The Facts of Life/The Beginning of the End (1)

The Beginning of the End (1)
Season 9, Episode 23
Airdate	April 30, 1988
Written by	Austin and Irma Kalish
Directed by	John Bowab
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The Facts of Life — Season Nine

The Beginning of the End (1) is the twenty-third episode of the ninth season of The Facts of Life, and the two hundredth episode overall.

Starring: Cloris Leachman (Beverly Ann Stickle), Lisa Whelchel (Blair Warner), Kim Fields (Tootie Ramsey), Mindy Cohn (Natalie Green), Mackenzie Astin (Andy Stickle), Sherrie Krenn (Pippa McKenna)

and Nancy McKeon (Jo Polniaczek)

Additional Cast: Sam Behrens (Wes Mitchell), Nicolas Coster (David Warner), Kathleen Freeman (Noreen Grisbee), Mayim Bialik (Jennifer Cole), Seth Green (Adam Brinkerhoff), Juliette Lewis (Terry Rankin), Meredith Scott Lynn (Ashley Payne), Marissa Mendenhall (Sam Bellanger), Jason Naylor (Beldon Glover), Danny Dayton (Mr. Avery), Richard Mehana (Mr. Plimpton), Patrick T. O'Brien (Mr. Copeland), Shirley Prestia (Miss O'Donnell), Sal Viscuso (Frank Payne), John Welsh (Mr. Morehead)

Plot Overview

When Blair learns that Eastland School has gone bankrupt due to declining enrollment, she decides, in lieu of going to law school, to use her trust fund to buy the school and save it from closing after an initial attempt to have her father buy the school falls flat. Upon arriving at Eastland after the purchase, she first meets chauvinistic science teacher Wes Mitchell and gets off to a less-than-perfect start with him, then enters the office of school headmaster Mr. Morehead for a meeting, only to discover that he is packing up and leaving after deciding to call it quits after 25 years of employment at Eastland, dating back to his first job there as a substitute teacher. Morehead tells Blair that after all that time, he is now going fishing and it is now her turn to deal with the students and their problems, and he turns down her request to have him stay on until a new headmaster arrives.

Blair later meets with Eastland's board of trustees, where one of her first acts as the school's new owner, to the surprise of the stuffy board members, is to make the previously all-girl school co-ed by admitting male students for the first time. After unsuccessfully interviewing candidates (including a dog training school owner who takes his job too seriously) for a new headmaster of Eastland, Blair appoints herself the new headmistress and also takes over temporarily as dorm supervisor after learning that the previous supervisor quit to join the Marines. The students, mistakenly thinking Blair to be a pushover, try to take advantage of her (particularly Ashley, the spoiled daughter of school trustee and Blair's banker Frank Payne) by tricking her into catering to their wants, but she has none of it from them as she begins her job of dealing with the new generation of the Eastland student body - including Terry, a streetwise rebel dealing with personal issues as she struggles with her studies.

Arc Advancement

Characters

• This and the following episode focused less on the established characters (other than Blair), instead focusing on the new students at Eastland School (including Pippa) and their antics
• One of the new characters at Eastland, Terry Rankin (played by future film star Juliette Lewis), was designated as the "new Jo" of the new kids at the school, carrying many of the same personality traits as Jo had during her early years on the show; she became a pivotal part of the episode's second part and was to have been one of the main characters in the planned Facts of Life spinoff
• Final appearance of Mackenzie Astin as Andy Moffett

Trivia

The Show

• This is the first of two parts of what would become the show's series finale. NBC had green-lit a tenth season of The Facts of Life, but those plans were later cancelled when main cast members Nancy McKeon and Mindy Cohn chose to leave the show at the end of Season Nine

• This episode was also intended as a backdoor pilot for a planned, but unsold, spinoff series centered around the new generation of students at Eastland School under Blair's supervision

• This episode was one of the first acting roles for a young Mayim Bialik (two years before she landed the title role on the NBC sitcom Blossom), as well as an early role for Seth Green