“All She Wants To Be Is A Modern Girl” (Third Quarter Recap)

For a quarter that had not one, but two Alex-less episodes (which has been par for the course for the last few seasons in the third quarter) it was a rather interesting few weeks for Alex. In fact, it was probably the most interesting quarter of the three so far, and (sadly) I may very well still be able to say that at the end of the season.

”Do You Believe In Magic” gave Alex something she's never really had before: a Valentine's Day story. She had a secret admirer send her flowers, and while at first she thought it was a ruse by her mother to raise her spirits (the flowers were sent by someone in her grandfather's closet company) it turned out her admirer was real, if unlikely: Claire's assistant, Ben (he started admiring her while she had a summer job there, yet another key moment in her life reduced to an “oh, by the way” moment).

Now there is a bit of an age difference (Alex is 19, Ben is 26), but it's not nearly as out there as the difference between Haley (23) and her weatherman boyfriend Rainer (mid-40's) and they do seem to make a reasonably decent couple.  But will they get to stay together?

”Do It Yourself” was Alex-less, but the next episode, “Heavy Is The Head” might just have been the best episode of the season¹, as least as far as Alex goes, even if things didn't go all that well for her in it. Alex actually made a couple of friends at her barista job at the coffee shop, at least until they tried to complain to their manager Scott about the scheduling. Alex went in trying to get Scott to change the schedule, only to find herself getting a battlefield promotion to Assistant Manager, which, not surprisingly, did not go over very well with her co-workers.

And then it got even better/worse (depending on how you look at it) – somehow Alex later unwittingly got Scott to quit (to be a drummer), leaving her in charge as the manager (while Scott ran off to a party with Alex's co-workers/now former friends). That's not really a good thing for Alex, since during this episode she mentioned that she had gone back to school, and trying to juggle a potential 50+ hour workweek with a full course load at CalTech may prove too much for even Alex to overcome.

Having said all that, I still liked the episode because it gave me the one thing I most wanted to see this season: An Alex story with minimal family involvement (Manny and Haley were in the coffee shop at the time, but they both only briefly interacted with Alex). It was nice to see Alex's life (mostly) away from her family (and it was nice to finally see a story about her at the coffee shop after two appearances there where she had little to do).

Will that make the season a success? Far from it, but I was still somewhat happy for a little while.

We did get to see more of Alex's story with Ben in “Finding Fizbo” (even if, for the second week in a row, we were not given a heads up about it) – she was still seeing him, but she still couldn't quite bring herself to mention it to her family (she did tell Haley she was seeing someone in a nice scene between the two of them, but did not mention Ben by name).

Of course, we now know that the secret will come out the hard way this week.

Not much happened with Alex in “Basketball” except for a small tea party with her and Cam, in which neither of their interests could keep the other from nodding off. But that was still more than we saw in “Pig Moon Rising”, when Alex didn't appear at all (for the third time this season and 19th time overall).

So the quarter pretty much fizzled out at the end.

One odd thing about the quarter was that it played out over six consecutive weeks – usually they take a break after the February sweeps but it didn't happen until last week, and it was only a one week break.

Which brings us to the last quarter which starts on Wednesday with “Five Minutes” (5 episodes to play out over probably 8 but possibly 9 weeks). We know the Alex and Ben relationship will come to a head then (Phil and Claire will find out when visiting Alex at CalTech) but how it will play out remains to be seen.

Also remaining to be seen: 1) will this be the last episode this season to have an Alex story, and 2) will this be the last episode ever to have an Alex story (I've heard nothing new about the latter)?
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¹ “A Stereotypical Day” and “Grab It” are really the only other two worthy of that title. Right now it's debatable whether anything from Season 8 will crack the Alex marathon list.