“You Came And Changed The Way I Feel” (Season 10 Wrap-Up)

I will say this: Last season was an improvement over Season 9, both for Alex and the show in general. It's just a question of how much.

Good things did happen for her:

1) She graduated from Cal Tech, and on schedule (this was in some doubt after she missed a semester a couple of years ago due to mono).

2) She won at least one prestigious award for her academic prowess.

3) She landed a highly sought-after job with the government.

4) Her relationship with Bill made it through the entire season, with the only real hiccup being the question of whether or not she wants to marry him.  For once, we did not see her getting her heart shattered into an infinite number of pieces.  And we got to see her come out of her shell a little (dressing up for a hot date, making passionate love to Bill), but not too much.

And yet, as seems to be always, I can't be totally happy with the way things went for Alex:

1) Both of her really big moments were treated, to one degree or another, as afterthoughts. They basically got the family job interview out of the way quickly to focus more on Phil's “dreamer” issues, and didn't bring Alex back in until the very end. It still was one of her best stories of the season in spite of that (a nice scene with Phil at the end saved it).

2) The same cannot be said for her graduation story.  First, we didn't even get to Alex's story until the last act of the episode (focusing instead on a high school graduation which involved nobody in the family, save for Jay giving a speech and Cam being a last-minute substitute host).  And then, they left us with Alex wondering if it was even worth going through commencement, since she thought everything she went through all these years meant nothing, based off a revelation found in a secret library she and some of her classmates broke into the night before.   In other words, they were basically trying to make Alex think that Cam was right after all (more on that in a moment).

3) While I'm glad Alex made it through an entire season without getting her heartbroken, and while I'm happy for her if she really is happy with Bill, I still have this nagging feeling that maybe she should have stuck with Sanjay (of course we don't know who broke up with whom the second time).

4) Not to mention they decided to have an episode where Bill was there but Alex was not. That would have been the low point of the season, except...

5) December and January happened. In a span of five weeks around the holiday re-run break, we had:

a) Alex find out Luke had sabotaged not one, but two puzzles, making them insolvable and driving Alex crazy;

b) Alex almost dying (at Christmas, no less) from a lengthening list of physical ailments trying to keep Haley's pregnancy a secret;

c & d) back to back Alex-less episodes to start January (meaning among other things we didn't see her for a month);

and e) when she did come back, she was promptly brought to a school assembly by Cam to promote education, only for him to hang her out to dry¹ by saying how useless going to college was (of course it almost turned into foreshadowing later).  At least they didn't have Bill break Alex's heart after that.

So in all, again we're left with disappointment. Just not as much as the past few seasons.

Thanks again for reading yet another seasonful of my rantings and ravings.  As always I'll post a couple of things during the summer (maybe a retro recap or two from the first five seasons) but basically I'll be on hiatus until September (or maybe longer – because this final season is supposed to be shorter I'm not sure the start won't be delayed as well).
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¹ I had to phrase this differently – I've used up my “thrown under the bus” reference allotment until September.