90210 – Games People Play

(Season 1, Episode 10)

Jaimie Trueblood/CW

Here’s the thing about games people play: holy crap, they are boring. I have such a weird relationship with this show. Last week, I was talking about how I was really starting to like it, but this week… ugh. There was absolutely nothing going on.

The writers continued to make Naomi absolutely schizophrenic, and it was super annoying. After spending weeks establishing that she’s a basically nice girl who’s going through a rough time, they decide to make her into a low-rent Blair Waldorf– and it doesn’t work. No one can out-bitch or out-scheme Blair, and anyone who tries just ends up looking pretty foolish.

The whole thing with Naomi flying Jason in from Kansas is completely ridiculous. I have to bring up Gossip Girl‘s Blair Waldorf again, because if she did something so elaborate just to get back at someone, it would be deliciously evil. When Naomi flies in Annie’s ex in order to break Annie and Ethan up, it just comes off as weird and desperate. Naomi could be a great ass-kicking character, but instead she’s clingy and weird.

The Adrianna/Navid relationship continues to not sit right with me as well. Navid spends the entire episode telling Adrianna how stoked he is to be in a relationship with her, while simultaneously pushing her away. It became pretty clear pretty quickly that he was hiding something. Just based on the little bit we know about Navid, there was a good chance it could be pretty interesting; after all, his dad is a porn kingpin.

When Adrianna went to his house and found him with that baby, I totally thought it was his. When it wasn’t, I was fine with that, because I thought the reveal would be even better. So when we finally find out at the end of the episode that Navid’s big secret is that he’s a virgin, I was completely let down.

Despite the fact that I haven’t even been out of high school for ten years, I cannot really relate to high school shows at all. Is it honestly that big of a deal that this 16-year-old kid is a virgin? I’m not trying to sound old and cranky, but back in my day, out of the sophomores I knew, some were virgins and some weren’t. It wasn’t a big deal either way.

All in all, this episode was pretty much a waste of time. Kelly came back, but her only purpose in this episode was to find out that Ryan was seeing Kim and to be briefly disgusted when she thought she was a student. We also finally got to meet Naomi and Annie’s half brother, but he just showed up at the last second, so we have to wait until next week to find out anything about him.

This week was basically just a rehash of the storylines from last week, but with very little forward momentum. We probably could have skipped most of this and moved directly to next week’s episode, which I hope will be a lot better.

Clacked by Kona Gallagher
on Nov 12, 2008 @ 12:50 EST5EDT