Again With This: Dawson's, Melrose, 90210

Steve's latest brilliant idea for the Beverly Beat is less about attracting readers and more about attracting gawkers, with "attracting" being the operative word: he wants to copy British tabloids by having cheesecake photos on Page 3 -- though at least he's not prepared for the Beat's models to be topless; bikinis will be just fine! To prepare for a publicity stunt announcing the initiative, he p...

A scandalous round of strip poker touches off a prank war among three of the gang's least clever members: Noah, Steve, and Donna. (David also gets swept up in it, briefly, but only incidentally; mainly, he's occupied chasing after a D-girl Peach Pit patron who may be trying to blow him off.) When the battle takes down a health inspector, Donna and Steve are forced to figure out at what point STUFF...

Having -- through sheer luck -- not killed Donna, Dylan decides he is ready to accept his friends' help in getting help for his heroin addiction. Unfortunately, he's not actually on Intervention and has to spend a night waiting for his bed in a treatment facility to be ready, which gives him just enough time to wake up in the middle of the night, pretend to take a shower, and actually slides out t...

Dylan's junkie logic leads him to decide his roommate's order that he get his illegally purchased gun out of the home they share just means he can wait until dark, put it in his pants, drive it over to the Marchette manse, and threaten its occupant. Unfortunately, Tony doesn't live there anymore -- nor, spoiler, does he live anywhere -- and the freaked-out victims of his home invasion call his mot...

We may not have previously understood how committed Gina is to the project of messing with Donna until this episode, in which she reinvents herself as a personal trainer and starts working out with...Felice. She easily parlays their new intimacy into an invitation to a George luncheon hosted by a not-yet-dead (but still completely offscreen) John F. Kennedy Jr., which she makes sure to tell Donna...

The approaching yuletide holidays haven't given Dylan any more concern for either her busy schedule as the co-proprietress of a retail clothing store, nor for her relationship with a dude who isn't him. So with that in mind, of course he has no compunction about getting her on a private plane and flying her to Mexico for huevos rancheros, authentic sombreros, and a Mayan fertility statue into whic...

Kelly spent all of "I'm Back Because" -- well, all except when she was making eyes at Dylan -- getting between her mother and her grandfather, to make sure her grandfather's legally documented wishes with regard to the end of his life were being followed. So naturally, in this episode, all Jackie has to do is call and ask Kelly to put her failing grandfather on a ventilator for Kelly to utterly di...

Since Gina doesn't have a job -- or an agent, even, despite what she's told Donna -- she's got nothing but time to devote to the new project she's pursuing post-Cabaret On Ice: Donna And Noah On The Rocks. When she's alone with Donna, she diligently shit-talks Noah (not that hard, given his many failings) to try to change Donna's mind about making their relationship work. And when she's alone with...

With Noah continuing his downward spiral of regret and self-recrimination following his father's suicide, it turns out not to have been a great idea for him to buy a bar: he's drinking a lot, and driving drunk, and maybe hitting someone? Donna's distracted from her usual fussing by the arrival of her cousin Gina -- former Olympic figure skater, current Ice Capade star, and [touches earpiece] I'm b...

It's time for Leah to have her day in court, and a custody settlement allowing Lenny basically unfettered access to their baby -- and, therefore, to Leah herself -- is obviously not the result she had hoped for. Enter Kelly, who's ready and willing to help Leah get out of the county on an assumed identity. Unfortunately for Leah, Kelly has no idea how to do any of that. On top of that, Noah's ongo...

Sophie's multifarious strategy to take over the entertainment industry leads her to consider working in adult films, despite all the great advice David's giving her about being patient and waiting her turn and paying her dues -- you know, like he did, which is why he's currently having such a successful career scoring movies LOL. Noah continues grieving his father in extremely drunken ways, and co...

We kind of respected Sophie for having some skill as a con artist, but she really loses a lot of her prestige with her latest scheme: getting Steve to let her write for the Beat. Over Janet's objections (which: that'll teach her not to require that Brandon designate her editor when he's out of town/on his way out the show's door), Steve not only gives Sophie a column in which she can apparently wr...

Noah's father having killed himself, a significant portion of the episode is focused on Noah's grief. This is bad news for Vincent Young, who can't act, and worse news for us, who have to watch him as he gets morbidly obsessed with his late father's weapon, drinks to excess, and pushes away the help of the only person who cares about him. (The only person who cares about him -- Donna -- at least g...

What's worse than surviving childhood sexual abuse from a parent who goes on to kill himself? When the primetime soap you're on is running out of ideas in its ninth season and makes you keep reliving it over and over and over again. Now, Val wants to tell Abby about the last days of Mr. Malone's life, but her attempts to get Abby alone for this rather serious conversation are immediately foiled wh...

Brandon and Kelly mutually and amicably agreed to leave one another at the altar, and you know what that means. ...Oh, you do? Please tell them, because they're not sure. Kelly decides to invest a round of ex sex with meaning: she forgets all the reasons she and Brandon broke up, gets maudlin and regretful, and suggests to Brandon that they go ahead and take their honeymoon to Corsica together aft...

It's the week of Brandon and Kelly's wedding, and preparations are underway: Steve is getting excited for Sarah to meet all his friends at the reception, but she might not be ready to keep seeing him because some other friend of hers is breaking up with her boyfriend and splitting up all their books and furniture seems like a big hassle, or something? Donna has somehow landed the job of wedding pl...

Since Kelly and Brandon have decided they really are definitely going through with their engagement and will absolutely get married, for sure , they've divided up the list of tasks required to plan their wedding. However, questions about the guest list and wedding registry are interspersed with their interactions with Alex, who meets Kelly when he brings to the clinic the woman whose baby he just...

It's been a while since the show gave David something he could really be stressed out, so: time for him to get robbed at (possible) gunpoint while taking money out at an ATM. Noah's got the perfect solution: he should get a gun, like Noah did: he's got one behind the bar and one on his stupid boat! David starts the process, but he has to wait eleven days to take possession of his confidence and se...

Kelly's notions of feminism have, over the years, perplexed us in their inconsistency; "Skin Deep" compresses all her worst instincts and muddiest thinking in a single episode. Brandon has decided to write about the grand opening (heh) of Beverly Hills's first sex shop, which has already attracted protesters even before its manager has opened the doors. Among those protesters is Kelly, who is sudd...

It's been five years since the gang graduated from West Beverly High, and since someone at the network presumably had the sense to predict that this crew wasn't going to make it to their ten-year reunion, we're made to suffer through their stupid, pointless five -year reunion. No, that doesn't mean we get appearances from Brenda, Dylan, or DeadScott's restless ghost; only Gabrielle Carteris had no...

Somehow, a real journalist (named Peter Raitt) has become aware of Brandon's work in the Beverly Beat , and somehow, it's convinced him to partner with Brandon on a story about a proposed football stadium. Brandon is so busy sucking up, he doesn't notice that Kelly is in the midst of a crisis regarding Chris, an intellectually disabled man who works the night shift at the clinic but may have to gi...

We all know that Brandon considers his job at the Beverly Beat a waste of his prodigious talents -- so much so that even after publicly reaffirming his commitment to it in the last episode, he's already prepared to edit the Beat on the side while joining the Los Angeles Chronicle as a reporter on the Metro desk. Somehow, despite being a journalist ostensibly focused on local news, it has entirely...

So Kelly was all about getting that confused teen mother, Leanne, to take back the baby she abandoned at the clinic. But when that teen mother, Leanne, let Kelly know that, actually, leaving the baby was the right call, Kelly decided that, actually, Kelly should foster the baby...which is why, when Pam tells her that, actually , her agency has found a pair of qualified foster parents to take the b...

Brandon already took a giant dump all over journalistic ethics the last time the Beverly Beat chronicled David's music career, but that was when it was on the rise: perhaps Brandon's now trying to balance the scales by exploring the fallout from David's decision to pursue Jasper's Law's record deal minus...you know, Jasper. It seems as though Jasper knows what's behind The Rise And Rise Of David S...

In show time, Noah raped Valerie less than a week ago, so of course, now they're in court as Val pursues her civil case against him. Val's lawyer is confident that the facts make Noah a poor defendant -- the poor little rich boy who got drunk and had sex with a woman who wasn't his girlfriend (anymore) -- but Noah's lawyer knows some things about Val, like that she faked a pregnancy before Noah ev...