Well, it's the third season of Felicity and the second season of MBTV Felicity recaps. Welcome back to all the returning readers and welcome to all the newbies, too. Before I get started, I just wanted to make it clear to everyone that I am aware that there is a character on the show whose name is Noel. However, all of the actors on the show pronounce that name as if it were spelled Knoll, so that is how I shall continue to refer to him. I don't want to read any complaints in the forums or receive any more idiotic email informing me of the error of my ways. All such comments will be treated with utter contempt, so don't claim that I didn't warn you. ["Particularly since it's also in the FAQ. People, we didn't write that shit up for our health. Please read it." -- Wing Chun] There will be all-new episodes shown this fall; then in the new year, Jack and Jill will return for a dozen or so new episodes. ["That is, it will return to the airwaves, but not to Mighty Big TV; we will not be recapping it anymore." -- Wing Chun] Let's all enjoy it while we can and hope that the rumours of Amy Jo Johnson's ouster from the show come true.
The new season of Felicity brings new opening credits. Gone is Amy Jo Johnson "lo-dee-doe-DAHing" tunelessly, this year there's an actual song with lyrics. And when I say "lyrics," I mean that the phrase "a new version of me-eee" is repeated a lot and I think it ends with "you wanna go where everybody knows your name." It's a Cheers-for-the-new-millenium theme. I'm ably assisted with this recap by Quinn, who hates Felicity, yet has joined me to watch the season premiere. If you think I'm harsh, you've never heard Quinn in full-tilt rant boogie.
The credits may have changed but this episode starts out like so many others have: in slow motion. Felicity is back out on the street and although her hair is a bit longer, she's still purposefully striding along with a hopeful look on her face. Javier pulls up in a cab and sticks his head out the window and screeches, "My little angel!" He hops out of the cab and has a joyous reunion with Felicity. After they finish hugging and Javier admonishes the cab driver to be careful with his bags, he asks after the rest of the gang. Felicity tells him and thus delivers a little exposition to the audience. She reports that everyone is fine but she hasn't spoken to Knoll all summer, in fact since he disappeared with Javier's cousin Gnatalie from Javier and Samuel's wedding. The Gnatalie thing is a joke, people, so don't get your gnickers in a gnot. Javier is shocked to find out that Knoll and Gnat are together and he proceeds to slag her off quite viciously. Felicity tells him about the "student apartment that's supposed to be amazing" that she, Julie, and Elena are going to be sharing. Javier offers to give them furniture from his friend Mitchell's apartment. Felicity explains to Sean's Docuventary videocamera that Javier's friend is moving to Chicago and he needs to get rid off some furniture. Hey, what a shout-out to me! By the time you're reading this recap, I'll be in Chicago, visiting some friends.
Anyway, Felicity and Javier go over to Mitchell's old apartment to check out the stuff. Everything that isn't up for grabs has a blue sticker on it. Felicity spies a cone-shaped lamp that she likes but it has been blue-tagged. Javier rips the sticker off and sticks it on something else. Felicity protests but Javier tells her not to worry because Mitchell has a big "dat comb" job, as in "www whatever dat comb, Internet." Meanwhile, the building manager appears and mentions that the apartment is going to be available the following week. Felicity asks if anyone has rented it yet and she is told that it is still available. She asks whether it is expensive and it isn't. Apartments in New York are always readily available and cheap -- on television. In reality, most studio apartments are filled with four adults who have to sleep in shifts in the bathtub, and they have to sell plasma to pay the rent.
So, Felicity is back out on the street and this time she's carrying a potted plant while Sean badgers her Docuventary-style. She's on her way to see Julie and Elena at their new apartment. Sean keeps asking why she is flustered, and she keeps putting him off. He begs her to talk because the Independent Film Channel -- which you'll remember from last season is the cable channel that's optioned the Docuventary -- wants to produce it as a weekly series and he needs a "hook" for every episode. Felicity and Sean enter the apartment and they're both impressed. Sean says, "This is a dorm? Welcome to college, Mrs. Trump." Felicity, Elena, and Julie, who looks as ratly as ever, all squeal and hug because they're reunited and it feels so good. Both Elena and Julie yell at Sean for shoving his camera in their faces. Felicity asks who the fourth roommate will be and all Elena knows is that "she's from England and she'll be here in a few weeks." Felicity eventually breaks the news that she's rented Mitchell's apartment in Brooklyn and plans to live there with Ben, even though he hasn't arrived from California yet or agreed to it yet. Felicity says that she can "get rid of it if he doesn't want to live there." That's some rental market in New York that you can find and turn down apartments at your convenience. Elena cautions her that she spent the summer with Tracy and being together all the time isn't what it's cracked up to be. Felicity suggests that Meghan could be her replacement. Elena and Julie veto Felicity's suggestion about two nanoseconds after she makes it.
At the loft, Meghan is being interviewed for the Docuventary about how she spent the summer. She's back to wearing those ponytails on each side of her head which make her look like she's sporting basset hound ears. Her head looks enormous in comparison to the rest of her body. She talks about spending the summer with her new boyfriend, who would be Sean, and how great their sex was. That's classy. Meghan and Sean spent the summer in Tuscany having a "mostly good time." He puts down the camera and joins her on the sofa and they start macking.
On the street, Sean asks Richard about his summer and docuvents his response. It seems that Richard spent it working at a theme park in Florida and it wasn't that great because "not every female rodent character you meet is played by a female park employee." Omigod, I didn't know that's where Julie worked in the summer.
Elena and Tracy spent their summer working at the Children's Hospital in Buffalo. Elena gushes about Tracy's pleasant bedside manner, which causes Sean to ask if they got it on over the summer. Elena informs him that they did not. Just then, a guy from across the hall comes in to invite them to a "kegger" that he's going to have later on. Elena stutters that they might come over while Tracy looks pouty. His pout and his like chipmunk teeth remind me of Adam Rich, TV's Nicholas Bradford, but without the bowl cut.
Javier is standing at a hot dog vendor's cart on the street while Sean and his camera ask him whether he's excited about being a freshman. Javier replies that he "can't wait to rush." Sean expresses some surprise that Javier is planning to rush a fraternity. Javier admits that he doesn't know what rushing means, only that it is something freshmen do. Which fraternity should he join, I Felta Thi?
Back to Richard's interview, where he's complaining that the worst part of his summer was when he tried to look for Knoll and couldn't find him. Dude, you obviously do not know how to enjoy a summer. Knoll left a "cryptic message on his brother's machine in June, and that's all anybody knows." And this is a bad thing because...? Richard describes Gnatalie as "that girl, who looks like the Doritos chick." Yeah, well that's because she is the Doritos chick and it's also a pretty lame meta-statement. Sean thinks Knoll's "disappearance" is great because "every reality-based show needs some mystery." No, every reality-based show needs some reality, which anyone who has ever seen a Bunim/Murray production can tell you. Richard is annoyed that Sean wants to exploit Knoll's "abduction." We can only hope that the aliens used a sizable anal probe.
Elena exclaims to Sean's camera that she's angry at Knoll and doesn't care where he is, though she admits to being worried about him.
At a pizza place, Felicity is shocked to discover from Sean that no one -- not even Richard -- has heard from Knoll.
Julie says on-camera that she was in Maine all summer and she didn't hear from Knoll even though she expected to get an email or two.
At the loft, Sean creates a "Noel's Missing" graphic on his G4 and shows it to Felicity. As she's explaining why she doesn't like it, Ben comes through the door. They jump into each other's arms and Sean leaves the room. Felicity immediately tells him about the apartment and before she can finish delivering her sales pitch, Ben agrees to move in with her.
At the dorm apartment, Julie and Elena help Meghan carry in a trunk. Meghan is moving in after all and she stumbles to thank them for allowing her to do so only because Sean put them up to it.
Ben and Felicity arrive at the apartment in Brooklyn to check it out in the light of day. The bathtub is sitting in the middle of the living room near the windows, which are either frosted, or just really dirty. Mitchell's discarded furniture is littering the place. It actually looks pretty small for a television show apartment. Felicity starts enthusing about its greatness as soon as they cross the threshold. Ben isn't as thrilled about the place but he doesn't say anything and Felicity is too wrapped up in her little romantic drama to notice.
In an interview with Sean on the street, Ben describes the apartment as a "hell hole." Cut to Felicity saying that it needs to be cleaned. The action goes back and forth between them, with Ben dissing the place and Felicity kvelling over it. Felicity asks Sean if Ben loves the apartment. Sean says Ben does, right before cutting to a scene in which Ben states that he hates the place.
Visa commercial with the Ritchie Valens song Donna as the soundtrack. Jetta commercial which postulates that men love gadgetry. Sprint PCS commercial. Levi's commercial featuring the morons trying on jeans in a changeroom. Gilmore Girls promo.
Richard is now riding in a cab and being interviewed by Sean. He's still obsessing over Knoll's whereabouts, and vows to find him. Yeah, whether he wants to be found or not. ["Or whether we, the viewing audience, want him to be found." -- Wing Chun]
Ben brings Sean over to see the Brooklyn apartment. Sean just shakes his head and repeats, "No, oh no." While they're there, the plumbing starts to get noisy. Ben gets some water from the tap and it is quite rusty looking. He asks Sean what to do. Sean asks how long Felicity will be out. Ben tells him that she's at a seminar and will be gone for a few hours. Sean begins to formulate a plan.
Javier reminisces on the street about his mother's wanting him to go to university ever since he was a child. On the day he was supposed to take the Spanish equivalent of the SATs, he went to the beach instead and broke his mother's heart. Since she is turning sixty-five in December, he's planning to give her his report card as a gift, assuming it is good. He contemplates that for a few moments and then decides that he has to leave to go study.
Felicity returns to the Brooklyn apartment with a sack of groceries and cleaning supplies. Ben and Sean's strategy to convince Felicity that the apartment is no good involves getting a huge television set. To me, this only proves that Ben and Sean are nudges, not that there's anything wrong with the apartment, except that the bathroom door is partially blocked by the TV. Felicity is less than thrilled about Ben's contribution, especially when he makes her wait out in the hall so he can surprise her. Instead of telling Ben that she doesn't like the TV, she says that they can watch romantic movies on it. Again with the romance, Felicity? Ben leaves and kisses her goodbye.
Over at the dorm apartment, Elena and Julie are painting the kitchen while Meghan regales them with tales of her parents catching her and Sean in their bed in Tuscany. They're having a grand old time and when the phone rings, Julie inexplicably jumps up on the counter and walks across it to answer the phone. The hell? It's Felicity calling to ask how things are going and whether Julie hates her for foisting Meghan off on them. Julie claims that they're having fun and asks how it is going at the Brooklyn apartment. Felicity, who is sweeping while talking on the phone, lies and says that things are going well. Julie asks if they've "christened the apartment yet" which I guess is her way of nosily asking if Felicity and Ben have done the deed yet. That Julie, so full of tact. Felicity tells her that they're going to do it that night. And again, she mentions romance. Okay, we get it, Felicity has stars in her eyes and can't see that the place is a dump.
Sean is interviewing Javier yet again. This time they're in a jewellery store and Javier is picking out a watch for his mother. He asks to have it inscribed with the phrase, "Made en españa." Um, shouldn't that be "Hecho en españa"? And he mentions again that he's worried about Knoll being with Gnatalie.
Over at the Brooklyn apartment, Felicity and Ben are about to get busy, when she starts screaming mid-snog. She's seen a giant bug and she dispatches Ben to kill it for her. Then the plumbing noises start again which distracts Ben and he launches into a tirade about how the noise went on for hours in the afternoon. Ben starts banging on the floor and shouting at the downstairs tenants to stop the noise. Felicity wisely notes that it probably isn't the neighbours making the noise, but "the pipes." She suggests just calling the manager about it in the morning. Ben would rather keep raging, but Felicity convinces him to turn his attention back to the bug.
There's a knock at the door and a lithe, scantily clad young woman is there, claiming to be from downstairs. She explains that whenever she turns on the bathroom taps that noise starts. Ben is bowled over by her appearance and suddenly he isn't so angry anymore. The chickie leaves and Felicity reams him out for being so gobsmacked instead of "ass-kicking" as he had threatened. He finally sees the bug and asks her to turn on the light so that he can get it. She plugs in the weird cone-shaped lamp that she snagged from Mitchell and when she does, it bursts into flame, which makes Ben combust. He starts freaking and yells for her to get the fire extinguisher from under the sink. The extinguisher is empty so Ben runs out to the hall to get another extinguisher. In the meantime, Javier arrives, sees the fire and screams, "Fire! Aie!" Then, without missing a beat, he looks around the room and deadpans, "Ooh, I don't like that TV." Ben charges back in yelling, "Clear!" and he puts out the fire. The neighbour chickie comes back in because she's heard yelling. Ben says it's just because of the fire and some bugs. Javier turns to Felicity and mutters, "Oh god, please tell me she doesn't live in the building." Through clenched teeth, Felicity says, "Mm-hmm."
Time for some more inane commercials starring various WB employees.
The action cuts back and forth between Elena and Tracy as they recount an enrollment lottery tale for the Docuventary. It seems that they both really want to get into a class with limited enrollment. A lottery is held and they decide to hold off opening their envelopes with the acceptances or refusals until they're out at dinner. Since they are both obscenely competitive, they've decided that whoever wins admittance to the class will pick up the tab at dinner. They both separately confide to the camera that they've peeked into the envelopes and discovered that only one of them got in. Tracy switches them so that Elena will get in and she ends up switching them back so that he'll get in. Oh, how very Gift of the Magi of them.
Julie, Felicity and Meghan are having coffee at the dorm apartment. Felicity whines about having spent hours at the ER with Ben so that he could get six stitches to close up the wound he sustained when he broke the glass on the fire extinguisher cabinet. Meghan says six stitches is nothing; she once got "sixteen stitches in [her] left butt cheek." Julie asks why she needed them and Meghan retorts that it's none of her business. Felicity continues to whine that maybe it was too soon for her and Ben to move in together and that after one day she's ready to call it quits. She tells them how Ben acted when the downstairs chickie came up to the apartment and describes him as being "such a guy." When they woke up they were both so cranky, according to Felicity. Meghan says, "You guys haven't done it yet?" She concludes that "domestication is the enemy of romance." Neither Julie nor Felicity agrees. Julie reminds Felicity that she can always move into the dorm apartment. Meghan snarks that she's not moving out and Julie mutters something like, "Don't boss me," which causes Meghan to say, "Okay."
Ben is doing some whining of his own, over at the loft. He tells Sean that he's "forgotten what it's like to live in a perfect environment." Hmm, I remember a few times when he thought that living with Sean at the loft was not so perfect. Sean declares that people should not say, "'Want to get an apartment together?' They should say, 'Want to get a hassle together?'" Ben is stretched out on the sofa and is under such stress that his hair looks terrible. It's somewhat like Anthony Michael Hall's was in Sixteen Candles. He continues to whinge about calling in an exterminator until Sean gives him some advice about tackling his problems with a business plan, or some other entrepreneurial mumbo-jumbo. Ben states that his first step will be to fix the sink, but he needs to rest on the sofa a while longer before he springs into action.
Julie confesses to the videocamera that she met her birth father over the summer. It turns out that her kidney was not suitable for donation and he ended up dying. However, she's glad that she got to know him before he passed away. I guess rodent-to-human organ transplant procedures haven't been perfected yet.
Out on the street, Felicity is carrying another sack of groceries. She tells Sean that it contains the ingredients to make her mother's rosemary chicken that she plans to make for Ben for a "romantic dinner." Sean asks how her parents are doing. She confesses that they're getting divorced. She quickly changes the subject because she doesn't "want to talk about it." I guess the rosemary chicken recipe couldn't work its magic for her parents.
Later on, Ben has his head under the kitchen sink, trying to fix it. Neighbour chickie appears at the door wanting to use Felicity and Ben's tub. The apartment manager has told her not to use her tub because it could make the pipes "explode" but since she's a dancer, she really needs a "bath for [her] back." Ben lamely tries to stop her but she pushes her way in.
Sean and Meghan are making out at the loft and she notices that the videocamera is on. Sean denies it but it turns out that her only complaint is that it is positioned incorrectly. She gets up and moves it beside them after calling him an idiot. Sean bristles, "Don't call me an idiot, I'm a documentarian." Tomato, tomahto. Just then, Ben calls to whine to Sean that the "supermodel" neighbour is in his tub. Meghan overhears and bellows, "If that girl is in the bathtub, your ass is grass!" Ben says that he couldn't stop her. Sean sagely notes that "excuse is not going to work." Felicity arrives and Ben rushes off the phone to greet her. From the tub, the chickie introduces herself as "Brigitte Pasterchek" or something like that. Felicity takes Ben aside and asks, "What's she doing in our livingroom bathtub?" Ben wimps out and describes his ineffectual attempts to keep Brigitte out. Felicity cries that her plans for a romantic dinner have been foiled. Do you think Felicity is into romance? The argument escalates and Ben finally admits that he never wanted to move into the apartment. While they're bitching at each other, the phone rings in the background. Brigitte answers it and comes in wearing strategically-placed bubbles and nothing else. She hands them the phone and says, "They found Knoll."
Richard is now on the street telling Sean about all his efforts to locate Knoll. It turns out that he found out that Gnatalie has been hanging out with a guy called Leon. Quinn, ever the sharp wit, notes immediately that "Leon" is "Noel" spelt backwards. However, Llonk, is Knoll spelt backwards, and that's even more fitting. Richard gathers tout le gang, sans Ben, to go in search of Knoll. They discover him at yet another apartment, looking dishevelled, unshaven, and unkempt, not unlike Noel Gallagher. He's très boho manqué with his semi-bleached hair and a Red Bull in his hand. Quinn snorts, "As if he needs to be any more stimulated." Drinking Red Bull and vodka is all the rage with the club kids these days, so I guess this means that Knoll has left his buttoned-down days of creaming over Macuser special issues, far, far behind him. He ends up trying to hustle them out the door because he and Gnat have to pack since they're going away for the weekend. Felicity bitches about not hearing from him all summer and Elena complains about having to pack up their old apartment on her own. Knoll explains that they ended up spending a month in Cuba by way of Canada -- a second major shout-out. Gnat appears and says hey to Javier. Javier warns, "Don't 'hey' me -- are you crazy messing around with my friend's little head?" Knoll confesses that he's not planning to return to college.
Out on the street, Felicity opines, "Knoll is trying to be all impulsive, which is what I was trying to do with the apartment."
Also on the street, Tracy, Elena, and Richard whine about Knoll's new lifestyle. Richard is particularly up in arms. Methinks his feelings for Knoll run pretty deep.
Felicity and Javier are walking and discussing the apartment situation. He advises her not to give up so easily, since there are always difficulties at the beginning of any cohabitation. He gives her money to take a taxi instead of the subway. They hug each other and both say that they love each other before parting. I just love Javier.
At the dorm apartment, Elena discovers a weepy Julie. She asks her if she's thinking about her father. Julie claims that she's fine and that she just wants to be alone.
Ben confesses on the Docuventary that he's frustrated about the "stupid apartment." He declares, "I don't get it, through all the filth and vermin, she sees something beautiful." Sean states, "I've got news for you: she sees you through the same eyes." Oh, puh-leeze! Ben runs out, refusing to let Sean follow him.
Ben has lit a million candles at the Brooklyn apartment, which surprises Felicity when she returns home. He apologizes for the l'affaire du bain and tells her that he wants to make it work. She breaks the news that she has already informed the building manager that she wants out. They get all lovey-dovey, the romance that she's been pining for all episode, and hop in the bath together, while Top Loader's cover of Dancin' in the Moonlight plays in the background. They decide that they still want to live together, just not in that apartment.
Javier drops an anvil on our heads when he tells Sean's videocamera, AGAIN, that Gnatalie spells trouble.
Knoll carries Gnat over the threshold of their apartment and calls her "Mrs. Crane." Apparently, he loves trouble.