Editorial: The Sleeping Beauty
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Welcome to the Ryan and Taylor show. This is after all their show. They’ve merely hijacked The O.C. with their incredible chemistry and individual charisma. And it doesn’t hurt that they’re unshakable passion and hotness is integrated with eased storytelling. There’s no over night flings or direct, convenient, avoidance of Marissa, Volchok and everything that’s happened in the last few months. Unfortunately there is a downside. There’’s a lack of plot structure that takes them, and us, out of the internal formation of their relationship or internal conflicts, whatever they are and could be. There’s nothing external that commonly builds elements of a show into forming story arch. I’m left wondering, where do they go from here? Or where do they go from the point of realizing how deeply in love they are? Granted it is a refreshing approach to have the shape of the relationship form interiorly with exciting but eased pace all while written in character and with distinctive detail. But at some point this has to build into solid plot line. At some point this whole show has to build into solid plot line.
Bullet is sharply written with his Republican pointed wit and tactless humor. But when contrasted with Caleb and the multifaceted impact Caleb had on season one he falls short on all accounts. Because unlike Caleb, regrettably, Bullet is a one-note and dimensionless character offering no more than a few cheap laughs and some backing money for Julie and Kirsten’s dating service.
Julie bedding the young ones and flirting with Kaitlin’s tennis instructor doesn’’t match the fierceness and shock of her affair with Marissa’s ex-boyfriend Luke. Having the ass tapping man who holds the financial future of Julie and Kirsten’s dating service [and the man who’s taken a liking to Julie] be the tennis instructor’s father was a nice twist. Still, it was hardly as engrossing as the tortured and inherited financial relationship that was Julie and Caleb.
Summer is still back at Brown playing the part of Che’s cohort. But perhaps, as it appears to be, she wasn’t playing at all. When she’s questioned by the ‘deans’ about her supposed involvement in freeing caged rabbits she never once wavers from who she has become and refuses to sell Che out. Che on the other hand finds it rather easy to sell Summer out going so far as to target her to every campus crime he’s actually committed. This means that while the writers quickly create an out of character shift in Che, they’’ve also quickly created an opening for Summer to come back to Newport. But it’s juxtaposed, even if unintentionally, with Seth’s former fear of revealing to Summer and his parents that he didn’t get in to Brown. Summer is now nearly kicked out of the Ivy League school and left with nothing more than a rabbit named Pancakes and a tentatively supportive Seth who is utterly clueless to the fact that she may be kicked out of school and heading home to a life she last left when just coming to terms with Marissa’s death. The subtleties of this are interesting even if too slowly reached.
Even more interesting are the continued nuances found in Seth. Never to have uttered Marissa’s name outside of context with Ryan let alone grieve her death this season, the impact of it still lingers in his life. It’s clear, especially to Taylor, that Seth is ultimately hesitant for her to peruse Ryan because she’’s “no Marissa” as Taylor says. And with his relationship with Summer becoming distant and frayed around the edges the world of the fantastic four has crumbled and its distressed state becomes more self-evident as times passes and the remaining members around him move on or change.
The genuine, even if feeling recycled, nuggets of season one (and a few remnants from other seasons as well) charm are formless and offer little to the extension of the show. And more over they don’t equate to the magnetism and quality of season one despite the sheer volume of people saying it’s back to season one glory.
There’’s slight vindication in Seth and Ryan bonding moments, Kirsten and Sandy kitchen scenes and Julie acting like Julie. Yes, the form, style and character distinctiveness of season one is back. But why do I feel I’m settling for second rate when we can still have so much better if the writers stopped to actually write captivatingly shifting storyline rather than quick nuggets of moderate joy.
*** 1/3 out of ***** stars
