Part 2 of Season 3, Episode 1: Misery Loves Company - Want to cry along with me each and every time Shannen Doherty appears on-screen? LET'S GO.

Check in on Part 1, right HERE.

Nighttime.  Back at the Pit.

Inside, David and Donna sit at a table, David perusing the menu; Donna, looking pensive.  Apropos of nothing, she blurts out, "I can't go to Europe."

After David asks why, she readily pulls out her passport - that she was just...holding open for no discernible reason? - and shoves it in his face: "I can't show that picture to anyone! I look horrible!" David assures her she looks cute, but she remains unconvinced.

Here comes Steve, Peach Pit uniform on whatever the opposite of "fleek" is.  He approaches the table and meekly inquires, "Can I take your order?"

David and Donna both look up and, flummoxed at what stands before them (i.e. Steve's hair), gawk at this all-out clown, given that they've never witnessed him put in a hard day's work in his life.  David, with his freshly bronde forelock, starts laughing and Steve warns, "Can it, Silver," then takes a big, showy look behind him and fills them in: "Look, it's a bet, all right? Brandon bet me that I couldn't hold down a job." David asks, "Does Nat know this?" like, Jesus FUCK, at least someone is asking this and trying to maybe advocate for Nat.  But Steve is a vapid, soulless ghoul with no conscience, so he merely threatens them: "No, and neither of you two weasels are gonna tell him, right?"

Steve and his tresses are true menaces: to Nat; to his friends; to society; to mirrors and hairstylists across the Westside.

Part 1 of Season 3, Episode 1: Misery Loves Company - Want to cry along with me each and every time Shannen Doherty appears on-screen? LET'S GO.

 A NEW BOMBSHELL - i.e. Season 3 - HAS ENTERED THE VILLA.  We've arrived at what is at once my favorite and least favorite season of the show.  I haven't watched these episodes in yeeeeeeeeeears, so I know some story lines are going to come as a (probably puzzling) surprise, e.g. Steve working at the Pit for a total of 25 minutes? Why the heck not? That's called engrossing TV, people!

Pre-credits, we're instantly inside the empty halls of West Beverly as some electric drum-heavy "mystery" music plays.  Skulduggery must be afoot!

The camera slowly pans over to the true jump scare of one Steve "Top Button" Sanders and the mullet he rode in on.  He priggishly nods, immediately after I say aloud to my laptop, "This fucking dildo." Coincidence? I don't think so, friend.

He then whips around (the ever-growing baby Bedlington Terrier protruding from the base of his skull leading the way; seriously: that thing billows in the West Bev breeze as he spins his head as though he's Finesse-ing his hair to beautiful like there's no tomorrow) at the sound of:

Mrs. T! and her SHOULDERPADS! saying, "Oh, Steve! I've been looking for you." You're better than that, Mrs. T.

Steve chuckles all nervously, and if you've yet to figure out this is dumb Steve's dumb dream, wherein Mrs. Teasley tells him that he didn't pass any of his classes - which, fine, believable - and will have to take his Junior year over, I don't know how to help you.  They go back and forth a few times and then! Dream School Bell rings, and we cut to:

Steve's glass-blocked holding pen and him JOLTING awake from the nightmare and cartoonishly gulping and gaping around the room.  My ultimate nightmare, you ask? Steve's tight tendrils.

Exterior, Peach Pit.  Steve's humiliation of a license plate with a Corvette attached is parked out front.

Inside, Steve regales Brandon with a very theatrically detailed description of the dream and it's abundantly clear that Brandon couldn't care less, probably because he's too busy thinking about how truly great his hair looks now, finally, two fucking years into this goddamn thing.

But still: he assures his ringleted friend, "Well, we're not [Juniors].  We made it.  We're gonna be Seniors...but first: two months of glorious, uninterrupted freedom," and then walks around the counter and flings an arm around Steve's dense underbrush and they basically plan out how they're going to be sex pests at the beach club all summer, picking up "hot, beautiful, babe-licious, sexy, half-naked, lonely racists with terrible hair chicks," and both of these absolute predators should be on some kind of a watchlist.  Steve breathlessly calls it, "Hot fun," and I need a quaalude-dosed iced beverage with a side of the number for a good lock-down mental facility, post haste.

Oh, and then they pull snaps off of each other instead of pulling knives on each other and saving us all from another six seasons of their utter buffoonery.  Also: glad that Steve's so gung-ho about his pending, literal seniority that he'll almost torch it to the ground in a few months' time with some harebrained pre-The Net-style shenanigans, costarring some poor, impressionable sack with a coiffure nearly as bad as his own.  Flop Era, thy permanent resident's name is Sanders.

On the Importance of Brenda and Shannen

I started my blog twelve long centuries lifetimes years ago - out of boredom; out of unemployment - as a profanity-and-mockery-tinged-marinated love letter of sorts to a show that altered my being on a truly epigenetic level at the age of 10.  But when I go back and read my old posts, I see that it's really been a love letter to the character of Brenda Walsh, and by extension, her portrayer, Shannen Doherty.

Never had I seen a character such as one Mz. Walsh: fierce, opinionated, loyal, wardrobe and hair to the GODS.  Wee me didn’t understand the concept of "feminism" at that time, but I knew she represented SOMETHING: a woman being treated differently than the men in her life; a woman being judged more harshly than the men in her life; a woman advocating for herself in the face of both of those things, ass-kicking and name-taking all the while. 

The character was eventually labeled “difficult" (much the same as Shannen the Person was labeled) but I never wavered: she was a Queen; a capital-I Icon; a VIP in my pre-teen-into-teen development; basically the Lady Gaga “talented, brilliant, incredible, amazing, show-stopping" .gif come to life.

And Shannen did that.  Shannen brought Brenda into the world and changed me forever.  Call it dramatic; call it ridiculous; say that she was just a character on a cheesy nighttime soap opera about entitled rich kids (I'm looking at you, STEVE).  But it's absolutely true.  Sometimes there are those actors that hit different for you.  Shannen was most definitely that for me, and I suspect that if you're visiting/lurking here, she was probably that for you, too.  

I always say my first crush was Luke.  But really: it was Shannen.