* Photo credit to The Closet *
I’ve nothing to really say about this cover. Liz looks cute. Her hand looks like a raptor claw. That’s about it.
Jessica is upset because the most recent love of her life—Cameron Smith, mail room nobody at Flair magazine, where she’s interning—shuns her after catching her smooching douchebag fashion photographer Quentin Berg. Still, she pushes her dismay aside, sure that her pseudo-relationship with Quentin will lead her to become a world-famous model, and lets Quentin dictate who she smiles at and what she must be seen doing and tell other celebs that he can’t go to fancy parties because he has to “babysit [his] underage date.” Ouch! Still, Jess is sure this “torture” will pay off, and she’s delighting in making super model/brat Simone miserable by taking over the “bad-tempered string bean’s” photo shoots when Simone is being a little bitch.
Then Cameron quits the mail room and Jess is beside herself, and I don’t mean that she’s standing next to Liz or a mirror. She finally gets sick of Quentin’s BS and dumps him, and she’s actually surprised when Quentin removes her picture from the photo shoot he’d promised her and replaces her with Simone. If you want to climb the ladder, Jess, you’ve got to climb all the way up! But then Jess later gets a special package with the next issue of Flair in it, and there’s a ten-page photo spread featuring her in it! She also gets an invite to a fancy dinner with Mr. McGee, the head of the company, and there she sees Cameron, and assumes he’s a waiter or servant until he confesses that he’s actually the unfortunately named Cameron McGee, the head honcho’s son and VP of Flair. He’d only been working in the mail room to get a feel for the business from the ground up. Oh, please. And I like how Jess is rewarded in the end with a hot guy who can also help her with her career. That way she doesn’t have to tax her tiny brain by choosing.
Meanwhile, Liz’s story line gives me much anxiety! She befriends Enid Rollins and Maria Slater again after treating them like peons and tells them that her boss, Leona Pierson, has stolen the ingenious idea she came up with for Flair and plans on passing it off as her own. Liz and the gang vow that that can’t happen, so Liz meets with the Gordon Lewis, the head of the magazine, in Leona’s office, pretending to be a newly hired editorial assistant with Enid as her secretary. Liz pitches her idea to Gordon, who loves it and wants her to sell it during an editorial board meeting, during which Leona happens to hobble in on crutches. (She broke her leg, dontcha know.) Leona announces that Liz is a little liar and has gone behind her back, and Liz is fired.
But Liz is insistent upon clearing her good, Wakefield name, and she does so by breaking and entering Leona’s condo to get the tape recorder on which she’d first heard Leona declare that she was stealing her idea. (Unfortch, by that point, Leona had already erased the tape.) But Leona almost catches them burglarizing her place, and I had to read ahead because I’m a wimp and couldn’t bear the intensity! Then Leona calls Liz up, sweet as sundaes, and invites her out to a power lunch to explain herself further (“It happens all the time in the corporate world”), and Liz goes hoping to record Leona’s confession. Howevs, a crazy driver in a pickup truck (is that redundant?) deliberately tries to run her Jeep off the road, and who should happen to save her but her ex, Whizzer Wilkins! Todd had memorized the license plate and goes to the police, who say that the license plate belongs to a notorious hired gun in L.A. Because all the best hit men always use the same car every time without the police ever saying a thing until a Wakefield nearly dies.
They bring the hit man in for questioning, and he crumbles like a cupcake, saying that Leona Pierson hired him to kill Liz and make it look like a car accident. Oh, for cryin’ out loud. Meanwhile, Liz is in Leona’s office, and Leona has a gun pointed at her and tells Liz to leave with her calmly to go out for lunch “someplace nice and secluded”—that’s corporate villain speak for “I’m going to kill you (around noonish) in a place where no one can find you.” I don’t understand why Liz is taking orders from this broad—they’re in a busy office building and Leona is on crutches! Why is Liz not kicking a crutch out from under Leona and skipping away, singing, “Catch me if you can, you gimpy bitch”?
Anyway, the fuzz bursts in and drags Leona away. Not only did they have the hit man’s story, but Liz had secretly hit an intercom button in Leona’s office that gave her witnesses who heard Leona’s Dr. Evil mwa-ha-ha speech. Then Gordon Lewis tells Liz she’s the best intern they ever had. Of course she is. VOMIT
Somewhere else in LA, Todd Wilkins abandons his life in Sweet Valley in order to prepare himself for life as a model. He scores himself an apartment so disgusting that it made me ill to even read about it. Mice literally hang out on the table when he’s eating breakfast. Then, even though he’s barely unpacked, poor, stupid Todd has his parents and his new girlfriend, mega-bitch Simone, over for dinner, which he hopelessly fucks up not once but twice, and ends up serving them macaroni and cheese and buttered toast. Oh, Todd. Simone is obnoxious to the point of calling Todd’s mom ugly to her face, and Todd breaks up with her because he craves Liz so damn much. Simone threatens that he’ll never work in this town again, and his modeling gigs dry up like a dead beetle in a sunny windowsill. Just as Todd finishes doing battle with another mouse and contemplates a career as a pool boy (ooh!), his dad rolls up with a moving van and takes his son away from that hot L.A. mess he lives in.
But what of Liz and Todd? Well, Todd risks his neck to rescue Liz from a homicidal road rager, but still Liz wonders, “Does Todd love me?” Miraculously—stupidly—he does, and proves it by ripping a page out of Say Anything’s script: He holds up a portable CD player over his head and stands outside Liz’s window, blasting a romantic Jamie Peters jam. Guffaw. Then Liz invites him to climb up her window a la Sam and Clarissa and they live happily ever after until the very next book.
Other Notes:
- I had to laugh: “Todd went to the wardrobe room to change into his first outfit for the day: bright orange moleskin pants topped with a royal blue velvet jacket and a paisley ascot tied at his throat. What kind of guy would dress like this? he asked himself incredulously.”
- Why are the twins’ lives always unnecessarily in (double) jeopardy at the end of nearly every mini-series? I’m starting to think this series is formulaic.
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