The OC Season 4 disc 2
Dec. 23rd, 2018 05:11 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
shallownessRemember how I am rewatching The OC's fourth season on DVD?
A good stretch of episodes as Taylor/Ryan developed and then one that was less good.
That was the most interesting strand, for me, in ‘The Sleeping Beauty’. Taylor thinks Ryan is funny, as the Cohens repeat to each other, dazed, and so, being Taylor, decides to seduce him by becoming his sleep therapist. Amid the wackiness that ensued, they got on. But being meta about the leftfield new pairing, making Taylor vulnerable (so vulnerable she took dating advice from…Kaitlyn who’s romantic life has comprised getting gazumped by her mother) and Ryan’s insomnia a real problem was disarming. Also, McKenzie pulls off great reactions.
At Brown, Summer acquired a rabbit, Ché was a rat, unfunny and racially offensive to boot. (I was probably carrying some residual feelings about this role into my reaction to early Andy in Parks and Rec, though it’s also true that they rebooted the character.)
I laughed a lot at ‘The Summer Bummer’ but mainly the Taylor/Ryan, Julie/Bullet (he thinks she’s classy and elegant, and she concurs) and Kaitlyn’s stint teaching the bitchy queen of the school that she could take it all away from her without even trying. Her jaded calling the cops to break up her own party was a moment and a half.
Summer had a plotline that brought her home, but took Seth away when Ryan needed him to talk to. Cue Kirsten and Sandy auditioning to take Seth’s place and offering advice on Taylor. Real Taylor was hurt by Ryan’s uncertainty about what he wanted from her, but reacted with usual Taylor weirdness. Ryan’s fantasy Taylor was influenced by 80s music videos.
Taylor and Seth had a punctuation-related similar thought process.
I love the ‘The Chrismukk-huh?’ for giving Taylor such a central part. It’s a deeply weird episode (possibly the show’s weirdest episode ever, although I suspect that if it were made now, we’d have an animated Atomic County episode). She makes for a magnificent companion in a joint visit by Ryan and Taylor to a parallel universe, even if canonically it’s a shared dream that they mostly forget.
Ryan has withdrawn from her after receiving a long-delayed letter from Marissa, but Taylor is tenacious, which leads to the accident that knocks them both out, and allows Julie’s maternal instincts to kick in. Of said instincts, well, they’re better than Veronica Townsend’s.
In a brighter lit, yet darker Newport Beach, no one knows Ryan (and Taylor is a guy). Everyone is all wrong: ice-queen Kirsten remarried Jimmy, but that’s out-wronged by Mayor Sandy being married to Julie, who is having an affair with Ché, who is engaged to a vapid Summer that sadsack Seth is pining for. They also learn Marissa died earlier (ha, Marissa always dies) because Ryan wasn’t there to save her from her self-destructive choices. But the way Taylor tells Ryan that Marissa is, she believes, still alive in this verse and then is there to support him when he learns she isn’t (okay, because she stalked him) is touching, because of Reeser’s performance. Ryan symbolically says goodbye to Marissa (in her letter she said goodbye first) and comes back to Taylor/the real world. I squeed a lot at this episode.
‘Earth Girls are Easy’ I liked less. I remembered that Ryan, Seth, Summer and Taylor took a really awkward road-trip. It is because Summer is having a pregnancy scare on New Year’s Eve. Taylor is a very loyal friend (after badgering Summer into taking a pregnancy test), but her actions make Ryan think she’s the pregnant one, while Seth is extra-immature. Especially in comparison to Ryan.
Julie’s accidental male prostitution ring causes problems when even Kirsten is starting to wonder what is going on. A mystery man is also looking into this. As I knew who he was (Ryan’s dad) the Big Reveal just struck me as soapy. Kaitlyn and Bullett are left somewhat drifting in the wake of Julie’s latest attempt at self-preservation, but they shared some sweet replacement father-daughter scenes (if you forget she had a crush on his son, who is Julie’s co-conspirator).
A few things land differently in 2018 to when they did in 2007: like the use of ‘slutty’ in relation to the thief dressed as an alien and how the girls think of themselves and sex. They use the starting in media res as a bait, again, but I did think the rewinding back to the start of the story was nifty. Still, I preferred the three other episodes to this one.
Ending with Seth proposing to Summer does set up the finale, I suppose.
A good stretch of episodes as Taylor/Ryan developed and then one that was less good.
That was the most interesting strand, for me, in ‘The Sleeping Beauty’. Taylor thinks Ryan is funny, as the Cohens repeat to each other, dazed, and so, being Taylor, decides to seduce him by becoming his sleep therapist. Amid the wackiness that ensued, they got on. But being meta about the leftfield new pairing, making Taylor vulnerable (so vulnerable she took dating advice from…Kaitlyn who’s romantic life has comprised getting gazumped by her mother) and Ryan’s insomnia a real problem was disarming. Also, McKenzie pulls off great reactions.
At Brown, Summer acquired a rabbit, Ché was a rat, unfunny and racially offensive to boot. (I was probably carrying some residual feelings about this role into my reaction to early Andy in Parks and Rec, though it’s also true that they rebooted the character.)
I laughed a lot at ‘The Summer Bummer’ but mainly the Taylor/Ryan, Julie/Bullet (he thinks she’s classy and elegant, and she concurs) and Kaitlyn’s stint teaching the bitchy queen of the school that she could take it all away from her without even trying. Her jaded calling the cops to break up her own party was a moment and a half.
Summer had a plotline that brought her home, but took Seth away when Ryan needed him to talk to. Cue Kirsten and Sandy auditioning to take Seth’s place and offering advice on Taylor. Real Taylor was hurt by Ryan’s uncertainty about what he wanted from her, but reacted with usual Taylor weirdness. Ryan’s fantasy Taylor was influenced by 80s music videos.
Taylor and Seth had a punctuation-related similar thought process.
I love the ‘The Chrismukk-huh?’ for giving Taylor such a central part. It’s a deeply weird episode (possibly the show’s weirdest episode ever, although I suspect that if it were made now, we’d have an animated Atomic County episode). She makes for a magnificent companion in a joint visit by Ryan and Taylor to a parallel universe, even if canonically it’s a shared dream that they mostly forget.
Ryan has withdrawn from her after receiving a long-delayed letter from Marissa, but Taylor is tenacious, which leads to the accident that knocks them both out, and allows Julie’s maternal instincts to kick in. Of said instincts, well, they’re better than Veronica Townsend’s.
In a brighter lit, yet darker Newport Beach, no one knows Ryan (and Taylor is a guy). Everyone is all wrong: ice-queen Kirsten remarried Jimmy, but that’s out-wronged by Mayor Sandy being married to Julie, who is having an affair with Ché, who is engaged to a vapid Summer that sadsack Seth is pining for. They also learn Marissa died earlier (ha, Marissa always dies) because Ryan wasn’t there to save her from her self-destructive choices. But the way Taylor tells Ryan that Marissa is, she believes, still alive in this verse and then is there to support him when he learns she isn’t (okay, because she stalked him) is touching, because of Reeser’s performance. Ryan symbolically says goodbye to Marissa (in her letter she said goodbye first) and comes back to Taylor/the real world. I squeed a lot at this episode.
‘Earth Girls are Easy’ I liked less. I remembered that Ryan, Seth, Summer and Taylor took a really awkward road-trip. It is because Summer is having a pregnancy scare on New Year’s Eve. Taylor is a very loyal friend (after badgering Summer into taking a pregnancy test), but her actions make Ryan think she’s the pregnant one, while Seth is extra-immature. Especially in comparison to Ryan.
Julie’s accidental male prostitution ring causes problems when even Kirsten is starting to wonder what is going on. A mystery man is also looking into this. As I knew who he was (Ryan’s dad) the Big Reveal just struck me as soapy. Kaitlyn and Bullett are left somewhat drifting in the wake of Julie’s latest attempt at self-preservation, but they shared some sweet replacement father-daughter scenes (if you forget she had a crush on his son, who is Julie’s co-conspirator).
A few things land differently in 2018 to when they did in 2007: like the use of ‘slutty’ in relation to the thief dressed as an alien and how the girls think of themselves and sex. They use the starting in media res as a bait, again, but I did think the rewinding back to the start of the story was nifty. Still, I preferred the three other episodes to this one.
Ending with Seth proposing to Summer does set up the finale, I suppose.
