Felicity and Time Travel

Well, it finally happened. Beth and I finished watching the entire series of Felicity. Now before you silently judge us, in Beth's defense and my shameful, shameful, guilt, it was actually my second time through. What can I say? I was a freshman in college and had a lot of things to figure out, and I also liked to have a reason to skip class. Any reason.

"It's lunchtime and Yo Momma's on again? ...Who needs Theology anyways."

If you don't know what Felicity is about, it's basically a girl who goes to college for four years, works at Dean and Deluca, and repeatedly breaks up and gets back together with the same two people over and over again. If you're wondering how a group of guys I knew in college were watching this show, one possible reason is that I knew a lot of closeted gay people back then, the other reason is that J.J. Abrams helped create it. That's not to say the show is filled with smoke monsters and polar bears, but there is a lot of drama and at some point somebody gets hit by a bus.

I should also mention that Matt Reeves, the maker of one of the best movies ever made, also worked on the show.

The problem with Felicity, I realized, is that the show apparently kept going way longer than I actually thought it did. Whereas whatever I watched took up about two weeks of classes, Felicity on Netflix can take up to a month. Each episode is an hour long, with twenty four episodes to each season, and each season spanning a year in Felicity's life. Essentially, I felt like I was at college all over again, and it was still a long, excruciatingly dramatic experience, with a few exciting moments thrown in where somebody gets hit by a bus.

I was surprised to discover that at some point towards the end of the series the show still had four episodes left after every single loose thread was already tied up. At this point I assume J.J. Abrams took back the helm and did what he only knows best, which of course was add time travel. So spoiler alert people: Felicity travels through time. Just like Urkel did at some point in Family Matters, with the the obvious exception being that Urkel did all sorts of crazy crap and Felicity was based in the real world where people went to school and worked all day at Dean and Deluca to pay off student loans.

Now anyone who knows me can say that I'm a huge fan of anything related to time travel, and am certainly willing to fit it into any show, especially if it involves robots of some sort. But here I had a problem. As opposed to doing something important in the past, like make tons of money and actually go to classes instead of watching reruns of Yo Momma on MTV, Felicity instead chooses to do exactly what she did before and repeatedly break up and get back together with the same two people over and over again until she screws with the space-time continuum enough to start killing people on accident. This could have been cool, but instead is just confusing because, again, the show wasn't Family Matters and Felicity isn't able to drink a potion and become Cool Urkel Stefan.

"Yo Mamma's a cool Urkel -OOOOH! You just won cash moneee!"

Not that it ruined the show or anything. I still have fond memories of watching Felicity in a dorm that reeked of mildewed ramen noodles, and enjoyed seeing it a second time in my new room which pretty much smells the same sometimes. Now that it's over, it's time to move on and see what else Netflix has in store, which I really hope isn't Family Matters. I guess moving on is really what Felicity was all about.