Episode Report Card Jacob Clifton: C | Grade It Now! YOU GRADE IT New Modes
By Jacob Clifton | Season 3 | Episode 1 | Aired on 09.25.2008
You know what? Let's just forget last season ever happened. Firstly because I'd love to, and secondly because... the show did. But to review: Mysterious French bastard kid, Claire's getting Hot Flash off the ground, Daniel's out and Wilhelmina is in as Mode EIC, Christina's pregnant with the spawn of Wili and the House of Meade, and Alexis has become both evil and retarded. The scariest combination of all.
Oh, and our heroine was "somehow" supposed to choose between a manipulative, judgmental dwarf, and a hot-as-hell nerd man who was so very unattainable that he invented new coincidental ways to be unattainable on a weekly basis, like getting people in New Mexico pregnant on his day off. In order to reboot the franchise before Betty managed to become completely, instead of mostly, irritating and unlikeable -- and because Gorham wasn't interested in moving to NYC just so his character mutations could continue to embarrass us all -- she Chose Me.
Not literally Me, like, "me" in the grand sense of Choosing Oneself. (Just like Potes said. She would never tell you this, being humble as well as lovely, but Potes is ... magic. I once saw a unicorn walk up to Potes on Rodeo Drive and ask her advice, and she totally played it off like it was no big deal. A goddamn unicorn.) Anyway, Betty's right now explaining this to an unseen apostrophe, somewhere outdoors with the city behind her, all about how she "had a choice to make" and: "then it hit me: literally, a softball hit me."
I don't really remember last season that well because it was mostly dumb except for Amanda and Mark, who were fierce the whole time because dumb is the name of the country where they excel. So I can't recall if any of this already happened, and there's a dependent clause in the finale recap that's throwing me off. So feel free to skip this paragraph, as she tells Henry (In a dream? Due to concussion?) that, while she loves him as passionately and deeply and hotly as any right-thinking human, she cannot marry him; then she tells Gio (In a memory? A flight of fancy?) that she cares about Gio, but not actually in that way.
Ah. The apostrophe is her dead mom. What is with this show and the downer openers? She explains to Mom that there is a lot she wants to experience before she settles into a relationship -- such as short-term mini-relationships with fine-ass singer-songwriters and the like -- but also in terms of non-relationships, like her career and grownupness and all the infinite things that would, and did, suffer due to Henry's unbelievably yucky babymama drama, and Gio's sandwichery and dwarven feelings of inferiority and whatever, and Betty's complete loss of all the things -- optimism, morals, focus, faith, compassion, resourcefulness, direction, willpower -- that make her my hero.