“Right Now I Feel Invisible To You, Like I'm Not Real“

”Double Click”, the final episode of Season 7 airs tonight, and there is a story about Alex coming home from CalTech for summer, but nobody notices.

Officially there has been little else revealed about Alex's story – the only tiny clue I've seen came from a series of behind the scenes pictures taken by deadline.com during the filming of this finale.

The key picture is the 11th one in the slideshow (hopefully the link I copied should take you right to it) showing the Dunphy's calendar with Alex's return date circled (May 11th) and standing out quite a bit from everything else planned this month. Obviously the key to the story is this – did they just forget the date, or is Alex home early?

(By the way, based on how often Alex has been home all season, why is her homecoming even a big deal? More on that plot hole when I review the season later this month.)

Anyway, here's what I think about tonight (I'm changing things up here a bit - I'll reveal my anticipation and emotional moment potential levels together, then try to explain them):

Anticipation Level: High.
Emotional Moment Potential Level: Medium to High.

Don't get your hopes up too much by seeing this: First of all, the high anticipation level is mostly because it is the final episode of the season – at this point with the long summer hiatus about to begin I'll look forward to almost anything that happens.

Which is good, since I'm having a hard time seeing a scenario with a happy ending for Alex. Which brings me to point #2 – remember, just like with “The More You Ignore Me”, a high anticipation level doesn't necessarily mean I'm expecting great things to happen for Alex – sometimes it's more about dread. And there's a high dread factor here.

The best case scenario is the most probable one and least dramatic: the family simply forgets Alex is coming home (in spite of the highlighting on the calendar) and not much more happens. But even this one isn't exactly what I call a happy ending – it still would probably come across as insulting to Alex (and would reaffirm her “I don't matter” comment from “Express Yourself”).

But what it's a case of Alex coming home early and her family doesn't realize it? Then I fear it's a case of something bad happening to Alex, with the most likely scenarios being one (or more) of the following: 1) she drops out of CalTech for some reason; 2) Sanjay breaks up with her, again; or 3) she develops a health problem (probably as a reason for #1). The chance that she's home early with good news is very low.

That's also why the emotional moment potential is up there – obviously there probably won't be as much emotion (except possibly another angry meltdown from Alex) if the more benign scenario pans out.

The X-Factor here is would they be trying to set up a cliffhanger for Alex going into Season 8?

On one hand, as I've said before, there are already two potential cliffhangers looming in this episode: 1) the latest chapter in the Haley and Andy story (a proposal, finally, maybe?), and 2) a potential blowup between Mitch and Cam over Lily. There's probably only room for one of these, or maybe two – a third one seems like a case of throwing too much spaghetti on the wall.

Also, the show has not been consistent with regards to having any cliffhangers to end seasons in the past (they did with "Baby On Board" in Season 3, and "American Skyper" last year, but not really with the other four).

On the other hand, as I've also noted earlier, there is one other wild card in the deck – Ariel's college decision in real life.  This episode was filmed in early March, long before Ariel even knew which colleges were going to accept her. Since her status and availability for next season was up in the air at the time (of course we now know she's staying close to home at UCLA) the writers could conceivably have decided to cover all their tracks and write that cliffhanger ending for Alex after all, planning to resolve it at the start of next season when they'd know whether or not Ariel was coming back (presumably now she will).

 Overall, however, I still think that this is the much less likely scenario - the show has been pretty consistently under-delivering Alex stories this season (yeah, yeah, so what else is new) - why should we expect a pipe bomb moment at the end?

If anything new shows up before 9:00 I'll try to pass it along. Otherwise, you'll probably hear from me at the usual time.