It's All A Lie
Updated 2006-11-07 16:00:00
Five months after we left Ryan holding a dying Marissa in his arms, everyone is grieving her death in an emotionally dysfunctional way that would make her proud. Julie alternates between taking pills and attempting home improvement chores, the latter with "hilarious" results. Dr. Neil is puffier than ever, despite working out in his home gym and getting a new girlfriend on the side -- the Stepmonster. Kaitlin has Luke's twin brothers doing her bidding and smokes weed in public like a moron. Taylor Townsend is supposed to be in France at school, but is actually back in Newport for some reason and trying to keep that a secret while also patronizing every single restaurant in the town. Seth is working at the comic book store and hanging out with all the Newport adults he used to despise or who used to despise him. Summer has become your typical rich white liberal-arts-college kid, complete with the desire to recycle, a friend who wears a Che shirt, and a general insufferable-know-it-all only-I-can-save-the-world-from-itself attitude. She does manage to help save Ryan, though, who has somehow gotten a job at a dive bar even though he's definitely not twenty-one. He lives in its atmospheric, dimly-lit back room that I think is the same set that used to be Volchok's apartment. Sometimes he goes out cage-fighting and gets the crap beaten out of him because of the angst. He doesn't visit the Cohens or Marissa's grave until Summer gets him to go to the comic book store, where Seth has made a comic all about him and what a great addition to the Cohen family he is. That convinces him to move back to the poolhouse. It also convinces him to take the file Julie's private investigator has compiled on Volchok's current whereabouts. Looks like that cage-fighting practice will be coming in handy soonâ¦