“One Of These Things Is Not Like The Others” (2nd Favorite Episode Retro Recap)

So as you've probably guessed by now, this is the one episode of my top five that does not have an Alex story in it. She is in the episode, but only as a side part of two other stories. But that's OK (mostly – more on that in a moment), because the rest of the episode more than makes up for it.

Brought to you by the letters M and C, and by the number 2:

 
”The Wedding, Part 2” (Season 5, Episode 24)

Obviously this episode was always going to be about Mitch and Cam's big wedding, and they did things about 1000 times better than I expected them to do – after the over-zaniness of “Las Vegas” weeks earlier, I expected this to be an over-the-top cluster on the level of Dynasty's “Moldavian Massacre” season finale. But while there were some crazy moments (with Pepper presiding there had to be – and what they did do was quite funny) the actual wedding itself turned out to be a nice little low-key moment that still managed to pack an emotional punch (even I was brought to tears when Jay walked Mitch down the aisle after their blowup two episodes earlier, and I've never really been nearly as interested in Mitch and Cam's stories as Alex's).

So what was Alex up to while this was going on? Not as much as the first part of this two-part finale (helping a vision-impaired-by-medical-procedure Phil get a rare bowl for the Dunphy's wedding present while looking terminally cute in a funny hat).

She spent part of the time taking embarrassing pictures of Manny and Luke as a pseudo-married couple (they helped Phil practice his wedding officiating skills and Alex happened to see them).

Fortunately for her, the cell phone she used to take those pictures did not befall the same fate that her old phone did in “When A Tree Falls” - she didn't drop it in front of a car of a vandalizer.

Her other role saw her stick herself in the middle of Haley and Andy's burgeoning relationship – she tried to convince Haley that she should only try to become involved with Andy if she had real feelings for him. This was more interesting from Haley's standpoint but Alex did get to say one poignant thing.

The one thing I didn't like was how this episode (like almost all of the second half of the season) failed to bring some closure to her junior year story. I thought they might be going somewhere during the evacuation by school bus when she mentioned as a kid being nervous about school and clawing at the seats (i.e. maybe they'd finally mention her earlier therapy), but that quickly became a dead end. At the end of the night we still did not know how all of those stress-inducing tests went.

I've been trying to come up with oddities about each of the top five episodes, but I can't seem to come up with anything for this one (other than the obvious difference vis-à-vis the other four).

Alex's Line Of The Episode: ”Here's the thing about nice quiet dorks like Andy: you get over us much faster than we get over you.”

And now we're down to one – I know there's little suspense in which episode is #1, so I'll just have to keep you in suspense as to exactly how I feel about it for a couple of days.