Classic 90210 Recap: S1/E2 The Pilot Pt 2 "And she was never seen again"

[babydraco]

The first episode ended with a series of clips from the next one and a weird version of the theme song.

More surprisingly romantic but ultimately pointless Brandon/Marianne. They go on a midnight motorcycle ride to the accompaniment of a lovely New Romantic type song. They fool around in a pool. He respects her and they don't have sex. She sends him flowers during class.

Brenda went back to that older man "Jason's" house, but managed not to sleep with him. She calls Kelly at 6 am to tell her about it. Kelly is wearing peach satin pajamas, and her mother Jackie, who is wearing a negligee, comes in to tell her to hang up the phone. “I thought we were mature. I let you do your thing, you let me do mine” when Kelly complains about the lecture on letting her mom's boyfriend sleep. So, we know she comes from a "broken home" and in the Eighties and Early Nineties, that was narrative shorthand for "this character will be screwed up and at least marginally unhappy". Because since the Seventies, everyone was still trying to act like divorce and mothers going to work was some new phenomenon. My elementary school briefly had a special support group for children of divorce. And the "help! Mommy had to go back to work!" plot was quite popular with sitcoms. So far on this show, single parents are not having a great picture painted of them.

Steve is determined to hunt down the freshman dork who crashed his car. Who is of course, David, only David had been wearing Scott's hat, which has Scott's name sewn into it and he left it in Steve's car.

Ruh RO!

When there's a misunderstanding over Marianne's flowers and everyone thinks Brandon had sex with her then blabbed about it, Andrea yells at Brandon about how disappointed she is that he's just like all the other guys (at which point I am sure people started shipping them) the Spanish teacher reminds her that they are only allowed to speak Spanish in class. So Andrea repeats her rant in perfect Spanish.

The scenes in Brandon's Spanish class, and Brenda's science class are clearly meant to bring in recurring subplots with the quirky teachers at their school, although this will not continue. Only two teachers, neither of whom have been introduced yet, will go on to be important to future plots or ever seen again.

Brandon and Marianne make up, he explains what happened and she tells him she's going to try to live a quieter life. Then she tells him “I'll call you”, but this is the last we're ever going to see of Marianne, if I remember correctly.

Good GAH this episode is long and has an awful lot of plots. You'd think it was done but it isn't. I feel like the Pilot was chopped in half at the wrong place to make sure we keep watching. Brandon finishes saying good bye to the love of his life who will never be mentioned again and spots Andrea headed to the bus stop. So he follows her in his car in order to apologize, I guess, for disappointing her. He follows her to Van Nuys, a much much shabbier town. Andrea practices her Spanish with the maids on the bus. She sees Brandon's car while walking up the street and panics. Andrea is angry that he pried, and terrified he'll out her to the school. She registered at West Bev with her grandmother's small, rent controlled apartment in Beverly Hills as her address.

If he does tell, she'll get kicked out. See, West Beverly is, surprisingly, a public, city funded school. The best public school Los Angeles, one of the best in California, one of the best in the country, is not private. Anyone can attend without paying a single penny in fees...of course, only if they are a legal resident of Beverly Hills. The fee you pay to attend is, essentially, your family being able to afford to live in the school district. This is not at all unique to LA or California. It's different in this case because it's become sort of a TV Trope, there have been movies (such as Charlie the Cook) and other episodes of other tvs shows about people lying about their address in order to attend this specific high school.

But in real life, it's a common loophole rich communities in the US use to keep poor families out of their schools. If they're legally required to educate, for free, every minor who lives within their district, they simply build new schools and redraw the boundaries so the school is technically in a technically entirely new town. This way they get what's basically a private school, but they also get to look democratic and open to the mixing of social classes and they get to act morally superior about not being “those awful snobs who go private”. It's not always done deliberately at first but they definitely deliberately reinforce it when they refuse to consider special cases like Andrea. Her parents don't pay rent or property tax within the district, her education is not their problem. Then they raise kids who don't even understand how this works, who think that all the opportunities they were given for free just because their parents could afford a house on the right side of a property line came to them due to nothing but hard work and clean living.


The distribution of who goes to what school isn't based on brains, talents, or life goals, it's strictly geographical and that means it's often economical.

So Andrea's chip on her shoulder is totally understandable. And she calls Brandon out on his privilege, saying "I'm not rich like you!" He probably thought up until this point, that he wasn't rich either. Back in Minneapolis, the Walshes were probably solid upper middle class, and while Beverly Hills is a whole other level of wealthy, not being as rich as your friends is not the same thing as having to commit fraud to get a decent education.

Now, in really big cities, Andrea's scheme is much easier to pull off, because you can hop on a city bus and sneak into some large school only a few minutes away. Real Life cities the size of Los Angeles usually have magnet schools (free public schools which deliberately lean towards some specific area of study), I know for a fact even tinier cities like Providence, RI have some. And I find it hard to believe LA doesn't have exam schools, like Boston, NYC and Chicago? Andrea is the type of person who'd get into one of those easily. She might have been able to get a scholarship to a private- after all, she's everyone's dream Deserving Poor Kid. But that would cut out the entire dramatic subplot.

The concept of quality of education being based on geography which really means it's based on money comes more into play when your town only has one SAU. Like mine did. There were some neighboring towns who were so small and/or poor that they didn't have their own high schools at all, so those kids got to pick what richer town they commuted to for school. Unfortunately, my town had its own school system- a state wide laughing stock which at best, worked its way up to almost mediocre- but it had a high school. Therefore, we were not allowed to transfer to any better establishment without petitioning the school board for a long and drawn out fight about it. I was in high school during the Claremont case and I was actually hoping my school would get defunded so I'd be allowed to go somewhere else. But because there was no public transit let alone intra city buses, how I got to the better school would've been my problem.

Meanwhile, Jason and Brenda continue to go on dates. He gets very into her, but he's angry when she reveals she's a sixteen year old junior at West Beverly. How he couldn't figure out that something was off about her, I don't know. What is the other explanation for why she acted like it was her first time in a bar and first time being bought a drink by a man, stuttered and stammered when he asked her what college she went to, claimed to be a member of a non existent sorority which had apparently uprooted itself from Minnesota to LA en masse, wouldn't sleep with him, insisted on being home before midnight but made him drop her off halfway down the block and waited for him to leave before going inside. Either this woman is nun on the run, or she's living in a halfway house because she's an ex con, or she's not okay in the head (mental illness or developmental delay) or he's going to mention her to someone he assumes knows her and they're going to say “Brenda? She died two years ago in a car accident” or she is a minor desperately trying to pretend to be an adult.

“Just wait til someone you care about lies to you!” Jason snaps in the car on the way home while Brenda is weeping. Oh boy. Just you wait, Brenda. It's all so teenage, because they aren't that convincing as a couple, their grand romance is all in her sixteen year old head and his failure to see who she really is. But I guess “who people really are” is the Theme of the Episode.


Cindy sees Brenda fighting with Jason and running into the house in tears. Cindy is There for Her Daughter and totally understanding. Because Jim and Cindy Walsh were some of the best parents on tv. No, I'm serious, they won some sort of poll one time.

By the way, the waiters in the restaurant they are eating at are wearing black and white polka dotted vests. Polka dots are one of those motifs which scream 80s/early 90s Rich Person to me.

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(I think one of my Skippers had an outfit like that)

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And Brenda refers to Kelly as her “best friend”. They've only known each other like two days, right? A week at most? I'm confused about how long they've been in town.



part one