I saw this weird Twilight Zone-esque episode of Felicity yesterday and was hoping that today’s episode would finish its story, but no such luck. I’m hoping there was a second part and that they’re shown out of sequence. Basically, I want to know what the hell happened and what the hell was going on. Spoilers galore below.
Felicity is put onto a place called the Clinic by a friend of hers. Supposedly, the Clinic performs a procedure that ensures you never experience heartbreak ever again. Felicity goes there, talks to a doctor and decides not to have the procedure. The episode turns extremely spooky. A guy in the library warns Felicity to “watch out for snow” and tells her that the procedure is going on. An empty cassette player tells her to “open 67” and when she works as a night janitor in a morgue she opens the casket marked 67. The corpse speaks to her and tells her to open his bodybag to see what it is the Clinic does. She looks and sees a big surgical scar on his chests - the Clinic removes people’s hearts.
The episode goes on, and Felicity discovers that both Ben and her friend have gone through the procedure and now lack hearts. In the middle of a fight with Ben she suddenly wakes up on the operating table and is told that the procedure is over. She then falls asleep again and wakes up in a doorless, windowless, ceilingless room with Ben and three others. They’ve been there for months without eating and yet still live. They have many wild theories about what’s going on. In the end, they stand on each other’s shoulders to get Felicity over the edge to the outside world. She gets over, screams, and falls.
Cut to Felicity’s roommate, who picks up a small doll and puts it back in a box where the other four dolls already are. She closes the box, and a voiceover informs us that the box is the roommate’s one true magical possession. Roll credits.
So: what the hell comes next? Tell me it didn’t end like that.
Okay, it’s been a while since I’ve seen the episode (or any of them, for that matter).
Felicity’s goth roomate had a box that she was always warning Felicity not to open. I guess it was the writers’ way of finally telling us what was in the box. But, yeah, it was weird. I’d rather have seen it contain some of Felicity’s hair and fingernail clippings that she was saving. THAT would have been creepy.
That sounds less Twilight Zone-esque and more Direct Twilight Zone Ripoff. Or at least the part about her actually being a doll in a box. It also sounds kind of interesting. Is that what Felicity is usually like? I always thought it was one of those teen angsty shows like Dawson’s Creek(?)
No, that was not typical at all. It was on the WB, so yeah, like Dawson’s creek, but in college.
I never watched it while it was on the WB. But Howard Stern and my mother watched it (not together, of course) and always mentioned how good it was, so when they started showing the reruns on WE, I got hooked. Scott Foley was eye candy, what can I say? Felicity chose wrong!
The episode was indeed written as an homage to The Twilight Zone. It was intended to be a stand-alone episode, so there was no part 2. If I remember correctly, it aired sometime around Valentine’s Day due to it’s “lovelorn” theme.
The mystery of what was inside Megan’s box was a recurring theme throughout the show, and so this episode was kind of a wink to the fans who speculated as to what might be inside. Basically the whole theme of the episode is that it is better to have loved and lost than never to experience love at all. Appropriate since Felicity was an extremely introspective and romantic girl, perpetually torn between Ben and Noel throughout most of the series.
I wasn’t a huge fan of that particular episode, but overall this was one of my favorite shows. While I guess it would probably be classified as a teen drama (or college drama), the superb acting and writing raised it to a level way above much of the other crap on the WB (such as Dawson’s Creek.)
Yeah, that’s what I figured. When Felicity fought against getting her heart removed and shouted that she’d rather experience heartbreak if it meant she could also experience happiness, I expected her to wake up at the Clinic and find out her hallucinations were the procedure, whose purpose was to get her to realize precisely that.
When it went on and ended without resolution, I assumed there had to be a followup. You’re saying there wasn’t? The next episode pretended the previous one didn’t happen?
Yup, pretty much. I think she’s got more of a handle on her feelings, but other than that you can chalk it up to being a dream or something along those lines. A lot of shows do that. Like take the episode of Two Guys and A Girl where Sharon was turned into a man after a brain-switching scientist accidentally squashed her body, so they put her brain in his body. Next episode, everyone was fine. Or the “sit-com” episode of Roswell etc.
If you want to see more really strange episodes of Felicity, check out the last 6 or 8 episodes of the series. It does not end in a conventional manner at all!
Of course, I can’t help but be reminded of an early Simpsons Halloween episode in which Mr. Burns is killed and has to have his head attached to the side of Homer’s body. The episode ends with a fake “next time” promo with Homer announcing his plans to go to some sort of sporting event, while Mr. Burns has more important duties. Sayeth Homer: “Oh, I hate having two heads!” (This is all meant to be tongue-in-cheek, of course: Halloween episodes are not officially part of the Simpsons canon).
Why was the show renamed Two Guys and a Girl, anyway? Did the pizza place hold out for more money?
Is that the bit with the witch and the time travel? I had seen some Felicity and pegged it for what it usually was, and then I came across on of those episodes. Hoo boy.
Creator J.J. Abrams says the idea for Alias, which stared Scott Foley’s then wife and Felicity guest star Jennifer Garner from a half-joking story plot for a Felicity. Abrams considered an episode where Felicity spends her summer as a government agent, then returns to school the next fall like nothing ever happened.
Scant evidence, but it would seem maintaining continuity was not necessarily a priority.
Yes, supposedly J.J. Abrams was having trouble coming up with material in the show’s sophomore or junior season, and thought to himself, “Wouldn’t it be cool if Felicity was a seemingly normal college student AND a secret government spy?” That was how the idea for Alias came about.
The time travel episodes at the end of the series were definitely a bit silly, but they came about by accident. The show was only supposed to have a certain number of episodes for senior year, but at the last minute the network greenlighted 4 more episodes. So the writers were basically stuck and came up with this time travel idea where Felicity got to relive her senior year differently. It allowed the Noel/Felicity fans a chance to see Felicity get back together with him, even though she ultimately ended up with Ben.