We looked into our Melrose Place Crystal Ball (patent pending) and saw the future of the show. Here it goes:

• Violent is the killer and she kills Auggie, because they're both off the show. We didn't even need our crystal ball for that one.
• Lauren is going to get caught being a giant hooker and Ella is going to have to save her. She's going to have to choose between helping out her roommate and boning Jonah, and she will choose to save Lauren, and then will hire both her and cash-strapped Jonah for a three way. But then she will dump Jonah for the hot doctor played by Nick Zano. They will have an on-again-off again relationship until they fake their deaths and run off together again, because she is the new Amanda and he will be the new Peter. Lauren is the new Jo, so she will be boring until her contract is up and she leaves the show.
• Riley and Jonah will break up, of course, and they will continue to make really bad dating decisions, but will still live in the same apartment building and will enable each other's bad choices. They are the new Billy and Allison. That means that Riley will hate Ella for taking Jonah and will get a job at the PR firm to make her life hell. PR is pretty much exactly like teaching first grade, so she will be great.
• David will not go to jail for being a horrible thief and even worse bloody knife hider, but he will live in a halfway house right next door to Michael Mancini. He will cut his hedges over the fence everyday until Michael realizes that he loves his kid. He will bring cookies to the halfway house and they will stay up late looking at old pictures and sharing stories about how great his mother is. Then David will suddenly turn violently ill and die. Michael poisoned him, because he does not enjoy the tingling sensation of love.
• The steam will float of the pool like fog off a primordial bog as the tiles of the patio start to shiver like orphans left out in the cold. As the building quakes, the balcony is the first thing to go, caving in on the courtyard, crushing Violent and Auggie, their limbs splayed about like spilled Twizzlers. An inhuman cry tears through the eardrums of all that remain, sending blood down their heads, and they grab their ears, stumbling about trying to keep from falling to their knees as they look up in horror at a sight that is giant, green, and massive: Dinosaur Amanda!

Really, Jo's return was pretty lame. When are they going to start realizing this is the old folk's home, and that they should give them a good housewarming!

Using the info from last night's episode and a glimpse into our Melrose Place Crystal Ball (patent pending) we were able to determine how all the story lines were going to pan out in the future.

• Jonah bones Kendra, the sharpened pencil face "development executive" who works at Paramount and grew up in the same town as him and loves his movie just the way it is. She wants to shield him from Hollywood and let him be a real artist, just like her ex-boyfriend Hippity Hipster who is the hippest director in all of hipland. Well, Kendra takes Jonah to a snazzy party where Hippity finds him and says, "Hey, Jonah, just trying to do you a solid, take a look at her yearbook photos." So he goes back to their old high school and he can't find her in the yearbook. He flips through it several times, and finally gives up. Then, in the middle of the night, it dawns on him. He goes back to the book and there she is, but her name is Ken! Your new girlfriend is a tranny, Jonah! That explains her boobs and that pencil face. After that, Jonah realizes that he's gay and leaves her to make sweet love to Hippity Hipster in the coolest loft in Williamsburg.
• Doggy Riley gets pissed that Jonah is having sex with a tranny, so she goes down to Guatemala to find Jo and the two become fast friends. That is, until she finds out that Doggy Auggie has had a relapse, but it's not the booze this time, it's heroin. He has pawned his motorbike and his surfboard to pay for the drugs and lost his job at Coal, so he gets a job at Kohls, which he loses too. Then he becomes a hustler. She leaves Jo in Latin America, but Jane, who is supposedly the landlord, but has been locked in a closet for three episodes, goes down there to take her place. Riley goes back and rescues Auggie and tells him that she will love him if he enters rehab. He does and gets clean. The he tells her what happened to Violent.
• When Riley leaves, Auggie is so sad that he starts drinking again. Violent starts to give him heroin so that he'll become addicted and have to go to her every time he scores a fix. When she finds out that heroin causes impotence, she can't get what she wants and tries to cut the drug with Viagra. Mixing the two together is a difficult chemical process, and while doing it in the basement of Melrose, there is an explosion and Violent blows her head off. Luckily, Dr. Mancini has been perfecting a way to turn bodies into automatons of evil. Auggie thinks he is saving her and gives Michael the body, but he just adds her to his cyborg army of death. To stop her, they exhume the body of Kimberly, send it into the future, where it is reanimated using the powers of good and then she leaps back to the past to kill evil robot Violent. After she does, she gives Riley a magic amulet and tells her never to press the button, which she does at once. What strange creature will it conjure up?
• Ella goes on trial for that orange outfit she wore last night. Really? A giant orange hat? And scarf? And a twisty tie belt thing? And cowboy boots? Who is doing the wardrobe for this show? The same people that do Gossip Girl?
• Lauren turns in David for being an art thief. He turns her in for being a hooker. They both get sent to jail. In a unique experiment, they are put in the country's first unisex prison where they have to join forces to defend themselves from an army of rabid Aryan gang members. Then they fall in love. Before going in, David had the plans for the prison tattooed on his body, so with that and his limited knowledge of lock picking, they manage to escape with some guy named Teabag. Once on the outside, they discover that Teabag is really Glenn Beck who was thrown into prison after being convicted of being a jerk. Finally, there is a law against that.
• The camera sweeps up the front entrance to Melrose Place and past the pool. It focuses on the flowers in the little poolside garden. One of them trembles, like a Tyrannosaurus is walking in the distance. Then more start to quake and quiver, like the beast is approaching. But then the earth starts to move, coming up from below. Suddenly a single manicured hand pops through the top soil and we see the back of a blond body rising out from the flower bed wearing a maroon mini dress. She shakes the soil from her hair and brushes it from her dress. She says, "Finally, someone used that god damned amulet!" and the camera twists around and she is finally revealed: Zombie Amanda!

We have looked into our Melrose Place Crystal Ball (patent pending) and, based on last night's activity, we have seen the future of all the character's lives.

• After her national campaign for Real People Jeans, Dog-named Riley becomes a world famous model. Well, not a real world famous model, because she's too short, but television's version of a world-famous model where she makes tons and tons of money and doesn't do very much. She leaves Jonah behind for a world-famous fashion photographer named Benson Benson. Then, one day, he is shooting her for a perfume ad in a giant mansion and the shoot is being catered by Doggie Auggie, who started a catering company just for this one single shoot. In a coke-feuled fit, Benson Benson lashes out and slaps Riley in the face because she refuses to pose topless. She runs down in the kitchen, crying, mascara streaming down her face, when Doggie Auggie finds her. He rushes up stairs, grunts a few simple grunts and socks Benson Benson. He shouts, "No one hits Benson Benson and gets away with it!" and Doggie Auggie goes downstairs and whisks up Riley and takes her home and does her doggy style. That is the end of her modeling career and she goes back to teaching first grade.
• Lauren's pimp, Kimber, starts get even more demanding and crazy. She sends Lauren out on a "date" with a very, very sexy lady, Evelyn, but Lauren is all, "I've never done it with a lady before" and Evelyn says, "I know, that's why I asked for you." And they kiss and the seven hundred straight men flipping by the CW when it happens drop their remotes and tune in to the entire episode, and Melrose gets its first straight fans ever. Very rich Evelyn promises that she will pay for med school if Lauren quits being a hooker and is her girlfriend. She agrees, but then Kimber comes after them with a switchblade. We would tell you what happens, but we don't want to ruin the season one cliffhanger.
• Violent continues to harass Michael because she thinks that he is the reason why her "mother" Sydney is dead. She uses the tape of the two of them together to get him to buy her all sorts of things and take her out and treat her nice. Somewhere between half-price taco night at Chili's and a ride on the Santa Monica ferris wheel, Michael realizes that he's only happy with a partner as crazy as he is and develops a sort of Stockholm syndrome where he falls in love with Violent. When she sees Doggie Auggie doing it with Riley, she realizes that she never loved him in a first place and that she's fallen in love with Michael. They are on their way to their shotgun wedding and as Violent goes to leave, crazy aunt Jane leaps out of the closet and jumps on her back. Everyone forgot the landlord was there, but she is so jealous that another red head has won Michael's heart that she strangles Violent with one of her couture gowns. She dies.
• Ella will do something other than throw shade and make bitchy quips. Her future is still uncertain.
• A beautiful blond stranger's high heels will go clickety-clack, clickety clack through the courtyard, but we will only see a backlit shadow as it approaches the camera. She is wearing a stunning, form-fitting turquoise minidress as she makes a lap around the pool, whimsically running her finger along the banister. We never see her face, as the camera closes up right behind her right shoulder. David rushes down the stairs to ask who this beautiful stranger is and she grabs him by both arms and pulls him in for a passionate kiss. He kisses her back, placing his arm around her waist. She moves down to his neck as his head falls back in ecstasy. Suddenly, he tenses up, we see him start to go pale, as she sucks the life force right out of him through his neck. He spasms suddenly a few times, and then she tosses his lifeless body to the side, wiping the gore from her face with her forearm but never mussing her lipstick. And she has returned: Vampire Amanda!

Scott Bowles has more at USA Today (including the troubling potential for yet another Indy franchise entry), and of course we'll have our own infallible figures Friday morning in Defamer Attractions. Meanwhile, a cadre of contrarian fanboys are even rallying now to defend current Memorial Day-weekend record-holder Spider-Man from the indignity of second place: "Save Spidey! Boycott Indy!" wheezes a recent headline at Comics 2 Film. "Spidey 3 tallied up $151.1 million this time last year. However, the web-slinger did it in a traditional three-day weekend, whereas Indy IV will have a five-day stretch. Fans who want Spidey to hang on to his cred may want avoid Indy this weekend and catch up with the adventure next week." Or, more realistically, pick up another pair of Spidey jammies and/or Underoos to help prevent total brand subsumption over the holiday frame.

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