• Amanda contacts a former paramour in order to hack her way into confidential police records: "Damn it, Cheney, do as I say! Your Mistress commands! Or we'll never play 'Black Ops Ilsa' again!" She's looking for the mysterious item that Sydney posthumously hid last week, but she finds ... Michael Mancini!
• Ohhhh, Jonah is bare-chested! And hairy! Noooo. Anyway, in the course of a couple of days, he's gotten a job as an IT guy (!) for WPK (!!). Improbable? Of course! We'll soon see that it was a thinly disguised way to expose Ella's cowardly betrayal of Jonah with the dumb BoomKatszzzz video a while back.
• Anyway, Jonah comes to work and is shocked that none of the extras will speak to him! Well, duh, Jonah -- those extras would have to get paid more if they had ANY dialogue. And apparently, Human Resources is part of Ella's job portfolio. (This is known in TV Speak as a Necessary Shortcut. Why create a new role for a new actor when an existing one can provide all the necessary exposition?) Amanda quickly appraises him. "Make sure he signs a confidentiality agreement," she orders Ella. "And from now on, all male employees' pants must be leather!"
• There's a scene with Riley and Increasingly Vapid Violet. Do you need to know more? Really? Let's move on....
• Somehow, in all the streets of LA, Michael's car cuts off David's car. Accusations about Sydney fly, since Michael knows that David stole the necklace out of Michael's car. (The way Michael talks, though, makes me think that he's protecting someone else.) He implies that if David doesn't back off, Lauren's medical career could experience some hiccups. David finds it hard to believe that Michael would ruin the career of an innocent woman over this. Michael's reply: "Oh, I've done a LOT worse." Ha! That's for sure!
• FINALLY, we get the long-awaited reunion of Amanda and Michael. After a hug (and probably a frisk for weaponry), Michael asks her why she came back to LA, since she seemed settled in the tropics. She says, "I got bored... sun, sand, Peter." Yay! Name-checking the Bizarre Dr. Peter Burns! I love it. Michael is incredulous, though, when he learns that Amanda had been keeping in touch with Sydney. "Let me guess, the two of you met each other at a support group for Women Who Fake Their Own Deaths." That, by a large margin, is my favorite line of the season.
  
• Michael says he doesn't know about this item that Amanda is looking for. He suggests talking to Jane, but Amanda says, "I already tried that, Ex-Slave! Jane is clueless -- as usual!" Ahhh, it's a wonderful nostalgia fest, this scene.
• Over at Coal (The Only Restaurant in Town), Violet is visited by her brother, Levi. Clearly, their parents liked to reuse letters. He tracked her down through... Twitter! Yes, Violet, she of the Secret Past, has been tweeting! My God, I could do a whole post speculating about Violet's Twitter posts....
• Okay, I'll do that before the next episode.
  
• But the Ick Factor ratchets up sharply when we realize that Levi and Violet had an extremely close relationship as brother and adopted sister. YeeeEEEEEeeee!
• Ella implores her new co-worker and weak plot device, Jonah, to search through company e-mails for references to her. Jonah swears on his goofiest tie that he can't do that, so Ella relates a sob story about her woeful childhood: "My mom walked around in a pharmaceutical haze, and she was such a pothead that she once smoked my John Stamos poster." Jonah caves. Sap!
• Dizzy David tries to warn new squeeze Lauren about Diabolical Dad. She's doubtful. "He's a world-famous cardiac surgeon who cheats on his wife and crashes his car into fire hydrants... oh, sorry, for a second, I thought I was working for Tiger Woods."
• Going to the police, David takes another, somewhat-interesting approach: telling Detective Smarmy that he, um, illegally appropriated the bloody evidence from Michael's car. Brilliant, Watson!
• As predicted, Michael corners Lauren with a fabricated failure: "So, you checked him for thrombosis... yet you failed to find the live squirrel stuck to his armpit!"
• Plot Device Jonah scans the e-mails and tells Ella, "Don't worry. Mistress Amanda isn't hunting you like a dog. But she is upset that her favorite fetish store on Hollywood Boulevard has become a Starbucks." After Ella leaves, though, he finds -- ta dah! -- the Plot Development. "Subject: Throw Jonah under the bus. Body: Boss Coop, you da man. Brilliant idea to give Kavi Schulptis the directing credit instead of Hat Boy Jonah. Smoochies, Ella. P.S. I want the pink laptop when you're fired."
• Amanda arrives at Melrose Place and chats with David (having heard from Michael that David and Syd were an item). David says sarcastically of Queen Amanda and her former minions, "Was there something in the chlorine that made you all so twisted?" She replies, "I don't think it's dissipated. Now silence, Yu-Gi-Oh! Soon you and your moussed hair will be gelatinous putty in my chemically enhanced fingernails!"
• Jonah promptly confronts Ella ... and quits! Geez, he had that job for, what, four hours? So long, Plot Device!
• Levi follows Violet back to her pad. More icky incest dialogue follows. Riley interrupts the White Trash Reunion. Later, Levi seeks revenge on Riley by... um, knocking over some CD jewel cases?! Anyway, Violet shows up with a baseball bat. (Melrose Place gets an appropriate prop for Alyssa Milano, 10 years too late!) Levi says, "I hate baseball!" and breaks Jonah's camera. In slo-mo, no less. Everyone reacts as though they just saw the Nielsen ratings. And isn't Riley's family supposed to be freakin' rich? Why is this a problem?
• Whatever. Jonah comes home seconds later, and he's not happy. But he does have a great reaction when Riley refers to Levi as Violet's "brother/boyfriend": "Okay... why does that not surprise me in the least?"
• Lauren bamboozles Michael with the "I'm EVER so concerned about David, Dr. Mancini, sir." She mentions the necklace and says, "David has been saying crazy things, like how you murdered Sydney or how shocked he was that Hootie & the Blowfish were NOT on HBO's Rock 'n' Roll Hall of Fame concert. When I hear disturbing stuff like that...."
• Michael foolishly takes the bait, breaks into David's pad, finds the bloody necklace... and is nabbed by Detective Smarmy. Ooooh, Michael (and writers), I'm disappointed. Such a transparent set-up job. Michael is savvier than that!
• The next day, David leads the residents in a toast to justice... but they're interrupted by Amanda, who says her "good friend Jane" (cough LIES cough) is giving her the penthouse apartment "until my new home in Bel Air in built." She says that until then, she's looking forward to getting to know all of them a lot better. MUAHAHAHAHAHA!

The series has gotten a fun, creative jolt from Amanda's return. But is too late for the series? Tune in next time: Same Sleaze-Time, Same Sleaze-Channnel!

Reposted with permission from http://ken-of-ghastria.livejournal.com/122901.html