atlanticslide

You mean Kyle from West Bev? I believe what he said was "I've never slept with a girl, and I don't know if I want to." Which could be interpreted as him being asexual, but for a teen show in the early '90s that seemed like a pretty clear code for "I think I'm gay."

She did Fastlane with Facinelli, but it was several years after she left 90210 - IMDB says she left 90210 in 1998 and Fastlane didn't premiere until 2002.

Wasn't he still adopted by Samantha though?

I think this is juuuuuuuuust about where I stopped watching during the original run of the show (and where I'd always stop watching during reruns back when it was on Soap Net). The Val/Noah rape/not-rape storyline is insane and stupid, but the Kelly baby bullshit is just really too much, especially when Kelly surprise!homophobia comes up. It's crazy how all over the map she is in this episode - first they can't give the baby to Social Services because "who'll tuck him in at night" or whatever the fuck, as if no one would want to foster or adopt an infant and this kid is going to be left to raise himself in a Dickensian orphanage, then it's "oh, you want his mother to have rights? WHAT ABOUT HIS RIGHTS?!" when they talk about how Jessica Alba will have a chance to take him back. Make up your mind, Kelly! Is a child doomed to a life of loneliness and despair without their biological mother, or are women who initially decide not to raise their children and then change their minds within a legal time-frame just selfish, evil bitches? Argh, as someone with several family members who were adopted, Kelly's initial bullshit speech about "who's going to take care of him when he falls off his bike and scrapes his knees" (or whatever it was) is so damn grating. Shut up, Kelly, just because his biological mother might not raise him doesn't mean he'll have no parents or family at all. Maybe you should talk to someone about that experience - like, for example, your friend Steve, WHO WAS ADOPTED. Also, yeah, the Val/Noah stuff is such a weird heel turn in this episode. Why does it matter that Noah's brother roofied her? From Noah's side of things, nothing has changed with that revelation. He still fucked her when she was basically incapacitated, even if he wasn't the reason that she was incapacitated.

"It's a flight to London, not prom." Excuse me, I think you mean "it's a flight to London, not a trip to the doctor." Oh my god, Donna's blue shirt. Even if she had normal cleavage that shirt would be ridiculous (although Val seems to be wearing almost the same thing and it, of course, looks great on her).

"This guy's been running this place into the ground for months and then he shuts the place down to fuck off to Hawaii for a week which means that's a week that I'm not making any money, then he can't pay for the fucking beer nuts, he let an antisemite rile up a crowd of Neo-Nazis, and then he set the place on fire. AND he dropped one of his giant stupid rings on my foot and the massive weight of it broke my toe. This job fucking blows, I don't care how much free food I get at the Peach Pit."

After being a non-stop asshole for pretty much 4 1/2 seasons straight, it's fun to see life kicking the shit out of David over and over in these episodes.

Wasn't there a big change in the writing staff between Seasons 4 and 5? It almost feels like the Season 4 writers loved the Scamily and had plans for Erica to stick around and be parented by Dylan, but then the Season 5 writers took over and were like "fuck that" and wrapped the Samily storyline up in one episode, shipped Erica off to the nearest available semi-viable parental figure, never to be seen again, just so that they wouldn't have to deal with her. They didn't even mention her (or Iris, for that matter) on Dylan's wedding day.

I just don't even get why Val would be torn between Noah and Cooper Hargrove (or whatever his name is). Noah is a boring, angsty drip who is apparently poor. Cooper is rich, cute, charming, and seems nice enough. Why was this even a question? What would Val ever see in Noah if she had a nice, rich guy on the hook already?

Doesn't David actually steal Donna's credit card at some point during this season too? Season 7 was rough, but everything from hear on out is really a slog. They should've just embraced the soapiness and kept up Kelly's amnesia for longer, had Donna go evil for a while, bring Dead Scott back from the dead. Who wants to watch Val mope over dead-eyed Noah, or Steve and Brandon fight about sweatshop ownership? How is that fun for anyone?

Word. Again I ask: Noah, why are you always here?? The thing I loved about that "wanna get a drink?" exchange is Noah not really caring that Brandon didn't want to drink with him, but also Brandon's flat out "NO" when asked. Because really, why would Brandon want to go hang out with some low rent Dylan that he doesn't even know? David/Val is the only David couple that I ever really enjoyed so whether it's deserved or not, David's attitude towards Val just bums me out, especially how nasty he is with it.

I don't remember much from Season 8, but Brandon's Rain Man-like description of the shooter is so WTF that it's seared in my brain. "Thin lips, small teeth." SMALL TEETH?? What the fuck does "small teeth" even mean? Word. Noah, why are you here?

Yeah, it's not an inherently wrong or unrealistic storyline, but someone else should've been the focus of it - have Brandon comfortably continuing his education or getting an offer from a smalltime newspaper in LA or something, while Kelly and/or Steve struggles with finding work, and the storyline is about Kelly realizing that her multiple periods of absence throughout college due to drug addition, cult induction, kidnapping, stalking, etc (ie, every stupid decision Kelly made from Season 5 onwards) has led her to be totally unprepared for post-college life even though she was apparently this amazing student good enough to get into Columbia, and Steve, who's never had to work a day in his life and never had any desire to work a day in his life, is the one who's complaining about "I need experience to get the job but I need a job to get the experience" and has no idea where to start. On another note, I don't really buy that a woman like Val who ran her own club for three years is totally unable to find work in the club or restaurant scene.

At least Gina has a reason to show up and hang around. With Noah, anytime he's onscreen from the moment he shows up until I inevitably quit the reruns and start over at Season 1, I'm constantly thinking "Why are you here?"

I'm starting a new job next week and I couldn't stop thinking about that as I was listening to this and shaking my head in horror at the very idea. And I'm in my 30s with an actual resume, not 22 and fresh out of college with absolutely no experience. Kelly should be down on her knees thanking god that she has a job this quickly out of college and making sure she doesn't do anything to fuck it up (like blow off her first week so she can jet off to Hawaii), and Brandon should be supporting her as the sole breadwinner in the relationship (and apparently one of the only two breadwinners out of the four people currently living in Casa Walsh). Brandon's "how do I get the experience without the job?" Huh, you know, I don't know. Maybe take the job offered to you in your junior year that you turned down like a moron? Or take the offer that Susan made to come work with her on Campaign '96 for [Candidate Withheld] that you blew off because your feelings were hurt? Or talk up the two summers you spent working for that Boston newspaper (otherwise known as: experience)? Or use that stupid fellowship money to go back to school??? Brandon being all wistful over Tracy is utterly nonsensical. I'm sure it's just because Emma Caulfield had actual work and Jill Novick had nothing else going on, but if they were going to have Brandon get nostalgic about someone, it should've been Susan. Brandon didn't even really like Tracy when he was dating Tracy. Nothing will convince me that he didn't toss out any pictures or mementos of her five minutes after they broke up. There's something really odd with former love interests getting engaged really quickly after breaking up with one of the 90210ers. Celeste broke up with Steve right before Season 5 and then Steve found out a few months later that she'd gotten engaged to a Marine or something (not even to the guy she left Steve for). Ray and Donna broke up before Halloween in Season 6 and then he was engaged when we saw him in April or May of that season. And now Tracy's been broken up with Brandon for max four months and is already engaged. Such a weird trend, it's like marriage is the ultimate pinnacle of success, even if you're 21-years-old, so the writers want to make sure that we know a character who's left the show is doing well by telling us that they're engaged.

I think it also wouldn't be quite so eyeroll-worthy if it wasn't the 87th time she's cried over her dead mom in this season alone. If they hadn't already done, say, her crying with Joan about how her mom will never see her get married, this storyline with her grief surrounding Mother's Day could've had some poignancy. Instead, it just highlights the fact that Claire's entire character has been reduced to "nagging shrew who misses her dead mom and cries about it every couple of episodes".

Especially when she gave Brenda a very matter-of-fact lecture about needing to be prepared and think seriously about protection all the way back in Season 1.

The gif of not!Dylan is making me laugh uncontrollably.

So I'm supposed to believe that a man who attempted to violently rape a woman who he'd essentially kidnapped and then bound and gagged has been so reformed after two-ish years in prison that the first thing he does upon getting out of prison is try to protect said woman? Right. Ugh, Tracy and Brandon. With Susan, with Emily, even with Kelly, you can see what the writers were going for and why they might go for Brandon (kind of. Susan's interest in Brandon is still a bit of a question mark, but at least he was interested in her in return, unlike Tracy). With Tracy, it's like they knew they had to have this character crush on Brandon but didn't care enough to write why she'd be so into him. So all they ever did was write her lines about how perfect and wonderful he is and how much integrity and discretion or whatever he has, but never actually wrote any scenes with him displaying any of these "wonderful" personality traits. I feel like we're supposed to be seeing him as Perfect Boyfriend material, except even by Brandon standards, there's been nothing going on in that area this season - he hasn't really done anything all season that Tracy's actually seen except get Tracy drunk before a TV broadcast, go without pants on a TV broadcast, and apply for a dumb fellowship. And yet she's so moony over him and now she's accidentally dropping "I love you"s? Basically what I'm saying is that Tracy's an idiot.

The addition of Joy was super weird. It felt like the whole purpose of it was to again redeem Bill Taylor for absolutely no reason - and really, without much effect. They seemed to play it off as "ohhhhhhhhh, so that's why he's always ditching Kelly, because he has another family to take care of!" Except that a) that's still a lame excuse for skipping town without telling your child that you're ditching them, and b) Joy reports him constantly taking off for parts unknown as well, so he's still basically as much of a deadbeat dad as he always was, just with two emotionally neglected kids instead of one. So ultimately I have no idea what we're supposed to take from this, other than Kelly is still an asshole to her mother and thinks sun shines out of her father's ass (like her rant at her mother about "you wanted me to think he was just ditching me when really it was that he had another family to take care of!" Kelly, that doesn't make it any better. He was still ditching you.)

Spoiler alert: hilariously enough, the campus rapist actually shows up during this storyline to warn Donna about the real stalker.

This is where I am. I watch all of the Bachelor franchise shows but I don't pay any attention to media or rumors outside of the shows so I came into this totally cold and had absolutely no idea what was going on. To be honest, I'm still kind of confused - who actually made the initial complaint? Both DeMario and Corrine seemed totally chill and relaxed leading up to everything shutting down. Was it someone from production, and if so, why?

I think the writers also genuinely forgot by this point that David and Claire were an item. re: the friendliness with Ray, to a certain degree I think this speaks again to the point that the writers frequently wrote men as sympathetic even when they did something wrong - Ray may have thrown Donna down a flight of stairs, but hey, at least he didn't make Joe go to prison, so all's forgiven! Hearty handshakes and club performance deals all around! That aside, though, wasn't there a story back in the day that Jamie Walters's career tanked after 90210 fans saw him as a domestic abuser? It always seemed like his random guest stints after leaving the show were the show's attempts to redeem Ray for the sake of Walters.

Word. I could've gone along with it if, during Brandon's meeting with Kenny, Kenny was a presented as kind of a slimy asshole and Brandon walked out of there without the hearty handshake and went back to Val saying "I know he's a weasel and he lied to you, but I don't want you to get arrested for extortion and blah blah extorting money is wrong blah." He can still bray and act holier-than-Val if he must even if he recognizes that Kenny isn't some poor schmo who got taken advantage of or something. As it is, it just really drives home the point that the show is constantly making, that women are liars and poor men are the real victims, even when a man does something wrong too (ie, Steve cheats on Celeste with Laura, but we should all feel sorry for Steve because crazy Laura is falsely accusing him of rape).

On the other hand, though, Mark seems like the kind of douche who'd tell you about "authentic Moroccan couscous" even in 2017. As a former college rower, I can confirm that's what both men and women wear for practice, but uniforms for races are actually generally tighter, if you can believe it: Also, there is no goddamn way a bunch of random frat guys who'd never been in a boat before could prepare and compete with a seasoned boat within a couple of weeks. In a whole series full of dumb episodes and a season especially chalk full of terrible crap, this might be my least favorite episode of the entire run. Kelly is an asshole, but what I really, really hate is the way that Kenny is treated like a poor victim. Brandon is so friendly and apologetic to him, and everything played out like we're really supposed to see Kenny as someone who's only mistake was falling in love with the wrong woman, and Val as the evil snake who tried to destroy him. Are we supposed to just forget that Kenny was happily cheating on his wife and shacking up with his mistress, lying to said mistress all the while about the status of his marriage? And from how easily Kenny took to all of this, it seems obvious that this wasn't his first time at this. So fuck him, why should we care that he's being extorted?