Felicity - Senior Year Collection (The Complete Fourth Season  (2005)

Rating: NR

Distributor: Buena Vista Home Entertainment

Release Date: March 8, 2005
Review posted: March 16, 2005

Reviewed by Dennis Landmann

SYNOPSIS

The final season explores what happens during Felicity's (Keri Russell) senior year at college. On the forefront, she struggles to decide if she loves/wants either Ben (Scott Speedman) or Noel (Scott Foley) in her life. Plus, she enters a beauty pageant in order to pay for classes, experiences more predicaments in her relationship, and later neglects her studies after learning of some emotional news. But as the season draws to a close, Felicity finds herself a college graduate just like her friends.

CRITIQUE

Before I get into the fourth season, here's a brief recap of my thoughts about Felicity. I didn't get into the show until the second season on DVD; it came out in the summer so I had plenty of time to watch the whole season. To my surprise I liked what I had seen, and so was looking forward to Season 3, but was a bit disappointed in the direction the show went, specifically with the stories. Now, Season 1 is regarded as the best one, and I haven't seen it, so perhaps I'll check it out some day.

With Season 3 somewhat clouding my enthusiasm for the final season, I wasn't looking for anything special or stories that would revitalize the show in some way. To put it briefly, Season 4 continues the soapy stories about love, friendship and life for the main characters. One of my frustrations with the Felicity character after Season 3 is her growing inability to choose and make up her mind about Ben and Noel. During the season she breaks and makes up with Ben at least two times. Damn it, girl, get real! However, Keri Russell turns in a lovely performance and her cute looks lessen the negative impact of the character's faults.

During the season Ben goes through some (good) turbulence as he reconciles with his father and starts a romance with a girl named Lauren, who is later pregnant with his child. Speedman does a good job with the material, but doesn't break out of the mold. As for Noel, he struggles to adjust to life as an adult since he graduated last year, but sets himself straight after starting a graphic design company with roommate Sean (Greg Grunberg). Foley and Grunberg share some chemistry and both turn in good performances. Some of the other stories in the season involve Javier taking acting lessons enrolling in a drama class, and Elena and Tracy almost marrying while Sean and Meghan actually go through with it.

My overall reaction to Season 4 is that the writers (some of which now work or have worked on Alias) didn't give the characters great things to do, and their stories were overly dramatic, which poses the question, just how much personal drama can these characters handle or experience before they go completely nuts and fail college? Thankfully, the writers chose not to go in that direction, but instead came up with a "time travel" story for the season's last five episodes.

Like the cast members, I believe The Graduate is the real series finale. It's when the characters graduate and stories are wrapped up, to an extent, anyway. What happened was the WB decided to give the season an additional five episodes after deciding not to cancel it after seventeen episodes. Well, the writers had to come up with something, and I guess they thought it would be interesting to find out what would have happened if Felicity chose Noel over Ben.

The result is a mixed bag. Portions of this twist are interesting, but considering it as a whole makes the events absurd. The question viewers will find themselves asking is, has Felicity really traveled back in time or is she experiencing an intense dream? To give you an idea, the whole thing started when Meghan, a practicing Wiccan, cast some sort of spell on Felicity. Knowing that, the only reasonable explanation must come from a third option: the writers ran out of ideas. In conclusion, I just didn't care for much this season as the stories felt repetitive and overly dramatic. For me, Felicity lost its appeal, and it's a bit sad to come to terms with that fact that after enjoying the second season.

THE VIDEO

Buena Vista presents Felicity in 1.33:1 fullscreen format. Colors look rich and sharp. Color detail looks pretty nice. I didn’t notice any compression problems or pixelation. Again, all 23 episodes are nicely spread out over 6 dual-layer discs, allowing each episode to maintain a well-balanced quality. The print image looks fine—there is no continuous softness or dirt to speak of. Dark tones and black levels are inconsistent, while grain appears during dark scenes. The overall video transfer looks pretty good.

THE AUDIO

Buena Vista presents Felicity in English 5.1 Dolby Surround. Dialog scenes are very clear and easy to understand. The soundtrack is also rich, each musical number or song comes together nicely through the front speakers. Surround usage is not really evident in most of the episodes. Overall, Felicity’s audio presentation is clear and sounds perfectly fine considering the material.

THE EXTRAS

There are three audio commentaries available on this set.

The first one on The Declaration by creators J.J. Abrams and Matt Reeves reveals discussions about the cast and the characters they play, and also some of the events that happened during the final season as well as the decisions they made.

The second track on Your Money or Your Wife by Ian Gomez and Greg Grunberg reveals more fun and personal stories than anything else, and the two have a good time chatting about the episode and the show as a whole.

The third commentary on The Graduate by Keri Russell and Scott Foley (who also directed the episode) spends a good amount of time remembering the series and the characters. Both engage in some nice discussions and overall the track is worth a listen.

The rest of the extras are located on the last disc.

Lost Elena is a 5-minute featurette that explains just how in the world Elena pulled off her appearance at Noel's wedding. You see, she was dead, but three deleted scenes and interviews included here help explain the confusion. Fans should find this interesting.

Fade Out is a 10-minute featurette that looks at the filming of the very last episode through behind-the-scenes footage and interviews with cast and crew. Specifically, the focus here is on the very last scene of the episode where emotions run high.

The Museum of Television and Radio: Creating Characters - Q&A with Keri Russell, J.J. Abrams, Matt Reeves and Jennifer Garner spends 15 minutes discussing briefly the entire show, the idea for the last five episodes of Season 4, and some more. This featurette also shows clips of memorable scenes from the show.

FINAL THOUGHTS

If you're new to Felicity, don't start here, go back to the first (or second) season instead. Season 4 is the worst in my opinion as the stories just got more soapy and redundant. The extras are fine but nothing too special, and I guess the Season 3 documentary was the closest thing to a reunion with the cast, so there was no point in including a similar extra for the final season set. Fans probably want to complete their Felicity DVD collection, but casual viewers who own previous seasons will be better off just renting this set.

VERDICT: RENT IT

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