Hi Jenny --
Yeah, that was a pretty awful O.C. last night. It's still playing in super slo-mo in my head, like the time I drove my Mom's car off the road and snapped an axle. Here's my list of problems:
1. So all along we were supposed to care about Tiny Tim and be sad that he died, but by the end of the episode, which took place over about 24 hours, nearly everyone in the show had moved on? Kaitlin tells that kid from her school, "Oh, yeah. The boy I liked just fell off a cliff and died. See you at school," which leads said kid to do a jig in the parking lot outside her double-wide? And by the end of the episode, Kaitlin has more or less eloped with this psycho, but is all, "Last night I dreamed I went to Manderlay . . ." about Newport Beach? Have we stopped even pretending that these people are human?
2. No, really. Who the Hell are all of these people? Matt, his girlfriend, Kaitlin's dopey stalker, Johnny's freaking jeweler? How come all of a sudden they're getting more screentime than the only character we still care about, Peter freaking Gallagher? I have two theories:
a. This was actually the pilot for a spin-off called Matt Loves That Chick from Firefly. Remember that one episode of The Brady Bunch that was all about some random kid and his adoptive parents or the Mork from Ork episode of Happy Days? It's like that.
b. Valentine's Day is the television equivalent of Halloween, only instead of ghosts and goblins, we're haunted by boring tertiary characters.
3. Josh Schwartz is starting to freak out my mp3 player. The O.C. Mix has always been uncomfortably close to my tastes, but last night was unusually so. "For the Widows in Paradise, For the Fatherless in Ypsilanti," which played during Johnny's memorial service, is a personal favorite (Note to self: learn to surf, so that you can have a bitchin' beach funeral.), and the Sun Kil Moon cover of Modest Mouse's "Neverending Math Equation" is exactly the song I've had on perpetual repeat for the last week or so. If the next episode features "The Dark Don't Hide It" by Magnolia Electric Co., you're going to have to help me accessorize an aluminum foil beanie.
4. Related: that meta-joke about Death Cab for Cutie showing up on The Valley was not acceptable. Meta-humor is hard to pull off. Stop trying!
Thoughts? Should we make like our friends in Newport Beach and just try to move on? Johnny would have liked that.
-- Pete
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