“Sparks Fly...It's Like Electricity” (4th Favorite Episode Retro Recap)

This actually is a rather famous episode of Modern Family, but not for reasons involving Alex. But she does have an interesting little story to tell, and that's what puts it in the top 4:


”The Kiss” (Season 2, Episode 2)

So now that Alex is 13(? - more on that in a moment) I guess it's time for her to finally take an interest in boys (actually according to Haley she's two years too late), in this case a boy named Jeremy (she did dance with a boy in “Fears” in the first season, but that was more at Claire's insistence). Of course, this being the Internet age, before they even get to first base, they have to take quite a few pitches at the plate, in the form of seductive text messages, which, unbeknownst to Alex have been intercepted (how's that for a mixed sports metaphor?) accidentally by Claire while getting laundry from her room.

But why did Claire think her cell phone would be sitting on Alex's desk?

Anyway, Claire asks Haley to talk to Alex, and this leads to Haley goading Alex (including a rather odd discussion about footwear) into going over to Jeremy's house and asking him to kiss her.

Predictably, this turns out to be rather disastrous, as Jeremy has a few members of his soccer team at his house at the time, and the fact that 5 or 6 boys hear Alex trying to get a kiss leads to her running away in embarrassment (amazingly without screaming at the top of her lungs).

This, of course leads to a major three-way blowup between Alex, Haley and Claire, including probably the only time in her life that Alex doesn't want to go to school anymore. Which leads to the one thing I did not like about this episode which I'll get to in a minute.

Then, after coming home from dinner at Jay's house (including some immaculately slapped chicken) Claire and Alex finally have a heart-to-heart talk about embarrassing moments with boys that does not involve screaming. It's the best moment of a well-done episode (as is typical for an Alex story), ending with Alex and Jeremy talking together and agreeing to put off the kiss for a while (actually it never happens – Alex's first kiss doesn't come until “Dude Ranch” the following season).

So why is this only #4? It had one of those rare moments when Alex did/said something even I had a hard time defending. I felt Alex talking back to Claire when they arrived at Jay's house was a bit uncalled for. Yes she had a good reason to be upset that her mother was reading her private texts, which led to her embarrassing moment at Jeremy's house, but at least here Claire was acting in Alex's best interests trying to protect her from trouble if those texts happened to be from a predator.

Contrast that to Alex's much more justified blowup this season in “The Long Honeymoon”, when the rest of the family were acting more in their own self-interests (trying to get back to having the perfect summer they were having) than Alex's (yes, again, Claire did question the advisability of quitting her project a week early with regards to her attempts to get into college, but that was just a convenient smokescreen for her real agenda).

The oddity of this episode is that it seems to have slipped through a time warp, with regards to Alex's age - she said she was 13 (in her first scene with Haley). This episode aired at the tail end of September of Season 2, which would have made Alex 16 at the same point in Season 5. But, as we know from “Under Pressure” from that season, she doesn't actually turn 16 until January of that season (of course there's a second time line issue triggered in that episode involving what grade she had reached in high school, but that's a discussion for another day). Unless Alex was rounding her age up from 12 2/3 to 13 here she couldn't already be 13.

Alex's Line Of The Episode: ”I guess what I'm trying to say is 'I'm just a girl, standing in front of a boy, asking for him to like her'. Oh, God, that's from Notting Hill - so quirky, but a really underrated movie.”

Hopefully once she turns 17 next month she'll finally get around to watching About Time, a really, really underrated movie written and directed by the same man (Richard Curtis) who wrote Notting Hill .

Later this weekend (I hope) I'll post my recap of favorite episode #3.