“When I Think About What Could've Been” (“Strangers In The Night” Recap)

Let's say you're playing a slot machine with a massive jackpot.


You put your money in. You pull the handle (OK, nowadays you just push buttons, but bear with me).

The reels start spinning. The first reel stops.

JACKPOT

The second reel stops.

JACKPOT

And just when you start thinking about what you're going to do with all that money, the third reel stops.

CHERRY

Two dinky little coins (basically your money back, more or less) pathetically hit the collecting tray.

In a nutshell, that was tonight's Alex story.

The story itself started out fine. It was really sad to see Alex's heart broken once again, sad to see nobody believed she had a boyfriend in the first place, but happy that she found a new guy right away...

...and then the door opened, and it was that guy (Carlito Olivero) from The X-Factor after all. I guess in the press release they used a fake name (Yuriy Turchyn) to keep from spoiling things.

Seeing them put so many eggs into one basket (some of which I thought they were saving for later), my heart sunk so low it needed to pay a subway fare.

So, now we don't have that “Alex goes on a date” story to look forward to, at least for the foreseeable future. (Are we ever actually going to see what happens to her on a date? The closest we've come was the “Spring Fling-A-Ding” dance last year.)   I just hope we don't have to wait another seven (or even more) episodes for another Alex story of any kind.

On the other hand, given what little we found out about Teddy (boy #2), he doesn't sound that far off from Ronnie Jr., so maybe in the end...

A couple of other notes:

Blinded by the feeling she had that Alec (boy #1) wasn't real, Claire missed a golden opportunity to convince Alex to stay home for college – she could have said something like this: “Honey, see how heartbreaking it is when someone you care for goes far, far away? Well that's what we're going to feel when you leave for college.”

And wonder of wonders, the writers finally remembered that Alex went to see a therapist, even if Phil and Claire wondered if he wasn't fake, too.

So I guess in the end it wasn't the totally worst case scenario I feared, but it really could have been so much more, now and for later.

Alex's Line Of The Week: ”His dumb dad got transferred to dumb Africa to operate on some dumb babies. So fixing their hearts is worth breaking mine?” OK, I'll admit it was selfish, but she just had her heart broken in a way she hardly could have imagined so I can understand it.