The fourth season of Felicity is very entertaining in a melodramatic way. The show is about Felicity Porter (Keri Russell), who is currently in her senior year of college, and how she gave up a chance to study pre-med at Stanford University to go to school at the University of New York. There is more to the story than Felicity giving up her past hopes and dreams, there's a boy and his name is Ben Covington. Ben is more or less the real reason Felicity changed her entire life plans. On a whim she changed her life to follow and pursue a relationship with Ben. The first three seasons spent a lot of time letting Felicity develop as a person and formulating her relationship with Ben and the other characters in this series. In this fourth and final season, the adventures of Felicity come to an end. While an exciting season, with plenty of melodrama (sometimes too much!), season four also gets a little weird and takes an odd approach for such a serious drama. While weird, it is not necessarily bad. Before we discuss the weirdness, we'll discuss a little about the stories in season four that make this a very strong season.

For those who are familiar with the earlier seasons of Felicity, the show moves along with one dramatic event after the other. This approach is met by romanticizing the main casts' lives to the point it becomes enticing to see how they interact and deal with various situations. In season four there are many stories revolving around Felicity and her friends that continue to produce high levels of drama. In some cases there is a bit too much, but for the most part the stories are interwoven well and they are easy to follow.

The stories introduced in the beginning of season four cover Felicity going against her parents wishes to study art instead of pre-med, Ben deciding to take on a very big academic challenge, pre-med, Noel learning to live without Felicity, Elena facing a big breakup, and Sean and Meghan exploring life as newlyweds. Alone these scattered stories do not warrant enough drama to be enticing, but together and the way they affect the cast is what really makes it exciting. Later into the season, the stories get quite gripping. The most entertaining ones are about Felicity and Ben. One of the big stories is the romance between Felicity and Ben begins to crumble. Some others that get really interesting are the continuation of Ben's struggle to succeed as a pre-med major and his developing relationship with his dying father. What really makes these stories interesting is how emotional the characters get. They are all overly dramatic and easy to connect with.

With the last third of the season, the season heads in a weird direction. However the weirdness isn't from the actual stories, but rather the way they are introduced. The fourth season introduces time travel, which in itself is an odd subject to include in a melodrama. For the most part the issue feels very strange and extremely unrealistic, but the result is still fairly entertaining. Essentially, what happens is Felicity gets a chance to go back in time and relive her senior year of college. With the knowledge of her "past mistakes", she has a chance to experience what life could have been like if she had only done this instead of that. The entire concept adds an interesting, yet weird dimension to this final season. The only problem is it feels very rushed in comparison to the early portion of the season.

Overall, the season is entertaining, but at times slightly overbearing. A lot of 'stuff' happens in season four. It is really apparent when Felicity goes back in time and relives senior year again. During this portion of the season, a lot of content gets glossed over and some stories are not fully explored. They are proposed and then not really covered later. Even in the first two thirds of the season it feels like a lot of content is crammed into an episode. For instance, midway in the season two freshman girls move into Felicity and Elena's campus apartment. The two girls make an appearance for a couple of episodes, but leave for Thanksgiving break and are never heard from again. Despite sometimes there feels to be too much content that's not fully explored or completely explained the season is still quite gripping. The element of nonstop drama is one of the strengths of Felicity.

The DVD

Video:
This fourth and final season of Felicity is given in 1.33:1 ratio full frame color. The picture quality is generally good and offers a fairly clean picture. There is a grain and minor compression artifacts, but it is not very distinct.

Audio:
The audio track in this DVD release is given in the format of English 2.0 Dolby digital stereo sound. It is primarily dialogue driven and offers a relatively flat and clean experience. The music, on the other hand, has a little more body to it. This release also comes equipped with English subtitles and supports close-captioning.

Extras:
For extras, this release includes commentaries for "The Declaration" with J. J. Abrams and Matt Reeves, "Your Money Or Your Wife" with Ian Gomez and Greg Grunberg, and "The Graduate" with Scott Foley and Keri Russell, and several featurettes. "Fade Out" is a ten minute behind the scenes featurette with the cast and crew reflecting their thoughts about the making of the final episode. The next short featurette is "Lost Elena", which contains two deleted scenes from the series finale. In the final episode "Back To The Future", something happens with the Elena character that doesn't quite make sense. In "Lost Elena" J. J. Abrams and Matt Reeves introduce the reason for removing the two scenes and the explanation why many fans were greatly confused over the ordeal. The final extra is "The Museum of Television & Radio", which is a portion of a panel with J.J. Abrams, Matthew Reeves, Jennifer Garner, and Keri Russell. During which, they discussed the development of the characters in both Felicity and Alias. This extra also appears in Alias: The Complete Third Season.

Final Thoughts:
Like the earlier seasons of Felicity, the fourth season continues to offer plenty of nonstop drama. While the season takes an odd approach (time travel), the result adds an interesting dimension to the season. It gives Felicity a second chance to relive life as she thought might be better and really gives you the viewer some closure and a happy ending to the series. Overall, I think the fourth season is worthy of a recommended recommendation. However, if you're new to the series it's probably best to start with the first season.