I'm glad she died. Perhaps it will illustrate what happens in REAL LIFE when teenagers don't live their lives in a Christian manner. It's only unfortunate that she didn't die a virgin and avoid a few years in Purgatory.

Yes? Jethro Tull? Cheech and Chong? How old are you, Ms. Havrilesky? These kids would have been seven years old when Jerry Garcia died, and even their parents were probably a bit past the Jethro Tull Generation.

Best line: Ryan clenches his jaw, but miraculously doesn't bellow "Noooo!" or nuzzle Marissa's bloody face.

Call me poorly dressed and sugar-deficient, but I never got distracted by Pop-Tarts and laundry while Marissa was on screen. Now, Ryan, he always helped me remember it was time to change the cat box.

btw, thanks to Comcast losing power (literally) here in central Indiana, we had NO TV from 7 - ??? last night, and the local Fox affiliate doesn't come in well w/rabbit ears, so no Will & Grace, no OC, ER, the carnage goes on.

What a piss-poor knock off of Beverly Hills, 90210 this show is. When will I be able to buy those DVDs, anyway?

I sure would have liked a recap of CSI instead of this trash. Sara and Grissom, anyone?

35 years old, to be exact. But I was still just a kid when Yes and Jethro Tull were in their prime. Believe me, no matter what generation they're in, teenagers find a way to rediscover Zeppelin and the Dead and Janis Joplin and all of the usual suspects. Get with the times, man!

Ah, it's always so comforting to hear good Christians rejoicing at a sinner's death. Cause that's Christ was all about. Not "forgive the sinner" but "rejoice at their death." Must be part o that new gospel o Judas I ain't read yet. --sk

My brother is a diehard stoner (at 17 years old), and the Dead is his doobage band of choice. Spot on, Heather.

My only regret for missing all but this final episode of this season is trying to figure out how they worked in a little sister for Marissa!!

Also, thanks to this article, I just realized that "Transatlanticism" would sould great while stoned! Too bad I gave that up years ago...

does Barton really have offers? While offering up a superior alternative to Pop-Tarts, she might not be able distract me from a handful of Junior Mints for 2 hours.

So since it took about 5 years to get throught senior year, should we expect them to graduate from college in say the same year Antarctica becomes a floating hockey rink? Prediction: without Barton, the show has two more years tops.

HH you will never again devote so many words to something so beautiful and yet ultimately useless.

In the first season she had the pony with alopecia. They sent her off to boarding school to grow boobs and get hot before they brought her back.

My problem with the ending is that it was completely unrealistic. Here's a more accurate finale:

As dangerously thin as Marissa is, when the car flipped over the cliff, she would have blown out the window like a sheet of paper and wafted about on the currents of the wind. Her paper-thin body would have sailed in the window of the local newspaper, then been blown into the wheels of the giant printing press. In the ultimate irony, the final scene of the episode would have shown a close up of a box selling newspapers the day after the accident. "Orange County Girl Goes Missing!" the headlines would scream, as we realize in horror that the headline is actually printed on Marissa.

I'm thirty-three, and back in my high school days, if I was smoking dope I'd eschew my goth collection in favor of some Floyd. It's timeless!

Most stoners have trouble keeping a joint lit. If they talk too much, it goes out in their hands.

The best clue to whether a person is smoking a joint or a cigarette is whether they have to relight.

Cigarettes are specially made to keep burning even when you put them down.

So I could believe that a dropped cigarette could cause a fire. They do all the time. That's why fire officials are pleading with tobacco companies to stop making cigarettes that keep burning when you put them down.

But it's hard to believe that a dropped joint could stay lit long enough to cause what happened on this show.

This story is so stupid, it raises an interesting question about the ethics of the producers.

A few years ago, the Bush administration got caught paying off TV producers to insert anti-marijuana story lines into popular TV shows. For example, 90210.

That practice was (presumably) halted after it was uncovered by the media, because it amounts to payola and propaganda. The government is not allowed to pay for broadcast entertainment content in secret. All sponsors of content on TV have to be identified explicitly in some way during the show.

This season of the O.C. was so stupid that it made me wonder whether the Bush administration was up to their old dirty and illegal tricks again.

The Bushadmin paid for the anti-pot story lines on 90210. One would think that getting caught and being punished would have kept them from doing it again.

But then given this administration's history of writing their own rules...

Maybe they thought, hey, they'll never expect us to do this again after we got caught the first time, so they won't even be looking.

I really wonder. The O.C. would have been irrestistible to them. And the real O.C. has more than a few rich Republicans eager to launder money for Bush.

Someone might want to look into this. What a juicy scandal it would make if the Bush administration paid for content on The O.C.!

It was the ONDCP that paid for these programs, and that practice overlapped between Clinton and Bush.

Since it was Dan Forbes working for Salon who originally broke the story of how the Clinton ONDCP was paying for the right to censor TV content dealing with pot.

Sorry for my stupid mistake.

I guess I'm so tired of being mad at Clinton, my subconscious decided to blame the whole thing on Bush in complete violation of causality.

But still, one wonders what happened behind the scenes when a show goes so badly awry at the same time the White House is more determined than ever to propagandize about marijuana.