon about how he wanted to prove to Annie that he wasn’t the dangerous troublemaker she thought he was when they were lying in bed and Dixon was trying to go to sleep was hilarious. Later in the episode he decided to try and make Annie her favorite dinner, but he ended up starting a fire ruining it right after he said that he wanted her to know that trouble doesn’t follow him around. This was a rather nice moment between them, but it was quickly ruined when he learned the guy that she was dating was his half-brother Charlie, then he suddenly wanted nothing to do with Annie. I feel like that was very unfair to Annie, because she didn’t know that Charlie was Liam’s half-brother, so it’s not like she set out to date Charlie to try and hurt Liam. I think Liam should have been more understanding about the whole thing
As for Teddy, he was still hiding the fact that he’s struggling with his sexuality and was trying to be a good boyfriend to Silver and help her get ready for the bachelor auction that they were doing to raise money for breast cancer research. Teddy freaked out when he saw Ian talking to Silver, because he was worried she would find out that he hooked up with Ian. Teddy also tried to get the other guys to go along with Silver’s idea to start the bachelor auction off with a group dance, but he once again freaked out when he discovered that Silver had asked Ian to choreograph the dance and teach it too them. I have to say that I think Trevor Donovan did a great job of portraying Teddy’s internal struggle with his sexuality in this episode, as well as season three as a whole.
I loved the scene where they were practicing the group dance and Liam got mad after Dixon “kick ball changed” him in the groin as he put it, and Navid was the only guy that immediately perfected the dance routine. The shit quickly hit the fan though when Ian kept Teddy grief about him having trouble getting the dance routine right, which led Teddy to flip out and call him a “faggot”. I thought the scene as a whole was very well done, and you could really feel the tension when Teddy called Ian a faggot. I know that Teddy’s really struggling with his sexuality, but he definitely shouldn’t have said that to Ian. I don’t blame Silver for promptly dumping Teddy after the whole incident.
One thing that confused me about the whole thing with Teddy is why he just happened to be at the school the night of the bachelor auction even though he was no longer in the auction. Did he simply go to the school hoping to catch Silver there so they work things out, or was that just some random plot device the writers used as a setup for Teddy and Ian getting into a physical fight with each other in the hallway? That time I kind of felt like Ian really did provoke Teddy into fighting with him by saying that it wasn’t his fault that Teddy couldn’t accept the fact that he’s gay. When Teddy told Silver that he only called Ian a faggot because he provoked him, I feel like he was trying to place the blame for his own actions onto Ian and didn’t really have the right to say that, but the incident in the hallway in my opinion was Ian’s fault. I personally think that he really did provoke Teddy that time.
I have to say that I was impressed by Ian’s ability to really defend himself when Teddy started acting him, especially since Trevor Donovan is big, tall athletic guy, and Kyle Riabko on the other hand is a lot smaller than him. In the end, Ryan broke up the fight between Teddy and Ian and told them that they would have to serve two weeks in detention for fighting. This leads me to my next point. Why is it that the writers have basically made it seem like Ryan and Mr. Cannon are the only two teachers who teach at the school since season two? They are basically the only teachers at the school that we’ve seen since season two.
I know that sometimes teachers at high school will teach three completely different classes throughout the course of the school day. I myself had the same science teacher for my sophomore, junior and senior year of high school. I also had the same history teacher for my freshman year of high school and my senior year when I took AP History. It was also the same thing with the English teacher I had for my freshman year, I also had her for a teacher my senior year when I took AP English. It just seems weird to me that they only show Ryan, an English teacher, and Mr. Cannon, who’s the journalism teacher, and none of the teachers for other subjects, especially considering the fact that the school had three different drama teachers just in the first season of the show alone. Since this is a teen drama, I’m trying to not get too hung up on that aspect of the show.
As for Ivy, I have to say that I loved her in this episode, probably just as much as I enjoyed Liam in this episode. I thought that Ivy’s line about Teddy acting like Mel Gibson when he lashed out at Ian was pretty funny. The conversation between Ivy and her mother, Laurel, about how she was ready to sleep with Dixon was both awkward and funny at the same time since it seemed like she had about a hundred different kinds of condoms that Ivy could use. I loved Kelly Lynch on The L Word, and I love her on 90210. Laurel is definitely one of the most interesting out of all the parents of the kids that we’ve seen on the show.
When it was time to bid on Dixon at the bachelor auction, I thought that Ivy starting off with a bid of one dollar was beyond priceless. Things got even more interesting once Sasha, the older girl that Dixon dated in season two, showed up at the auction and started trying to outbid Ivy. Luckily, Silver intervened and declared that Dixon was “sold” to Ivy right as Sasha was about to bid four hundred and fifty dollars.
After the auction, Ivy told Dixon that she was just about to bid a thousand dollars when Silver intervened. This raises another question for me, exactly how much money does Laurel make as an executive in the music industry? She must be pretty successful and appears to be very generous when it comes to giving Ivy money for things if Ivy had a thousand dollars for bidding on Dixon at the auction. In the previous episode, Ivy told Dixon that her dad wants nothing to do with Ivy or Laurel, so Laurel is left to financially support Ivy and herself without any help from her dad. It’s obvious that Laurel isn’t a struggling single mother based on the things that have been said about Ivy and Laurel’s financial situation.
Sasha finally managed to get a chance to talk to Dixon in private after the auction. However, they showed Oscar in the backseat of a car making out with the girl who won a date with him at the auction as he watched them walk off to together, which leads me to believe that he paid Sasha to show up and tell Dixon that she was HIV positive. Sasha told him that after they had ended their fling, the guy she had recently gone through a bad breakup with showed up again and told her that he was HIV positive, so she needed to get tested too. As far as we know, Sasha also ended up testing positive for HIV, but I have a feeling that this whole thing was orchestrated by Oscar to breakup Ivy and Dixon like he had when he paid those girls to film Dixon doing body shots off of them at a bar in the previous episode. I thought that showing Ivy at her house waiting to have sex with Dixon right as Sasha was telling Dixon that she was HIV positive was a pretty good way to end the episode.
In this episode, we learned that Debbie is having financial problems and is having trouble finding a job because she apparently didn’t go to college. I don’t know what to make of that, because they never directly stated whether or not she went to college or not in the past seasons. Although, I do remember Debbie telling Annie that she gave up something, I can’t remember what, to do a photography internship, which ended up being very beneficial to her career in the beginning. Also, in the second episode of the series, Debbie already had a photography job right after they had moved to Beverly Hills. Now suddenly Debbie apparently can’t find a single photograph job in Beverly Hills. Although, Debbie did mention that having taken time off from working for quite a while was another thing that was making it harder for her to find a job.
Annie finding out about Debbie’s financial situation was of course a plot device on the writers’ part to serve as her motivation to agree to donating some of her eggs to Catherine for the ten thousand dollars that she had offered to give Annie if Annie let her buy some of her eggs so Catherine and her husband could have a child.
Victor really pissed me off with the way he treated Adrianna in this episode. I thought refusing to let Adrianna sing at Silver’s charity event unless they paid her ten thousand dollars like the gig he had lined up for her was beyond heartless. I know that Adrianna claiming that she wrote the song that he had done with Javier, before Javier died was wrong, but doesn’t he believe in doing something simply out of the kindness of his heart without earning money? I hated Victor even more after he up and decided that he would be getting eighty percent of the money that Adrianna would get for her singing gigs after Adrianna had performed at the show he had lined up for her, which left Adrianna with just two thousand dollars. I don’t like Victor at all.
There were some more pretty entertaining moments at the bachelor auction besides the bidding war between Ivy and Sasha. Silver told Oscar to say something to the ladies, because she knew that they would like his British accent, which of course made all of the girls go wild over him. The girls at the auction also made it clear that they wanted to bid on Ryan, but he of course shot them down right away since they aren’t old enough to have a romantic relationship with him without it being considered statutory rape.
I thought the way Liam walked onto the stage rather ambivalently was classic Liam. The whole thing was even funnier when Silver told everyone that he likes to surf, enjoys pumping iron, and curling up at home with a good book, which immediately led Liam to tell Silver that he didn’t write that, but Silver told him that he didn’t write anything on the card. In the end, Liam ended up being “sold” for three hundred and fifty dollars, which I think is rather impressive.
I felt really bad for Navid who initially didn’t have anyone bidding on him, which led Silver to keep dropping the amount she was auctioning him off for lower and lower. I don’t buy Navid as being a guy that girls wouldn’t want to date. He may be a little nerdy at times, but he still seems like quite the catch. Fortunately, Adrianna showed up and bid the two thousand dollars she had made singing that night on Navid and apologized to Silver for choosing her work over their friendship.
All in all, this episode really is one of my top favorite episodes of season 3, so I give a rating of an A+, because while there were some confusing parts that didn’t completely make sense it was still a really great episode. Besides, I’ve come to the conclusion that you sometimes have to let certain plot holes and contrivances in the writing slide when it comes to teen dramas.
1 comment :
Love Trevor Donovan
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