The Rewatch: Felicity
I binge-watch old shows so you don’t have to.
I’ll start on a positive note-Keri Russell plays Felicity to perfection. She nails the whole “naive, wide-eyed engenue” thing in a way that few other actresses could pull off. The rest of the cast nails the brooding, overly dramatic late-teenage angst with ease. Here’s the thing though. Felicity herself suuuuuuucks.
Even Jean Ralphio thinks Felicity is the woooorst
In the opening episode, some guy she’s been crushing on quietly (and pathetically if you ask me) for four years signs her yearbook with something along the lines of, “sorry we didn’t get to know each other better.” Does she catch up to him? Invite him for coffee? Call him up on the phone in a day or two? We had phone books back then, people were not hard to find. Of course not, because then we’d have a summer fling movie and not an angsty teen drama that lasted a regrettable four seasons. Felicity spends her summer completely rearranging her college plans in a way that is both unlikely to be possible and completely psychotic.
If I put aside the fact that I’m supposed to believe that NYU (or whatever made up NYC college she went to) took an applicant in June AND gave her a dorm room on 0 notice, I’m still left with the fact that she followed a boy she barely knew across the country. That is stalker-level crazy pants.
Once Felicity gets to her dorm, we meet her resident advisor, Noel. What blows my mind here is the “resident advisor” role he inhabits. People are coming to this man (nee boy) for advice and treating him like a professional psychologist. A real RA pretty much just tells you where the dining hall is and where you can buy booze if you’re under 21. That is the extent of their professional expertise at that level.
Does Felicity keep her insane, stalker-level behavior and bad decision-making to herself? No, of course she doesn’t. She tells practically everyone INCLUDING THE GUY SHE FOLLOWED TO NEW YORK that she followed that guy to New York. If Noel had had any sort of “training” to be an RA (they keep mentioning it like it’s a graduate level psychology program) he would have sent Felicity to the nearest counselor. Predictably, instead of doing that, he promptly falls in love with her. Another piece of evidence that 19 year old boys have no sense.
The guy she followed to New York, Ben? He does not seem at all alarmed that this girl he barely knows literally uprooted her entire life to follow him across the country. Does he tell her she’s crazy? Does he hire personal security to protect himself from his person who is clearly unhinged? No, THAT would be crazy. Instead, he befriends her and they start hanging out. At this point, I’m pretty sure Ben is either equally unhinged or has some nefarious motives for keeping Felicity around.
One weekend, Felicity’s parents come to visit. They are understandably confused about her behavior…AS THEY SHOULD BE. In a meeting with her academic advisor and her parents, it is established that Felicity used to have a special dinner date with her mom every Tuesday, a tradition they ostensibly both cherished. So Felicity proceeds to tell everyone in that meeting that when she got to New York and had dinner by herself, the food tasted so much better; “like freedom,” she says. She basically just takes a cherished tradition that she and her mother shared and throws it back in her face…and then wonders why her mom leaves the room in tears.
In another episode or two, her friend Julie gets date raped by a guy she’s seeing and tells Felicity about the situation in confidence. Julie is unsure if she wants to escalate the situation or tell the school’s administration. Well, what does Felicity do? If you guessed “tells the 19 year old de-facto psychologist all about it including the real names of all the people involved,” congratulations, you win. Literally everyone in their dorm knows about it within two days. Julie is upset with Felicity AS SHE SHOULD BE, but forgives her quickly for reasons that are still entirely unclear to me.
Felicity proceeds to do some more really cringey stuff in the next few episodes but the episode where she decides to lose her virginity to Noel is probably the worst. What does a nerdy girl who somehow knows absolutely nothing about sexual intercourse do? Right, she goes to the bookstore and asks the 50 year old clerk if they have “any books on sex.” Does she own a tv? Does she have any friends? How can she be this naive? I can only recall two moments in the history of entertainment when I felt secondhand embarrassment for a character this strongly-when Rachel from Friends put on her old cheerleading outfit to impress Josh-wah and when Michael Scott returned to meet the group of “Scott’s Tot’s” who he’d promised to send to college on the insane notion that he’d be filthy rich by then.
As I’m sure you can imagine, the resulting attempted sexual encounter was equally as cringey and resulted in their starting a fire because Noel had taken possession of a dried out Christmas tree from one of his residents and was keeping it in his dorm room next to an open flame.
I haven’t decided if I’m going to keep watching this show or not. For the purposes of this article, I was Googling “how long did Felicity run for” and when I typed in, “how long did Felicity…” it filled it in with “stay in jail for,” so I’ll probably stick around to see how much more intolerable Felicity herself can become.
