Felicity: How Elena Is Still Alive In The Series Finale

Felicity fans were left wondering how Felicity’s best friend Elena Tyler (Tangi Miller), who had died in a car crash, was alive in the series finale. Felicity, which followed a group of friends attending the fictitious University of New York, aired on the WB from 1998-2002. California girl Felicity Porter, played by Keri Russell, abandons her plans to attend Stanford to pursue her high school crush Ben Covington (Scott Speedman) to New York City. Created by J.J. Abrams and Matt Reeves, Felicity explores that transitional time when young adults are trying to figure out who they are and what they want to do with the rest of their lives.

Although the series overall was largely praised, with Russell winning a Golden Globe for Best Actress – Drama Series in 1999, season 4 of Felicity was controversial. The first 17 episodes throw in some last-minute drama as the show prepares to wrap up the storylines of the main characters. Elena is accepted to Columbia medical school. Felicity and Ben’s relationship takes several hits, including Felicity cheating on Ben, resulting in a brief breakup. Ben sleeps with another woman who becomes pregnant. Sean Blumberg (Greg Grunberg) and Megan Rotundi (Amanda Foreman) navigate life as newlyweds and business partners, and Noel Crane (Scott Foley) struggles to find a job. The show takes a bizarre turn during its final five episodes. Felicity, who is studying pre-med in Palo Alto with Ben, discovers he is cheating on her. She returns to New York for Noel’s wedding, and Megan casts a spell that allows Felicity to travel back in time and reexamine her life choices.

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Felicity’s decisions affect everyone around her, including Noel, who dies in a fire. Desperate to undo the damage, Felicity visits the creator of the spell Megan used and asks him to send her back to the future. Felicity wakes up in the present to discover everything she’s been through is just the result of a high fever. At Noel’s wedding, Felicity, who still believes Elena is dead, reunites with her friend. The season 4 DVD featurette titled “Lost Elena” includes an interview with Matt Reeves and J.J. Abrams, who explain why they decided to cut two scenes, which provided clarity regarding Elena’s fate. One shows Felicity warning Elena not to attend Columbia because something terrible is going to happen, and she urges Elena to choose Duke instead. The second scene takes place during Noel’s wedding reception, where Felicity learns Elena took her friend’s advice, altering the course of her entire life.

These scenes appear integral to understanding the finale, but Reeves insists they had too much content and not enough time in the allotted 42 minutes to include everything. This meant that Felicity’s fever dream wasn’t a dream, after all. This answers the question of how Elena is alive, but it raises others like how Elena is the only one of Felicity’s friends to remember her erratic behavior during those last episodes, and why everyone else’s present-day life turns out the same. The whole fever dream explanation wasn’t satisfying, but this sci-fi-supernatural plotline is entirely out of character for the series.

In 2018 the cast and director-producer Lawrence Trilling reunited at the ATX Television Festival to reflect on Felicity. According to an article in Variety, Russell said the show’s creators had planned for Felicity to graduate by the series end, which happens in season 4, episode 17. The WB ordered five more episodes, but instead of exploring the characters’ lives post-graduation, they decided to allow Felicity to see what her life would have been like if she had broken up with Ben and dated Noel.

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