FUTURE! Desperate Housewives, Channel 4, 10.00pm
When series four of Desperate Housewives finished, all that time ago (i.e. last week), we were treated to a glimpse of Wisteria Lane five years in the future. The new series picks up from that point (although there will be some flashbacks, too). In the future some things haven’t changed too much: there hasn’t been much sign of an apocalypse, it doesn’t look like the credit crunch hit our friends in the Lane too hard, there aren’t any funky new gadgets kicking about, we still don’t have hoverbikes and robot butlers.
There have, though, been other changes afoot. Susan has a new fella (played by Gale Harold), and we discover in this episode what happened to her relationship with Mike. Edie left Fairview at the end of the last series, but is back tonight (the trailers give this away, so it’s hardly a spoiler), with a creepy new husband, presumably this year’s ‘mystery’ who looks familiar – he’s done lots of bits and pieces but if you’re as geeky as me, you’ll remember him from Star Trek: First Contact, where he played the doomed Lt Hawk (that was the one with the Borg Queen, and Alfre Woodard, who played short-lived housewife Betty Applewhite).
Talking of short-lived housewives, miraculously for this show, Kathryn is still around, and her catering business with Bree has really taken off. However, on the back of this, Bree (still married to Orson) has become a minor celebrity. Can you see their friendship lasting, or could their rivalries possibly resurface? Lynette and Tom’s children have all got new bodies and heads and the twins in particular are causing lots of trouble.
And then there’s Gaby. She now has two fabulous daughters, is still married to Carlos apparently (who is still blind: no Neighbours style miracle cures here, then), and has ‘let herself go’ – i.e. she has scruffier clothes and a less stylish haircut. Apparently she is also ‘fat’, but Eva Langoria Parker has clearly refused to method act and so she looks as tiny as ever.
As for Mary Alice? She’s still dead and still narrating. Some things change, some stay the same.
