Beverly Hills, 90210
The Complete Third Season

Review By: Rocco Passafuime
RoccoPassafuime@TheCinemaSource.com

By the summer of 1992, it became undeniable that Beverly Hills, 90210 had ballooned into an enormous teen pop culture phenomenon, with dolls, trading cards, and even a hit soundtrack with several top 40 hits. However, it would be soon time for the teen characters to inevitably finish their high school years and graduate, so creator Darren Star and executive producer Aaron Spelling pulls out all the stops for Beverly Hills, 90210: The Third Season, now available on DVD.

As senior year is afoot, much is still happening with the tight-knit circle of friends at West Beverly Hills High. After flagrantly taking a stand against her parents Cindy and Jim’s (Carol Potter, James Eckhouse) disapproval of her relationship, headstrong Brenda Walsh (Shannen Doherty) and her equally such boyfriend Dylan McKay (Luke Perry) comes to an end.

They both flirt with temptation when Brenda goes away to Paris for the summer and engages in a fling, deceivingly posing as a French native, while Dylan begins getting closer with and eventually leaving Brenda for her best friend Kelly Taylor (Jennie Garth). Dylan himself, however, begins to mend bridges with his shifty and absentee father, but is reeling when his father is killed in a car bombing. Lovable party animal Steve Sanders (Ian Ziering) soon learns the hard way that his privileged life as the son of an actress does not make him invincible, when he resorts to attempting to break into the school’s computer system to change his grades for the better.

Meanwhile, the overachieving Andrea Zucherman (Gabrielle Carteris) faces perceived threats to her image as the school’s brightest student, when her confidence is continually shaken with her newspaper’s new faculty advisor Gil Meyers (Mark Kiely). Perenially geeky David Silver’s (Brian Austin Green) relationship with Donna Martin (Tori Spelling) continues to grow, despite occasional temptations bubbling up due to the latter’s desire to stay a virgin, as well as his emerging talent as a hip-hop musician.

Donna herself has little to fear, until she gets barred from graduating for getting too drunk during senior prom and her friends scramble to rally around her during finals. And finally, even Brenda’s twin brother Brandon (Jason Priestley) is not completely above the fray when his increased compulsion for gambling gets him into money trouble with a bookie.

Beverly Hills, 90210: The Third Season pretty much directly continues where the previous season left off. While dialogue has never been this series’ strong point and the mood is still often campy and comical more than anything else, the cast is still in top form and giving it their all. The writers deserve immense credit for making much of the third season’s