Date of airing: November 4, 2004 (FOX)
Nielsen ratings information: 8.56 million viewers, 5.5/8 in Households, 3.8/10 with Adults 18-49
written by: Josh Schwartz
directed by: Ian Toynton
I can almost say for certain that this has been the third time I have watched this episode. Maybe it’s a miracle, considering how many words of “badness” the third and fourth season have gotten, which is why my interest in this show, as much as I loved it during my teen years, floated like all of Pennywise’s victims down below the creepy abandoned monster house. But here I am, catching up on certain pop culture references of the mid-2000s, as well as realizing once more why I loved the show in the first place. It turns out that THE O.C. had the right amount of drama to make me care about the characters and see myself in them. It is not difficult to see myself in Ryan, even though I am nothing like him – for starters, I do not have people in my life like Ryan that I could consider family, or who care about me. I am a champion of brooding, I do not have a rosy relationship with my family, and every once in a while, my life is as goalless as Ryan’s. He was essentially me during the first season.
In this episode, however, I saw myself in Marissa. Her breakdown in front of her mother, and with furniture on their way into the pool, was reminiscent of how I would have acted and reacted if I had decided to have an “honest and real conversation” with my parents for once and when I would ever break down as Marissa did. I never screamed out loud into the open to make my frustrations heard (the “most” I did was to punch a wall real hard and break a bit of skin in the process), but here was Marissa, showing me what it is like and how it is done, and how the moment of my screaming out into the wild could have been like and what the response would have been.
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| This is Marissa in her truest form. |
That was the most powerful moment of the episode, and it was not even the major storyline. Marissa was in her own little poolside prison, always able to hang out with her bestie and a bottle of the hard stuff, listening to music, and it was not like she was being locked in at night. But her frustration and anger made themselves visible and audible in this episode, and all of a sudden, Marissa has become a much more dramatic and emotional character. And the thing is, it is almost certain that the scream did not help. It has only been heard by her mother (most likely, considering the location of the Nichol/Cooper forest of luxury, there was not a living soul in a five-mile radius capable of hearing that scream), and not even Julie came to realize what the scream was about. And here I was, hoping that Marissa would tell Julie about Caleb’s blackmail deal with Marissa, but I guess there was no room to create a story in which Julie and Caleb’s marriage is already breaking apart, right after Alan Dale has been upgraded to regular status and included in the opening credits, as his character was threatening to smell a prison cell from the inside.
The Portland story was solid enough, and thankfully kept on a downlow. Seth was not out to live an exciting adventure full of surfing and sun and women and surfing lessons that end with sex. He just became a roommate of sorts, had a job, made new friends, and was as goalless as Ryan was at the beginning of the series. Maybe Seth turned out to be a boring character in this hour, thanks to the passive status of his life (he would have been more active with a girlfriend or at least a friend with benefit, but it looked like Seth was not here for this), making his story about his conflict with his parents a little ... uhm, to put it bluntly, self-centered. At the end of the day, I do not know why exactly Seth “ran away” from Newport. Yes, he explained it by hating the town, and telling Ryan that he would have gone away if Ryan had not shown up a year ago, but Seth has been a very privileged boy, and if you compare his troubles with Marissa, then Seth definitely used his whiteness and his richness to his advantage. He may have made something of a life in Portland, but there is no reason to think and believe he would have done the same when he did not have the life he had before.
I mean, just think about comparing Seth and Marissa here: She is stuck in a golden prison, but she can run away any time – yet she does not. She lost her boyfriend, she lost her friend she could confine to, and Summer has not been a BFF lately either, while Caleb does not care about her, and Julie is unable to care. Seth had all the space in the world, he had a girlfriend, he had a boat, he had something of a future. But he ran away because he could not get over the fact that his best friend left town. White men and their problems – always have to make it about themselves, while the real victims are silent. But it does beg the question of why Marissa did not just do a Cohen and run away as well. Was she emotionally unable to, or did the writers forget to find an answer to that question during the summer? It is not like anything could have stopped her after Caleb bought out her father. After all, Jimmy was living a happy life and he already knows about the blackmail, so Caleb could have done nothing to stop Marissa from escaping.
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| There are gamers in Portland, and they are aggressive. |
And the rest of the episode? Naked construction workers that looked like they have been working out to flex their abs in-between jobs – I did not find that particularly realistic, but I will give Kirsten the hot and sweaty dreams here, which she sort of deserved, considering her current status as a mother. Meanwhile, Caleb’s paranoia taking over and teasing a potential political and legal fallout, creating a cloud of an ongoing story for this season, get me slightly more intrigued about his character arc, even if he is still one of the more boring aspects of the show. I would not mind if he gets indicted and goes to prison for whatever he has done over the course of his career. After all, seeing Caleb in jail might bring joy to Marissa. It might also bring joy to anyone else in Newport Beach, California.
Then there was Theresa, who decided to lie to Ryan and break everyone’s hearts in the process, because “it’s good” for her and him and the baby. It was a sad moment for sure, but the notion that Theresa would let the love of her life leave so he can get back to his family, when all she wants is a family of her own, seems weird and absurd. But I guess I will have to take it, considering it is the cheapest way Josh Schwartz could come up with to get rid of Theresa and get Ryan and Seth back to Newport in less than five minutes. What a shame because I liked Navi Rawat (must I really go and watch NUMB3RS now?) and I would have loved to see her character develop and flourish as a mother. Although, if her character is not retired after this, there is still an option to portray her as a single mom at the end of the season. Since she did not have a miscarriage, she will definitely have a baby, and Ryan must find out sooner or later.
