“I want the world to know” that I love this goddamn show. Directed by first-time Ugly Betty director Wendey Stanzler, she’s done a lot before and after Ugly Betty: Desperate Housewives, Monk, Sex and the City, The Vampire Diaries, Glee, Arrowverse, GLOW, and a metric ton more. With a welcome and hello for our director, it is goodbye and “be seeing ya” for our writer, James D Parriott. Parriott previously wrote what is, without a doubt, one of the most useless episodes of TV, “Swag.”

With Grandma Suarez grounded and eating cookie dough in the recliner, Betty is shouting into those stupid hands-free sets that make you want to hit people. Hit people because they are wearing them, not because you are the one wearing them. Speaking of hitting someone with the intent to kill, Bradford tells Daniel his plan to announce at the end of the Mode show at Fashion Week that the business will be handed down to him, the only surviving son. While Fabia and her little bitch (female dog, for reference) too, have a cat-fight with “Wrinklemina” that results in Fabia admitting she gets a Duck’s corkscrew liquid injected in her face.

Turns out Grandma Suarez wasn’t as depressed as she thought, and came to Mode to look for a job during Fashion Week. Or as the other surprise at Mode calls it, the “Booty-lympics.” How in all that’s holy could Daniel have strayed onto the path of himbo with such great and intelligent friends as Bailey Chase’s Becks Scott? He’s just such a nice guy. What could honestly go wrong with this “fine gentleman,” as my legal team advised me to call him, around? Oh, and while we’re at it, Christina dropped off incriminating evidence on Bradford to get in Mode’s Fashion Week runway show with her own designs – everyone loves blackmail!

I am literally sitting here with chills at how horribly devious and just trashy this mystery woman storyline is. It is wonderfully messed up, a bit like Wilhelmina’s face after the duck splooge. We’ll talk about both of them in a bit because this is an episode that’s packed with stars and famous faces. Octavia Spencer makes her return as the obsessive case worker, Gina Gershon returns as Fabia, Tim Gunn of Project Runway is the reporter for Fashion TV at the Mode tent, and an itty-bitty Katharine McPhee shows up on the heels of losing out to Taylor Hicks. Yeah, I think American Idol crapped the bed after season 1.

So, with Daniel giving Betty her worst nightmare on one of the busiest weeks of the year, Hilda joins Mode to do as Hilda always does after I give her a touch of praise. Getting under Betty’s feet as she tries to make sure everything is perfect, Hilda wants to be here to talk to the models, be popular, and generally act like it is a social event for her. That’s her personality, I get it. However, Betty hits the nail on the head, for once, Hilda needs to act like an adult and do work.

Exploding in that infamous scene in the hair and makeup tent, where the two are spraying a model like there isn’t a hole in the ozone layer, only for the dizzy bint to spark up and go up like Hiroshima. However, they aren’t the only Suarezes there. With Fabia telling Wilhelmina to get this duck-based treatment, the wonderful Vanessa Williams has all this makeup on to suggest the duck semen has caused some sort of reaction. Her eyes are crusted over, and there is puffiness; it just looks horrible, and she’s blind.

So with Fabia and Stevie Wonder having their little spat, Wilhelmina gets Marc to guide her about the place. Which means that Marc needs to employ Amanda to find the “IT” item of Fashion Week, something that Marc does every year, so he can steal it, sell it on to a discount Hot Topic, and he gets a massive payday so he can go on his super hot and sexy gay cruise. So Wilhelmina is ditched by her gay and gets a new Mark, and I do mean with a K.

I think I’m right in saying that Wilhelmina is always nice to Justin, played by the fantastic Mark Indelicato, and it is no different here. She does call him Jason or whatever, but she can’t see, and he adores her, so he doesn’t care. It is truly lovely seeing Justin and Wilhelmina just hang out. It is adorable how it is played up and just how different she is with him in particular. It is comforting seeing them as they are here and in “Fey’s Sleigh Ride.”

Ok, I’ve dragged it out long enough, I think now is a great time to talk about the woman in red. As revealed last time out, the woman in the bandages wasn’t Fey Sommers being de-aged in a weird sci-fi element that turns Ugly Betty into crappy Star Trek; that’s not how this works. It is, in fact, Alexis, as played by the fantastic and wonderful Rebecca Romijn. A stunning, jaw-dropping, unbelievable woman who basically walks around the majority of the episode a bit smug because she knows something Daniel and others don’t know.

With Daniel’s idiot friend in town looking to get this year’s “Booty-lympics” underway, Becks challenges Daniel to get the number of the most attractive woman at Fashion Week to the tune of $1. $1 can’t even get you a 2-minute call on a payphone now, mostly because they are destroyed, and kids think they’re toys of yesteryear. Nonetheless, with both men setting their sights on Alexis, Daniel takes the bet and sets off on his quest to bed the attractive woman.

I’ll skip the build-up to the two talking, but they eventually do, and it is only after Betty has a chat with Danny that Alexis softens her tone with him. She softens her tone and tries to open up by telling him a little secret that she’s got. She used to date his brother… her and Pam’s five sisters. Ok, fine, she tells him the big secret, and he becomes his mother, turning to drink and kissing Hilda in the backstage area of Fashion Week. If we weren’t already talking about a big reveal, then I’d spend more time on that.

As part of the deal, Christina agreed to last time out with Wilhelmina, she gets her designs in the Mode Fashion Week show, with Stevie Wonder surprising her with a late model switch at the last minute. Alexis is the final model for the showcase and is front and center when Bradford is trying to close out the show. That’s until he’s interrupted by his daughter, revealing that she didn’t die two years ago, and she no longer goes by Alex Meade.

Everyone involved: Alan Dale, Rebecca Romijn, Eric Madius, Wendey Stanzler, James D Parriott, America Ferrera, Ana Ortiz, Mark Indelicato, and, since I’m naming everyone, Vanessa Williams and Ashley Jensen. They are perfect. It wasn’t a surprise to us as viewers, given Romijn appeared last time out calling herself Alexis Meade, but I love how deliciously evil and high drama that reveal is, with Bradford arrested for Fey’s murder. It is that build and this bomb shell that turns the show all on its head here. The “Hi daddy, I’m back” is done so wonderfully.

Not to skim over it either, when Alexis is explaining to Daniel why she transitioned, she tries to explain why she essentially faked her death, why it took 2 years, and just why – there is a lot of important detail in that scene. Not just what is said, but what isn’t said either. You have Alexis trying to explain, “since I was 5, I felt like I’ve been dropped in the wrong skin,” and Daniel just can’t wrap his head around any of it, so he turns to drinking. It isn’t an outright denial of who Alexis is, but it is mixed with the idea of your dead brother being your sister who’s very alive.

It’s the fact that he found his sister attractive, it’s the grief he felt and watched his mother go through, it’s trying to process in real-time, in an already stressful day, that everything he thought had just been thrown out the window. I’m not saying that Alexis is the perfect representation of a trans woman; I wouldn’t know. However, the point that I need to keep making is that for a show made in 2006 and aired very early in 2007, it is a very important role and reveal to do. We can get into the complicated bits later on, but this reveal is great for its time.

Everything else, including Doctor Who, played up trans people as either a joke (throwaway or otherwise), played up as the freak or as someone horrible, or just as regularly, played up as the tragedy. Here, Alexis is powerful. She’s the one in control, and she’s commanding of the room. Yes, she’s played by a cis-woman, but name me an actor (I’ve always used that as the genderless term, before you start) who was publicly out at this time. I’ll wait! For reference, Lana Wachowski didn’t come out until 2008, and her sister Lilly didn’t come out until 2016, and they are the ones who made THE film™ about trans people.

The first trans actor I can think of was Alexis Arquette, but I can honestly say I don’t know a single thing she was in. Is the casting perfect, particularly now? Probably not with lots more openly trans actors, but with the studio behind Ugly Betty reportedly only okaying the story if it was a cis-woman in the role, I don’t think there is a better casting. If the show happened today without any other change, I still can’t think of another actor who could take this role and do it as well, in my opinion.

Rebecca is fantastic, but the only thing I have “against” her casting is that it, of sorts, sets an unrealistic beauty goal for both trans women, but also sets up a strange fetish for some people. I don’t just mean trans women, but particularly cis-men who might not understand why they could be slightly attracted to trans women at all. People who actively want to demonize trans people for not fitting into the already unrealistic beauty standards of women could, would, and probably do view Alexis Meade as what post-transition trans women should look like. Though none to little of that is the fault of Rebecca Romijn.

“I’m Coming Out” isn’t the best episode in the history of TV, and from a technical level, it isn’t even the best episode of Ugly Betty. One thing that it is, however, is fun. I’m not terribly excited about the Hilda drama. I think she’s got her points, and there is an emotional beat to hit there for the character and for Betty as well this time out, but it does sometimes feel too big at times. In fact, those times are more often than not. The big emotional beats of the episode are Alexis, Daniel, and Bradford. It’s not perfect emotionally, but that’s the thing about emotions.

Something Ugly Betty gets with this reveal in particular, and of trans representation for 2006/07, is that it is messy. As much as I love both shows, Ted Lasso’s emotional moments are a utopian idea of loveliness and warm feelings, while Ugly Betty is backstabbing, anger, and high drama. Somewhere in between there, there is realism. That’s my point, though Ugly Betty isn’t trying to make every single moment real; it is making its moments interesting, telenovela-style TV in a typical American comedy/drama setting. As a show, it has a light tone but sometimes touches on heavy, dark, or real subject matter.

Ultimately, if you cared about the mystery part of Ugly Betty alone, then you’ve hit your crescendo. “I’m Coming Out” was (metaphorically speaking) a season finale cliff hanger for a show that never got a second season for you. There, it is a great big beautiful dramatic note that’s deliciously evil in a wonderful way. Realistically, it is episode 14 in a 23-episode season, in a show that has a total of 85 episodes, and is about to explore a lot of this drama in some very awkward 2007-2010 ways. Ugly Betty is a bit clumsy and a bit naff, but it is truly unlike any other show from this time.

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Ugly Betty “I’m Coming Out”

9.5

Score

9.5/10

Pros

• "Hi daddy, I'm back..."
• Justin and Wilhelmina.

Cons

• Becks is an awful person.
• Hilda is sometimes too aggravating.