"Somewhere Back In Time, You Became A Friend Of Mine"

Ah, the dog days of summer (not dog years, although sometimes it seems that long) are here.  And so far re-run season has been less than enthralling (tonight it's another Alex-less episode, "Tough Love", and next week is the one-and-done "Brushes With Celebrity"), and with the final season still more than three months away (and probably any spoilers at least two months away) there really isn't much to talk about right now.   So, for those of you new to this blog,  don't expect to see a lot of posts in June and July, and only a little bit more in August.

But I don't want to leave this blog totally dormant, so I've come up with an idea for a series of (approximately) semi-monthly posts.  It's far from the most original idea around, but I'm going to go back and repost my pre-season prediction posts for the past four seasons, with additional comments about how well they went (hint: usually pretty badly) and other little snide remarks.

I'll leave the original formatting as is (there might be some links that may or may not still work) and add my thoughts today in [bracketed bold and italicized green like this].

Today, we start with what was going to happen in Season 6 (the first season of this blog), the season when Alex graduated from high school and got accepted into CalTech.

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[Originally posted September 16, 2014, which was also the date when "The Fault In Out Stars" came out on Blu-Ray, which was part of the point of me starting a vacation on a Tuesday.  And, as you can tell, I hadn't quite started using lyrics for post titles on a regular basis yet.]


OK, so this post won't be about the question of Life, The Universe, And Everything (and those mice would surely have been better off picking Alex's brain instead of Arthur Dent's) [I think that was my first reference to "The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy".  It would not be the last.], but I will make some guesses as to answers to some of the questions about Alex's upcoming year. So let's do this:

1. Will Alex graduate from high school? [Seriously, that was the best I could do for a first question?]

OK, on the surface, this is very much a question with a “Duh!” answer – she's in at least the top two in her class – how does she not graduate? Well, of course I think she will, so my answer is Yes. On the other hand...

If this were real life, I'd have about 99.999% confidence in my “Yes” answer. However, since this is fiction, I have to downgrade my confidence to a mere 99%. There is always the chance of something happening for the sake of suspense (especially in the next-to-last or last episode of the season), such as a surprise failure in a critical final exam (like what nearly happened to Richie, Ralph and Potsie on Happy Days), or maybe Alex gets implicated in a cheating scandal.

I think one of these scenarios could crop up near the end, but I think it will all get straightened out (Alex gets to take a “last-chance” make-up exam and/or gets to clear her name of any accusations).

[Of course she did graduate, but there was almost no drama about whether or not she'd get there.  The only moment that sort of came close was her going sleepless studying for a test in "Queer Eyes, Full Hearts".  But, also, of course, I did spend much of the first 3/4ths of the season worrying about it anyway.

The real drama turned out to be her attempts to get into top-level schools - she blew an interview for Princeton, and Harvard rejected her, the latter leading to another emotional meltdown sadly fueled someone by alcohol.]

2. Will Alex be valedictorian?

This one's more of a toss-up. Right now, just as in junior high, it's basically a two horse race between Alex and Sanjay Patel, her constant rival [That didn't change, as far as I know - Alex did say she was (only?) in the top two percent of her class when writing as essay for Yale so maybe there was someone else or two in the picture?]. Alex won out four years ago, thanks to an ill-timed robot incident that befell Sanjay. I'm pretty sure she can't count on that happening again. [Thankfully Alex didn't have similar misfortune with her "Rock, Paper, Scissors" robot this past season.]

Still, I think the answer to this one will probably be Yes as well, since I think we're going to see some sort of closure to what happened in “See You Next Fall”, where Alex was talked out of giving a scathing valedictorian speech by Haley. Since she's going to be separated from most of her classmates after senior year, this time she may feel even stronger about taking some parting shots, since there's less chance of ending up a “social piranha” (Haley's words, not mine :) ). I think someone will talk her out of it (Mitch, being the smartest of the rest of the family, reminding her about potential networking issues down the line is my best guess), leading to what I hope would be a more serious but still positive speech than the last time.

[Alex wasn't outright valedictorian, having to split the honor with Sanjay, but in the end at the time she was far from disappointed.  As for her speech, we'll never know what she said, since they chose not to show the ceremony, skipping right to the family graduation party in the finale and leaving her in the background as usual.]
 
One alternative scenario could crop up where she is not valedictorian but still gives a speech: She runs for and gets elected Senior President. Of course, given her lack of popularity with her classmates this would be difficult if she attempted it.

[Well, one of the Dunphys eventually did get elected Senior Class President, but it sure wasn't Alex...]

3. Where does Alex end up going to college?

Obviously, this is the biggest question of the season, and the one with the most implication for what the show does with Alex next year and beyond (barring of course the 1% possibility of question 1 being “no” kicking this can down the road to Season 7).

As I pointed out a week or so ago, Alex is considering going to an eastern school, and her parents are not going to be happy about her going far away from home. If Phil and Claire can talk her into staying close to home, there are schools in Southern California (e.g. Cal Tech) that have the academic prestige that Alex wants. A compromise option would probably be Stanford up north – I once calculated it would be about a 5 ½ hour drive from there to the Dunphy house (at normal freeway speeds – given it's Alex doing the driving it would probably take longer). Alex would probably not want to do that on a weekly basis but monthly might make this palatable to both her and her parents.  [In retrospect I'm guessing Alex wishes she did give Stanford more consideration.  But, at the time, she probably passed on that knowing Sanjay had chosen that, given they would have still been rivals at the time.]
 
Right now, my guess is that Alex goes to a local college, since that keeps her on the show on a weekly basis [Not so much this season when she missed almost a fourth of it.].   If she goes east, she''ll probably be written out of the show, except for an occasional holiday appearance. If she goes north to Stanford, we probably see her at home about once a month or so, with the potential for the remaining episodes for them to go a similar Skype-like route that they used during Haley's brief stint in college in Season 4. That scenario would also keep open the possibility of an episode or two with an on-campus story for Alex (well, I suppose they could do both of these as well if she goes east, but I think that unlikely – they could also conceivably use her campus life as a spin-off show, but while I'd love to see such a show that's even less likely).

[CalTech is about 30 minutes away, so I'd say that exceeds the "good enough for government work" threshold.  Unfortunately, even being close to home hasn't meant seeing much of Alex on campus.]
 
4. Will Alex get a steady boyfriend this year?

Sadly, I think No. There's already going to be Haley and Andy's on again/off again relationship [off by the end of the season, albeit only temporarily], and Manny's going to be getting a steady girlfriend this year (and may just drag Luke into getting one as well) [BUZZZ! Wrong!]. It would probably be overkill for Alex to join this party this year, but hopefully she'll at least get a date or two (including hopefully one to senior prom, and hopefully this time they make more of a story out of it than they did with “Baby On Board” - but that's a rant for another day).

[There was a boy named Alec in one episode ("Strangers In The Night"), but he left Alex to go to Africa with his surgeon father.  She did have a quick fling with a bad boy named Teddy that same night, and there was an obnoxious new neighbor named Ronnie who had eyes for her but she wasn't interested in him, thankfully.  But all was not lost, as I'll get to in a second.]
 
5. But what about just getting a friend or two (either gender) – will that happen?

Unless she befriends Sanjay, probably not. I just don't see this happening either.

[Oh, ye of little faith.  Alex would become more than just best friends with her rival. As for a best friend, she did become friends with a boy from Boston named Jason during a tour of CalTech.  Since we never heard from him again I'm not sure how long that lasted.]

That's all for now – if a press release comes out for the second episode (“Do Not Push”) today I'll probably comment later.

[Ah, the innocence of the days when I didn't have to make a dire prediction of how many Alex-less episodes we'd have to endure (there were two that season, a  typical number at the time).  Sadly, as you probably know, that will become an annual question, starting with my review of my Season 7 predictions in a couple of weeks.]