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.

Part 4 of Season 2, Episode 28: Wedding Bell Blues - THE END (of this season and my rope) IS NIGH.

DON'T MISS OUT ON ALL THE FUN: rendezvous with parts 1, 2 and 3 here, here and here, then come back to get all up in part 4's business.  Also: THIS IS IT.  Season 2 will be in the rear view after this one, and I'll begin recapping Season 3 which will eventually conclude when I'm in my mid-50s.  Something fucking depressing to look forward to, I guess.

We pan down to the ceremony already in progress: the Pink Ladies in their delicious confectionery dresses; Jackie in her tragiqué bridal Don't; Mel and David and the Probably Degenerate Rando Groomsmen in their Dream Date Ken But Make It Blindingly White suits.

It's not too late to Runaway Bride-it, Jackie: away from that catastrophic headdress (which is clearly striving to be this but failing miserably); away from Mel and his deviousness and odd, wig-like hair here; away from the David-as-a-stepson of it all.  Alas.

Don't front, Kelly.  We all know the true meaning behind those tears of stepfather-induced terror.

Cut over to a shot of a squinty Dylan, plotting Jim's murder and/or his summer fling with his girlfriend's best friend which will alter the entire trajectory of the show and piss off an entire generation of girls and boys who will carry the anguish with them well, well into adulthood.  Or something.  Just me? Yes? Oh.

We arrive at Dorkmeister Z and her Six LeMeure-coded hat and maybe? okay? dress, alongside Brandon, smug-less, thank gawd, but with that fucking Conair barrel-curled piece of forelock jutting out over his forehead which really just gives me the shakes with a side of a suddenly bile-filled trachea.  Also, while we're here, we hear the minister drone on about Mel and Jackie and their "singular devotion that time and time again has been tested." Pardon the interruption, but when has all of this testing occurred? No doubt, it's about to get real, real bad, real, real quick for these two yutzes, but thus far, it's been pretty smooth-sailing, other than all of the fucking annoying ~wAcKy~ misunderstandings that could've been cleared up but quick if these cretinous supposed "adults" had just opened their goddamn yaps and communicated with each other rather than involving their high-school age children in their non-dramatic non-problems high jinks that took place in the "And Baby Makes Five" episode. 

Part 3 of Season 2, Episode 28: Wedding Bell Blues - THE END (of this season and my rope) IS NIGH.

HURRY!! CATCH UP!!!! Part 1: here.  Part 2: here.

Back at the Walsh Wedding Venue, Donna and Kelly enter the hubbub, Donna proclaiming it a madhouse with Kelly reasoning, "At least it's dry," and unironically wearing a possibly-denim button down adorned with cows, reminiscent of the time she thought Button Down With Pugs was the zenith of early-'90s' fashion.

The nightmare blunt rotation that is Steve, David and Brandon enter, carrying flower arrangements and scolding the girls about not aiding them in their manual labor.

Kelly exits to go clear the air with Brenda in her bedroom, and Brandon, who is OF COURSE doing the least - carrying the smallest, pint-siziest baby bouquets the florist probably had to offer; the currently in utero Spawn of Silver could schlep a heftier load - leans in and hisses in Donna's ear, "I smell trouuuuuble," after Kelly's retreating figure, like, okay, Truman Capot-not.  Nothing comes between this rhododendron-toting, gossip-mongering bitch and a cat fight.

Part 2 of Season 2, Episode 28: Wedding Bell Blues - THE END (of this season and my rope) IS NIGH.

 Catch up on Part 1 here.

Taylor Compound.

In the foyer, Jackie fiddles with some floral arrangement as Mover Types mill about.

Kelly arrives and asks after them, with Jackie informing her that they're making room for the tables for the pre-wedding cocktails, and that the ceremony will follow outside, "on the veranda." Kelly says she didn't even know they had a veranda, and perhaps Jake erected one in the last twelve hours or so with some leftover wedding canopy materials and scraps from Mel's sex swing setup he assembled.

Speaking of Danny Zuko, he swaggers in all leather-jacketed and popped-collar douche with his tool belt slung just so over his shoulder and tells Jackie, "That should just about do it," I assume referencing the havoc that he's wreaked on Kelly's psyche and the undoubtedly lifelong intimacy issues he has foisted upon her.

Part 1 of Season 2, Episode 28: Wedding Bell Blues - THE END (of this season and my rope) IS NIGH.

 THE FINAL EPISODE OF SEASON 2.  I began the season almost TEN YEARS AGO YOU GUYS, on January 5, 2014, with the excremently-christened "Beach Blanket Brandon."  And yes, that title and episode still haunt my nightmares and night terrors, my day-mares and day terrors.  Here's to hoping that Season 3 is a little less of a slog.  It is infinitely more melodramatic, so that's a win for us all, I guess? BUT AT WHAT COST? Sadly, we already know the answer to that one, *sob*:

It's just about time to pour one (or several hundred) out for these two Hot Sluts.  But first:

We begin where we ended in the last episode: Border Inspection.

Inside some holding room: Dylan looks like we all would if we knew that the nerdlinger wrath of one Jim "Butch" Walsh was high-speed comptrolling its way down the Golden State Freeway at that very moment.

Brenda, supes cute in a very Taylor Swiftian Red-era ensemble, is, justifiably, freaking the fuck out, since she knows her dildo of a father is going to go completely and totally unreasonably ballistic on her, especially in comparison to the time her brother almost drunkenly killed a man, or the other time where he was on scary, scary drugs and left his car for dead and lied about it for days and days, and I know I bring this up every mother-fucking chance I get, but COME ON PEOPLE.  As a child I recognized the hypocrisy, but was mostly just like, boo, poor Brenda, but I'm now An Old and have lived in the world (pathetically, mostly, but that's of little importance) and I'm like, STRAP JIM TO A RADIATOR IN THE HOUSE OF WALSH WITH HIS FAVORITE PAIR OF SUSPENDERS AND BURN IT TO THE GROUND.  Mostly-mostly: poor all of us women of a certain age, who grew up watching this crap and thinking it was the norm, no matter the unfairness of it all, and believing it was just How It Was.  And it's only going to get far, far worse on this toilet heap of a show of which I will never, ever get enough, please help me it's been so long.

Dylan and his dreamy eyebrow scar assure Brenda everything's going to be okay; that yes, her father is a gigantic ass-face who likes to swing his probably-micro-penis around and generally tyrannize his daughter and hold her to ludicrous standards to which he doesn't hold his smug-mugged son while huffing and puffing about like he's fucking Charles Bronson With A Receding Hairline, but that it will all work out and and it was worth it and that they had a weekend that they'll never, ever forget, and I'd say that takes the lucrative title of Understatement of the Episode Thus Far.

Out in the hall, here comes plaid-cloaked Certified Tough Guy© Jim Walsh, best known in accounting circles as This Fucking Dweeb.  Border Agent from the previous episode leads him to Brenda and Dylan's holding room, explaining, "It's not that we didn't believe her, but we have these rules and regulations." Jim gets Hyper-Masc by placing his hands on his waist and shooting the door a filthy look.  I'm quaking.

SUCK IT, JAY SHERMAN.

Upon his arrival, their grab-ass and face-sucking is put on pause and they manage to peel themselves off of each other, Brenda whipping around with a, "Dad, hi," rather than the, "Don't even start with me, you fucking anal rot," I would've thrown his way.

The kids try to explain themselves but Jim and his ill-fitting slacks with diaper insert are having none of it and he goes Full Bitch as he turns on his heel all, "I said, let's go." Settle down, Death Wish.