Date of airing: December 2, 2004 (FOX)
Nielsen ratings information: 6.51 million viewers, 4.3/7 in Households, 2.8/8 with Adults 18-49
written by: J.J. Philbin
directed by: Michael Fresco
There is love in the air in Newport Beach, because four exes decided they should move forward with their new crushes, and they ended their evenings in happy and promising positions. Suddenly, there are four new couples in this show and I do not know what to do with myself now. Watching this as a suffering single Thirtysomething with social anxiety, I naturally did get a little jealous here because things were actually working out for the rich kids, even if their nights have been somewhat of a disaster at first, and I am just armchair-reviewing this sometimes-piece-of-crap show in my bed, the clock almost striking midnight because I do not have a damn life. Well, I guess television is my life. If I could find a way to not be this envious of fictional characters’ love lives, that would be excellent. TV shows could help me with that by not showing me four happy couples (five, if you include Sandy and Kirsten) doing the love thing late at night, with which this episode ended.
This was an okay-ish episode. It turns out that the Bait Shop is not just a new hangout for the characters because a new set was needed, but also a way to promote some of the hot indie rock music THE O.C. was getting famous for during the first season. The show already had Rooney guest cameoing (albeit not in the Bait Shop), and now with The Walkmen and The Killers having made appearances, there was only a question of time until this season went through all the indie rock bands with a “The” in their name, in addition to Death Cab for Cutie because of Seth (I mean, come on, why has Death Cab for Cutie not made an appearance yet?). No room for women-fronted bands and singers in the Bait Shop, because those people are not indie rock, right? Did Josh Schwartz have any of them on his playlist back in the day? Because it is known by now (thanks to Rachel Bilson repeatedly mentioning it) that Schwartz liked his playlist so much that he wanted some of it to appear on his show. I cannot even name a single indie rock band that is all female right now (Maybe HAIM, but are they indie?). Why is that genre filled with so many penises? What happened in the 1990s that made it this way?
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| Marissa is making a fashion choice in this screencap. |
The events in the Bait Shop were not that boring, although definitely
a little worthy of a couple of serious eyerolls. That the double date,
equivocally known as group hang among the four people, would not work
out was extremely predictable, and while the fact that they would switch
at the end was also a bit obvious, it was nice to see that it happened,
giving the characters an opportunity to end the night in a positive
way. I might have no clue what Alex thinks of Seth (she is so out of his
league, more so than Summer was), and why she decided to give him a
smootcher and went on an ice cream date with him, but here they are, kind
of looking cute as potential friends and maybe even lovers, even if
Alex has not gotten any kind of character depth yet, having me wonder why she would go with this annoying dude than any other tattooed rocker that comes before her.
Lindsay is the contrast here, because she already has ambitions and certain micro-aggressions going on that define her character, although her backstory is missing as well, but I guess you cannot just expect a ten-page backstory expose on each recurring character, just because they happen to date one of the main characters. I am a little bit of a Ryan/Lindsay shipper though. Maybe it is because Shannon Lucio is a worthy-having-a-crush-on woman to me, and a woman like Lindsey is someone I would have a shot with in real-life (there is no way that former TV supermodel turned Hollywood director Olivia Wilde would ever give me the time of day), or maybe it is just that with Seth in a relationship, you know your ear always gets chewed off, which would have made a Seth/Lindsay coupling unbearable from the start.
At least the new guys dating the main girls became a little more interesting and important in this episode. Marissa and DJ seem like a plot device at first, but it looks like she needs a bit of romance just to get her mind off of certain things and I do not even take it that badly. Yes, DJ is way too hot for someone like Marissa, and way too outside the Newport Beach bubble for her to date (at least Ryan was thrown into the bubble when she started dating him), but hey, I liked the isolated beach thing at the end. It was just cuddling and respecting each other’s silence, because that is all I want sometimes, too.
And Summer with Zach? Well, it is a boring story, it is one filled with constant chatter and obsession about Seth, which is getting tiring already (I thought the previous episode would end the Seth/Summer obsession, but it continued here, to the extent of me metaphorically vomiting), but it also looks like Summer would actually fall in love with Zach here and see in him as a guy she could think about growing old with him, guaranteeing things to get a bit more complicated in future episodes.
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| This double date slash group hang transpires in a Hell dimension. |
Once more, I could not care less about the adult storylines. Great, Julie expectedly failed during the business meeting and made it up later at another cocktail party, during which – surprise! – no one punched another guy into the pool or something like that. And all this while the writers were not forgetting that Caleb is part of the main character pool now, so the scribes had to force themselves to find a story for him. I am seriously wondering if the writers planned for Caleb to be a main character, or if it just happened because the producers and studios needed to lock Alan Dale in for the entire second season and decided to give him a season-long contract before the actor would go off and do other work and become unavailable for THE O.C. in the process. Or Dale’s agents forced the studio to give him a year-long contract.
Who knows what happens behind closed doors when it comes to actors’ contracts? Because really, it feels like Caleb is being given stories that come from the randomachine of storylines. In hindsight, it at least makes somewhat sense here, because when his secret is revealed, it fits with how the writers built it up to be a secret during the past few episodes. Something is about to hit the fan and the odor of Newport Beach will be disgusting when that happens.
