Again With This: Beverly Hills, 90210

After Steve gets caught turning in one of Brandon's old papers, Cory Randall -- of "getting cucked by Brandon and Lucinda" fame -- comes back to take them both to a disciplinary hearing over it. Steve readily accepts the punishment the Chancellor offers, but Brandon insists on fighting his charge, so strap in for Two Angry Men. JOIN THE AWT CLUB

Now that Models Inc. has been un-blackballed at D&D, Jo can work with her all the time! And Sarah really seems to want to befriend Jo, too -- so much so that she makes up a reason to pop by Jo's latest photo shoot just to introduce her boyfriend Hank, newly arrived from Sioux City to protect Sarah from the Gomorrah that is the L.A. fashion world. Jo picks up on a couple more hints that Sarah isn't having a lot of fun with Hank in town before Sarah herself comes pounding on her door, very upset after a fight with him. Jo opens her home for Sarah to stay with her, but her guess that Hank is already on his way back to Iowa proves a little too optimistic. While Kimberly continues running hot and cold in her relationship with Michael, Sydney quickly moves on from trying to reassert her marital claim on him to setting up her escort business at her Melrose Place studio apartment, just in time for Lauren's lawyer finally to spring her from jail! Lauren is ready to settle up, per their arrangement, but she remembe

Mark and Kelly take a Doing It getaway that ends in food poisoning; Nat hosts Gangsgiving with a (free, but still) raw-looking turkey that, uh, probably also ends in food poisoning; Steve takes yet another academic shortcut, and gets busted yet again; and Dr. Candyman treats David's bi-faux-lar disorder in the most unprofessional and continuity-hostile way possible. JOIN THE AWT CLUB

After a minimal amount of lurking about just far enough away to make Michael doubt what he's actually seeing, Kimberly enters the beach house and gets close enough to let Michael touch her and know that, yes, she's really there, and really alive; her mother just lied to him to try to get him out of Kimberly's life, but now Kimberly's all better and ready to pick back up like the past five months never happened! When Michael sheepishly confesses that, during that time, he married Sydney (though not specifically why), she orders him to get out of it, and since Kimberly's return means Sydney's blackmail material is worthless, it's pretty easy! Michael gloats about how great it is to put one over on their enemies, and maybe Kimberly would join him if she wasn't still having so many terrible headaches.... Jo's happy to be working with an adorable young model named Sarah, until Amanda shows up at the shoot and fires her on the spot. D&D NEVER works with ANYone from Sarah's agency! Only after the head of the age

While an Alpha Omega charity casino night is reawakening Brandon's dormant gambling addiction, Donna helps out Rose Queen Lisa by handling her shift at a South Central L.A. store, where she crosses paths with a boy trying to acquire a gift for his brother's birthday. After helping him escape capture for shoplifting it, Donna meets him again later after Joe runs out of gas; Donna learns that the boy looks after his younger siblings while his single mother works and attends nursing school at night, and figures she should just stick around for this woman to come home and lecture her about her choices. St. Donna's halo slips a little bit with this one! JOIN THE AWT CLUB

With Sydney settling into her work managing Lauren's call girl business, Michael can't help getting curious about her little black book, and very quickly finds useful information in it: it seems Dr. Levin, his antagonist at the hospital, is a client! Since Michael isn't going to be able to advance on the traditional path of doing reliably good work, he opts for blackmail instead. Everything in his life sure is falling into place! No further drama on the horizon for him, probably! It's starting to be a problem for Alison, and the therapeutic process, that Dr. Miller is exactly her type. Even Billy knows it's worrisome not only that Alison kept her therapy a secret from him, but that (as Amanda reports) Dr. Miller is casual enough to have "sessions" over seafood lunch at the marina. He confronts Dr. Miller about hitting on Alison, which Dr. Miller denies he is doing; then Alison confronts him about not hitting on her? Eep. Both Amanda and Jo notice weird clunking noises at Amanda's place, though when they inves

CU's Black Students Union has invited Roland Turner -- a controversial speaker who is NOT Louis Farrakhan but is definitely supposed to remind you of him -- to come speak at the school. The Jewish students' group enlists Andrea to lobby President Brandon to cancel the booking. Janice from the BSU makes a First Amendment argument in favor of an invitation she didn't even support. Which side will our golden boy come down on?! JOIN THE AWT CLUB

Jane is pretty much screwed, financially -- so much so that she tries going to Amanda for a loan. Amanda doesn't even pretend to consider it, instead offering to introduce Jane to someone who might be willing to park his money in her company. Then she goes to Michael: if he puts his half of the inheritance into Jane's company, they'll both save on legal fees, he'll probably make money when she's a big success (snort), and while a court case would drive them apart, being in business will inevitably pull them closer together. Jane is horrified to be ambushed by the sight of Michael at lunch with her investor, but has to admit that Amanda's scheme makes sense. Sydney, however, is jealous as hell that Michael's once again entangled with Jane and her talent, so Lauren's arrest for pandering comes along at just the right time: Sydney visits her in jail to arrange to take over her business while Lauren's locked up, and prove to Michael that she has talents of her own. Alison first admits to Billy that she never want

It's the second of seven entries we had to cut from our book (buy it now!), in which Sarah compliments ShanDo's acting but is baffled by the show's version of therapy. JOIN THE AWT CLUB

When Jane and Sydney's grandmother dies and Sydney claims not to care because she always loved Jane more, Jane feels appalled. Then Jane finds out their grandmother is leaving her a six-figure bequest and Sydney nothing, and feels guilty. Then Jane hears that, actually, Gram never changed her will after the divorce, so the cash has been willed to Dr. and Mrs. Michael and Jane Mancini, and feels horrified...because she already quit her job with Kay and rented commercial space to start her own design business. Whoops! Billy is hurt when he finds out that Alison is planning to go back to Wisconsin for her father's 50th birthday party without him, and even more hurt when he hears that no one's going to wonder where her fiancé is at this major life event because no one back home actually knows she's engaged. He then buys his own plane ticket behind her back, invites himself along, and ignores her twice-stated wishes that he not upstage her father on his special day by announcing their engagement and does precisely

In the first of seven entries cut from our book (buy it now!), Tara shares her thoughts on figure skater Tricia and a short con Cindy runs on Brenda's jerk boss Deidre. JOIN THE AWT CLUB

After Michael's ominous parting line to him at the end of the last episode, Matt is pretty sure Michael is taking Sydney up north to murder her, and as we know, he's not actually wrong. He's just going to have a hard time (a) tracking them down to the resort in the High Sierras that they happen to be staying in, and (b) convincing law enforcement that these newlyweds are out of sight for reasons other than that they're having tons of sex. Michael makes a couple of attempts on Sydney's life before Matt gets to the right cabin with the cavalry, but did he make it in time?! As Jo's pregnancy progresses, she is increasingly haunted by visions of Reed, in both her sleeping and waking hours. (Reed is also on Jake's mind, as he attends the police auction where the Pretty Lady is sold with designs on convincing the winning bidder to let him use the vessel for a charter business, just like Reed told Jake he was planning to do.) Jake convinces Jo that she won't have peace until she gets closure on Reed, or whatever spe

After informing Michael that she's going to use her knowledge of his part in Kimberly's death to force him into marrying her, no one is happy about it -- not Jane; not Sydney and Jane's mother, who flies in from Chicago after Jane tells her about the nuptials to try to talk Sydney out of it; and certainly not Michael himself, though he likes the idea of losing his medical license and possibly his freedom (due to incarceration) even less. So: it happens. But then the answer to Michael's problems comes to him in a dream. Jo is woozy and nauseated on the set of a photo shoot, but it's not, as her assistant suggests, the flu that's been going around: she's pregnant with the late Reed's baby. Under duress, she tells Jake what's going on and that she's not interested in remaining pregnant with her dead criminal boyfriend's baby, but the clinic tells her she has to think about it for 24 hours and she's a woman on Fox in the '90s, so...she does. Helping Jo through the crisis gets Jake out of an engagement celebration

After ending up in jail following her arrest on Reed's boat (or was it?), Jo's next challenge is convincing her public defender that she killed Reed in self-defense and had no involvement in his drug business. He (a) doesn't believe her, and (b) is apparently in some degree of cahoots with the DA to get a threatened first-degree murder charge pled down so that Jo's case will just get off his schedule and he can move on to inadequately defending his other clients. Jo uses her one phone call to reach Jake, who rallies the neighbours to her aid, but what she really needs is a decent lawyer; the only one who could find or afford such a person is Amanda, and she's in deep CYA mode given her own entanglement with Reed. Is Jo going to serve hard time?! After sleeping on it and then going to work for half a day, Alison has given Billy's marriage proposal enough thought to accept. Billy tells Amanda that in order for there not to be any secrets between him and his intended, he's going to tell her about hooking up with

Reed understands why Jo is frustrated, having been stuck in the hold of his stupid boat for the better part of a day without food, water, much air, or a toilet. But she's just going to have to stay down there until his drug business is concluded -- and honestly it's her own fault for having looked into said business in the first place. Once he's sprung her, he goes to work convincing her that she'll be happier on the run with him than back in her dull, safe L.A. life, and maybe saved a little of his supply for his own use because she manages to get out of his eyeline a couple of times. Will Reed convince Jo to sign on for (yo ho, yo ho) a pirate's life? Alison, having figured out she was wildly overreacted to the scene at Billy's, remained in New York to talk it out with him. Agreeing that long-distance relationships suck and getting him to bone her apparently convince him that she wants him to surprise her by arranging for all her stuff to be moved to his place in New York. This proves to be an egregious mis

The merry partners are all ready to get down to some seafaring except, whoops, Reed announces that he had to cancel the one charter they had booked without giving anyone any notice, and he doesn't seem to be that interested in rescheduling it, or lining up any more business. Jake and Amanda's attempt to get him on track just ends in Amanda demanding her money back. Meanwhile, Jo discovers the secret trap door, and though she initially accepts Reed's explanation that it's to save him lugging valuables on and off, it's on her mind when Jake warns her that, according to the state of California, Reed's boat officially does not exist. Will Jo survive her own curiosity? Billy and Alison's attempts to make a long-distance relationship work are hampered by Billy's horny new co-worker, who's apparently determined to set Billy up with someone immediately and won't take "I have a girlfriend" for an answer. Out of his mind recovering in the hospital, a delirious Michael starts babbling some incriminating remarks about bl

Remember how Amanda thought Reed was a creep and Jake thought he was a con artist? Apparently they don't, because Jake has no problem fixing the engine of a boat Reed totally does not own, for free, as a favour to Jo, and considering coming in with him 60/40 in a partnership, as his full-time mechanic. To get Jake hooked on the seafaring life, Reed invites him and Amanda out on a harbor cruise, which apparently sparks all of Amanda's happy memories of boating in her youth; no sooner has Jo volunteered to stake Reed the collateral he needs to buy the boat than Amanda is slagging her off and throwing her money at Reed. Between her misgivings about getting into business with Amanda and her suspicions about what might be in a suitcase full of valuables Reed has asked her to store, Jo has a lot on her mind! Michael is living at the beach house again, but all his focus -- such as it is; he's taking a lot of painkillers, so his vision's probably pretty blurry -- is on convincing Jane to take him back. Sydney joins J

Things are going so well at Jane's -- and at the hospital, where Michael has returned to work -- that when Sydney shows up to ask him to support her at her upcoming court date, he laughs her off. Michael apparently still hasn't learned that he underestimates Sydney at his peril, because she goes straight to Jane, tells her pretty much the whole story about her work for Lauren, and tearfully confesses that Michael hired her to arrange for one of her ex-colleagues to seduce Robert. The sisters are reunited, and Michael is out on the street! ...Well, back in the beach house, with his pills. On his way out of Jo's to move into the boat, Reed learns that Amanda is rich, and immediately hits her up as a possible investor for the charter business he wants to start if he can just buy the boat he's been hired to work on! Amanda seems like she may actually be receptive to his pitch until he gets into her personal space, but she still lets him take her out for a little ride, which is when Jo shows up and sees them setti

As teased in the previous episode, Michael has given Sydney cash to arrange for one of Lauren's ladies to go to San Diego and videotape herself seducing her. Sydney's not so sure that Robert -- who's really in love with Jane! -- will be such an easy mark, but then she also sends a young Famke Janssen to play the role of horny married business traveler looking for no-strings-attached fun, so...Sydney. Come on. Jane's viewing of the tape has the expected result: she throws Robert out just hours ahead of the deadline she and Robert had both agreed she'd be turfing Michael. He just may have overplayed his hand with one of the other women he's scorned. When Alison goes over Amanda's head to get the MICROCOMP account back, we meet Amanda's boss, Bruce Teller (Stanley Kamel, the future Tony Marchette on Beverly Hills, 90210). He kindly recommends that Amanda take a couple of personal days to process everything that's going on with her dad, during which time Alison less kindly snakes one of the accounts Amanda's been

Though Palmer has been offscreen since his arrest -- working on his defense, presumably! -- Amanda has continued to attack the person she thinks is to blame for it, and is now trying to evict Jake on the grounds of "spite," which they both know is flagrantly illegal. Thinking she can exploit Jo's anger over the end of her relationship with Jake (despite the fact that, you know, he started dating Amanda herself seconds later), she tries to get Jo to write a letter attesting to the damage Jake did to Jo's apartment in support of his eviction; Jo refuses, though that doesn't stop Amanda from just telling Jake she did to try to squeeze him. Eventually, the feds freeze the funds Palmer paid Jake, permitting Amanda to proceed on the basis of his having bounced a rent cheque to her, but she doesn't get far before Palmer asks her for a meeting to make a very difficult admission. (Oh, and in the midst of all this, she agrees to Billy's request that she not tell Alison they slept together, but then turns around and scr