Despite only airing four seasons, the WB college drama Felicity remains as present in popular culture now as it was when it first debuted. Even modern familyPhil DunphyTy Burrell) admitted that if he could go back in time to the 90s, he would tell Felicity Porter (Keri Russell) don’t cut your hair. Really, Felicity quickly ingrained itself in our cultural consciousness during its first season in 1998, after a recent high school graduate decides on a whim to change all her college plans to follow a high school boy she barely knew, Ben Covington (Scott Speedman) in New York.
From a critical standpoint, it wasn’t a girl blindly following a pretty boy who spoke to her one day across the country for no reason (although it wasn’t much, and I would have done the same for 1998’s Scott Speedman). ) and what’s more, his comment, written in her yearbook, awakened in her the desire to finally become someone other than what she was. Or, as the theme song for the show’s last two seasons says, a new version of you. “I came here because of Ben, but I stay because of myself.” It was what sold the show, beyond the wide-eyed ingénue with dreamy golden curls and two irresistibly charming guys suddenly sucking up to her set against the backdrop of Manhattan just happened on 9/11.
Felicity was known for creative plot twists
Sad, Felicity didn’t always deliver on the promise of its first season, which in some ways felt like an allegory for the college and/or adult experience where nothing seems certain and things can go wrong. Or was it just a member of the writers’ room who didn’t know exactly where they wanted the storyline to go at any given moment. That’s probably how we got there. Twilight Zone- an inspiring scene filmed entirely in black and white, Eddie Cahill plays a murderous drug dealer and, most infamously, Felicity cut off all her curls for a change at the start of the second season.
Second after the protagonist’s haircut as the most hated plot twist (if a haircut as such can be justified at all) to Felicity thus the creators decided to end the series after its fourth season in 2002. At the time, the series was advertised in the form of American college years, so it only made sense Felicity will end after graduation. It would also have been canceled anyway due to a gradual decrease in quality, but it has nothing to do with it. The fact is that after a well-deserved and largely satisfactory conclusion to the series’ storyline in the 17th episode of the season, the remaining six episodes were devoted to another creative twist: Felicity travels through time.
Felicity Really Travel back in time?
On paper, this sounds ridiculous. Despite one questionable sci-fi fantasy experiment, Felicity did not fall into this genre. It was a dreamy 90s teen drama with an acceptable if not over the top amount of angst and emotion. So is Felicity Porter. Really time travel at the end of her final season? It turns out, yes: a year after graduation, Felicity discovers that Ben is cheating on her. Returning to New York to Noel (Scott Foley) wedding, she wonders what life would be like if she chose Noel over Ben. So, her friend Megan (Amanda Foreman) casts a spell on her that effectively returns her to the beginning of season 4, where she had just slept with Noel on the roof.
What follows is the dilemma that graduate students are most concerned about: can she just go along and repeat her relationship with Noel in her senior year so that one day it all works out? Before she can answer that question, she begins to realize that the very act of traveling back in time is beginning to interfere with the order of events as she knows it. So when she tells Noel and Ben that she’s time traveled from the future, she ends up in a mental hospital until she predicts something to Ben and he doesn’t realize she has to tell the truth. Noel is then killed in the fire that he and Felicity fled from earlier in the year. For the nightmare to end, she must visit the person who wrote the spell Megan cast so he can undo it. To do this, she must tell him the whole history of her college with the help of souvenirs from different life events.
What started as a final attempt to make the dying show’s storytelling interesting for a few more episodes ended up being one of the most creative plot twists I’ve ever seen on TV. FelicityThe series’ finale, which follows the character telling the spell’s creator the story of his college years, serves as an effective reminder of everything the series did right: young, attractive characters in (mostly) realistic storylines. . Personally, I’m convinced that the three-way chemistry between Russell, Speedman, and Foley kept Felicity alive.
Felicity wasn’t a fantasy… Right?
While it wasn’t technically a fantasy series, in a way it was: I first watched it in my tumultuous college years, trying to embody something of its magical premise for myself. I can’t help but believe that this was the foundation Felicityappeal as an inspirational portrayal of the American college experience that could only exist on The WB between 1998 and 2002. Instead of just ending the series with the release of Ben and Felicity, go back home to the same grad school and live happily ever after, show the creators Matt Reeves And JJ Abrams dared to ask, “What if that happened instead?” This is a question that all of us at this stage of life have asked ourselves at one time or another, in one situation or another.
It’s also easy to understand the controversy that has surrounded Felicity’s time travel, given that these ambitious last six episodes should have been streaming from one week to the next, rather than being devoured in one day on Disney+ under the covers at the time of my own post. University depression. What would have looked like madness in 2002 could have a different landing in the era of streaming, without having to wait a week between explanations. It just contributes to the revival of the genre of WB series such as Felicity for the new generation, may be in the form of a version of the PG-13 Euphoria. Either way, stories like Felicity matter, no matter how overly emotional or privileged they may be, and it’s time to start finding new ways to tell them.
Source: Collider
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