Part 4 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.

Part Un.

Part Deux.

Part Trois.

Back at it.

Inside, in a real move-the-needle moment, Steve busses and Brandon chides him about missing a spot.  I'd seriously rather spend the evening with The Zuck and her non-entity of a boyf than have to endure much more of this brainless rich-dunderhead-works-at-restaurant / is-a-total-failure / morally-superior-friend-has-the-last-laugh absurdity.

Worthless Nat emerges from the kitchen carrying approximately all the eggs.  He calls out to Steve to help him in the backroom, and we're about to slip into some Imbecile Breaks Eggs Waka Waka Comedy (truly the lowest form of comedy) so buckle up.

Brandon scolds, "You better hurry, Stevie.  Don't want to tick off the boss man." Steve spouts off some delusions about Nat loving him: "This is working out great!" I'm sure his barber also said, "This is working out great!" as he spun Steve's salon chair around after putting the finishing touches on the in-hibernation frillback pigeon slumbering on the back of his cranium, so I don't know how much stock I'd put into his words here.

As Steve scurries back to the kitchen, he puts Brandon in a non-fatal chokehold and the gang just laughs and laughs while also dying on the insides at having to feign delight at the low-rent clownery of two mega-chodes.

Nat apparates table-side as if from nowhere, and scares the ever-loving shit out of me, not unlike something something Steve's hair something something every time that sun-bleached steel wool bastard appears on screen something.  He asks to speak to Brandon in private...

...and then takes him two feet away to sit at the counter.  Worthless Nat: a true Virtuoso of Subterfuge.  He tells Brandon that he's going to fire Steve, GASP, saying, "I don't know how to break it to him."

Brandon, nothing but a simpering, skeevy snake with a good head of hair, smirks and fires up the ol' gaslight: "Maybe you should just tell him the truth.  I'm sure he can take it." Nat ponders, "I can't even figure out why he wants this job.  It's not like he needs the money.  It's like he's got something to prove, ya know?" I hope when all is said and done, Nat finds out everything and goes all Laney Boggs StyleZ, "Am I bet? Am I a BET?? AM I FUCKING BET????"  And then beats Brandon to near-death with his fucking precious spatula, the handle of which is currently lodged in Steve's pubes.

Whatever whatever, Brandon seems to feel a bit of remorse and tells Nat to give Steve another chance and then there's clinging and clanging and crashing from the kitchen and, in the grand tradition of the iconic Chandler Bing, someone should really ask Steve on the daily, "How do you not fall down more?"

Nat hurries back to hopefully kick half-witted Steve's half-witted perm as Brandon chortles and ambles back to the table, asking everyone, "Omelets, anyone?" My sides? Decidedly not splitting.

Part 3 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.

Study up!: here's Part 1; here's Part 2.

BHBC.

Brandon's still a-runnin'.

He jogs up to Donna, who's sipping a drink out of a glass that matches her bathing suit and generally being adorable.  She tells him she saw Brenda and Dylan a little bit ago, down by the showers.  Yeah, we ALL saw them by the showers, Don:

Yowza.

Currently at the showers, however, is AHHHHHHHHHHNdrea and the kiddie camp small fries, who've most certainly by now heard tell of their summer school marm's tenure as Editrix-in-Chief of the ever-loving Blaze and are collectively devising a plan to casually wade themselves into the Pacific Ocean and never look back the moment she turns away from them while she scans the Club grounds for any sign of Brandon and his peacock walk, which is always.

Lucky for her at this moment, he arrives!...

...and she in turn orgasms, pushes three children to the ground to get to him, and starts pawing at his arm.  She introduces him to the kids and asks after some badminton equipment.  Brandon, who really didn't want to talk to her in the first place, quickly tells her its whereabouts and then asks if she's seen Brenda/Dylan.  She points over to a bike rack...

...where they stand, talking and giggling  About being Hot Sluts, I assume.

He jogs on over and sure knows how to bring down the mood real quick: "Mom and Dad joined the Beach Club.  Cabana 33."

Brenda's all, "Oh, my god, Dad and his embarrassing JCPenney clearance table shirt said he had a surprise." Brandon advises that they should probably take off, and Dylan, whose mussy hair still manages to get me every.  Single.  TIME. says, "I'll go up there with you right now if you want me to." Brenda tells him no: "They might not even know you're here."

So Dylan is OUT, walking away but stopping and turning around to say, "Fine, Bren, if that's the way you want it, you're callin' the shots...whatever you want! I'm through playing games."  And then goes to catch some gnar-gnar combers and contemplate life and love atop his rhino chaser.  Probably, I mean.

The fucking Synth Ghee-tar DOOM track starts up as Brenda steels herself and walks past Brandon in a march toward her destiny and unavoidable downfall.

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.