Six Eps. None The Richer? (1st Quarter Review)

So with this week's airing of “Halloween 3: AwesomeLand” we've officially reached the quarter-way mark of Season 6. So what has happened with Alex so far?

Essentially, not much, at least on screen.


The first two episodes (“The Long Honeymoon”, “Do Not Push”) both featured stories involving our little genius, however both felt like they could have done even more with her.

I've been thinking about Alex's plight from “The Long Honeymoon”, and more and more I wonder why (other than she thought it would make her look more well-rounded on her college applications) she went the humanitarian route for summer in the first place? She's not the most handy person out there (remember her attempts to kill a rat or to clean up spilled sugar?), so I think helping build a house was probably a case of biting off more than she could chew. She probably should have stuck with her original plan of either a (regular) summer job or internship – I don't doubt she would have been in a much less bitter mood by then.  And it remains to be seen (maybe) if Alex leaving her project early comes back to haunt her academically, as Claire pointed out to her, if not particularly tactfully.

And while this bad experience arguably did leave Alex in an avoidably foul mood (and admittedly did change to some degree the mood of her home), I still stand by my earlier comments about how badly I felt the rest of her family treated her when she came back – instead of going out of their way to drag her out of the house back to her project so that they could go back to their “perfect” summer (which wasn't so perfect after all), they could have been more sympathetic to what she went through.

In “Do Not Push” we did get to see Alex take a tour of CalTech, and while at first she had little interest in going there (wanting time away from her family, understandably if for no other reason than how they treated her the week before), a boy named Jason from Boston who wanted to go CalTech for their better (than more local MIT, in his mind, or at least in the writers minds) applied physics program who became attracted to her led to her at least putting a local school in her sights.

This was also the only time in the first six episodes where Alex got a private camera scene (at the end she noted that Jason “friended” her online).

But that's been about it – she was given very little to do in the next four weeks, and not one word was mentioned about where she ends up applying for college, and we've yet to see or hear anything about how her senior year in high school is going (in "Marco Polo" we did see she still practices the cello).

The closest we've come to character advancement for Alex in the past four weeks? The son (Ronnie, Jr.) of the Dunphys' new obnoxious neighbors finds her attractive. And that's actually a story I do not want to see, given his father's occupation.

See, this is what's disappointing about the last four weeks – OK, it's to be expected that Alex will not be the focal point of a story every week, or even every other week or every third week. But why can't they advance her story a little bit, even just a quick line or two (e.g. “Mom, where's the postage stamps? I need to mail my application to Harvard today.”)?

Heck, even if there's an episode where Alex doesn't appear at all, they could at least explain her absence by saying she's out of town on another college tour (probably Stanford, since I doubt Phil and Claire would trust even Alex to go across country by herself). As much as I don't like Alex-less episodes (inevitable though they may be), in that scenario I'd almost prefer it to one where she's there but not doing much.

And as for high school, I really wanted to know whether she'd eased up a little bit on her course load for senior year, just for her own sanity. Knowing Alex, she probably didn't.

And what's up with her rivalry with Sanjay?

So now that we've seen where Alex went for six episodes, where does she go from here?


Unfortunately, as I've noted before, the next two episodes do not look promising for anything big for Alex. On the other hand, there was a tweet and Instagram posting by Ariel last week indicating that Alex actually will be going on a date in an upcoming episode (she didn't name the episode – maybe it will happen in “Strangers In The Night”?), with a third person (i.e. not Jason or Ronnie Jr., but someone to be played by a former X-Factor contestant).  So, hopefully things pick up in the second quarter, and I can actually post something that's not a total downer.