"The O.C.": Happy Doesn't Always Make Sense

Oftentimes, when a show knows it’s going off the air, it tries so hard to give everyone a happy ending that the stories don’t make sense.

Unfortunately, that’s what seems to be happening to my beloved “The O.C.,” as you well know if you saw last night’s episode…

Warning: The remainder of this post gives details about last night’s episode.

You know that I think Taylor and Ryan are a great couple, but didn’t they make up just a little too quickly? Taylor gets a therapist, who tells her not to speak to Ryan—which of course Taylor can’t do—until Taylor can get herself together. That made sense. But when Ryan shows up at the end of the episode, Taylor just chucks all of her pretty speeches out the window and goes with Ryan. And Ryan, even though Taylor has been ignoring him for weeks, just sweeps everything under the rug.

On second thought, maybe that was completely realistic…

I like that the show is trying to give Julie a happy ending and Bullet proposing to her totally makes sense, since his character is naturally impetuous. But Frank proposing to her (as cool of an idea as that is) doesn’t make us much sense since they’ve only been dating for a few weeks—although the passage of time on this show gets murkier by the week. And Ryan would help his abusive dad get together with Julie—Marissa’s mother—why?

As annoying as Che was starting to get, that story ended way too quickly. Wouldn’t it have been a lot funnier if Summer found out that Che thought her boyfriend was his soulmate? And is it just me or do Summer and Seth never have any scenes together anymore? I can’t help but think that the Adam Brody-Rachel Bilson split is starting to affect storylines.

And as for the Kirsten pregnancy, I’m not really sure what to say about that. If the show wasn’t cancelled, I might say that it was a clever twist in the Cohen family dynamic. But now it kind of rings hollow. I would rather think of Kirsten and Sandy spending the rest of their lives together—just the two of them—with Sandy righting injustices and Kirsten planning the parties to celebrate when he does.

So, yes, I’m a little disappointed at the show’s closing stretch, but I’m still holding out hope that the ending will be worth all of the stuff we had to go through to get there.

Remember that the series finale of “The O.C.” airs February 22nd on FOX—just four episodes away…