“Please Come To Boston” (“Spanks For The Memories” Recap)

You would think after a surprise Alex and Phil story which ended with a hug I would be happy, right?

Well, not totally – I was somewhat happy for the most part but I did have one somewhat big issue with what happened.

I know Phil was not wrong to suggest to Alex that while she's still young she should enjoy life once in a while, such as relaxing during the upcoming summer instead of going cross-country to MIT¹ for what by Alex's own words would be a potentially very pressure-filled internship. And I feel he did have the best of intentions with his words.

Not to mention of course I've worried a lot myself about the stress that Alex puts herself through far too many times.

And yet, I feel in a way by talking Alex out of going out and accepting the internship, Phil clipped off her wings to more than a small degree. Some fatherly advice is fine, but Alex is an adult now (and at times has acted more like an adult than her own parents from the beginning). That seemed a bit atypical of Phil to be a bit less than the cool dad who supports his kids decisions (and, don't forget, even at the start of tonight's story he was encouraging Alex to hope she got the internship while she was having doubts about her chances), and I think he should have let her take her opportunity and let her see what could happen.  Besides, internship or no internship, what are the chances Alex is going to relax this summer anyway?

Again, don't get me totally wrong – it was still a very nice story, and I'll be glad for Alex's mental health (as it is she needs all the help she can get here, as we'll probably see in the next few weeks). I just hope in spite of that Alex doesn't end up regretting her decision to pass on this opportunity.

Anyway, a few other thoughts:

It would have been a longshot, but another smaller reason I'm disappointed that Alex isn't taking the
 internship is because maybe they could have done a story about Alex at MIT to open the final season, including filming a scene or two on location that maybe just maybe I could have seen in person. Of course, with my luck they would have filmed on a 100 degree day² (we do have those up here once in a while in summer) so I'd miss out anyway (I'm not a summer weather person).

Also, we could have had one or two reunions for Alex: Jason (the kid from Boston she met at the CalTech school tour who hopefully wound up staying home and going to MIT), and/or Fig (the MIT professor Alex met a couple of Christmases ago).

And speaking of Fig, I wonder if she had anything to do with Alex getting accepted for that internship. Maybe she wrote the school a letter of recommendation for Alex?

Who says Alex has no fun in her life – she knew what she was doing playing that role-playing game with Phil's nemesis so I'm guessing she's played RPG's more than once. (Having no friends I've never played an actual board RPG myself, but I've enjoyed playing RPG video games in the past.) Of course, we are talking about Alex – I could easily see her being her usual hyper-competitive self and taking it far too seriously.

Since there was no reference to what happened last week, I'm guessing tonight's episode really was set in time before that. And I didn't see anything that happened in tonight's episode which may have caused a postponement (such as something that could have been tied into an unexpected bad current event). My final theory on why they did was maybe at the last minute they decided not to do a Valentines Day episode in March.

Considering I thought we could have been looking at an Alex-less episode when the day started it was strange that we got almost the exact opposite – Joe was the only other kid to even appear briefly in a couple of scenes and only for a couple of scenes – Alex was the only one of the kids to have a meaningful role.

My comment about there being a higher chance of an Alex-less episode right before or after an emotional Alex story still is sort of in play - it's still a possibility for the episode in two weeks (especially since there is still a chance, albeit a bit slimmer after tonight, that it could be adults only), since that was apparently supposed to be the next episode after last week's.

Alex's Line Of The Night: ”I'm familiar with the game (Wizards and Warlocks³) - I go to CalTech – the guy who invented it gave our commencement speech last year.”⁴

One other good thing about tonight was there was no shortage of candidates for this honor.

And with that, it's time for another break. Thankfully this one is only one week and not five. I do have a recap of the past seven episodes to do, so look for that sometime in the next two weeks. I wouldn't say you should look forward to it, though.
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¹ Yes, MIT isn't actually in Boston, but in Cambridge (I've taken the #1 bus past it many times) so my song lyric title isn't totally accurate. But MIT is just across the Charles River from the Back Bay neighborhood of Boston so she could have rented an apartment on that side and biked/taken the bus every day.

² Given that as I'm typing this it's snowing like crazy, it would be at least a little while longer before I have to worry about that, I hope. By the way, as you can probably guess from this post being on time I did not have rain/snow fade issues watching this tonight (one of the two ABC stations I have on my satellite did break in at the start for a weather update – thankfully I was recording on the other station so I didn't miss anything).

³ As best I could tell from Googling there is no actual “Wizards and Warlocks” game in real life, but there was an iPad game called “Warlocks and Wizards”.

⁴Now that I think of it, that does seem like a bit of an odd choice for a CalTech commencement speaker, though, given how many famous scientists they probably have on speed dial.