Donna is rushed to the hospital after falling in a coma from an overdose of painkillers where she comes clean with her father about her addiction to pain pills. When Donna admits to her boss, Robert, that she plagiarized someone else's sketches, she is immediately fired. Meanwhile, Kelly cares for a newborn baby left at the clinic by a teenage mother, named Leanne, which makes Kelly wonder if she can take in the baby to care for it herself. Steve falls for Jill, a woman that he has never met, when he starts reading her love letters which are actually addressed to someone else named Ted. Also, Brandon investigates David's sudden success with his new songs where Jasper suggests to him that David's gains for the record deal are ill-gotten. Elsewhere, Valerie struggles to get past her incident with Noah.

Kelly objects to the decision of a Special Services person when the abandoned baby is placed with a gay couple. Meanwhile, Brandon and Steve and Janet quarrel over running cigarette ads for their failing newspaper in which Brandon threatens to quit, while Steve continues to pretend that he's Ted in order to please his pen pal friend Jill. Noah asks to finance Donna's marketing of her own designs for another fashion company. Also, Valerie deals with her long-estranged mother, Abby, who arrives back in town for a visit and hits it off with Kelly's father, Bill, who has been paroled from prison. Elsewhere, David becomes intrigued by his new neighbor Woody Sloan, a former rock star.

Valerie and Kelly reluctantly join forces to attempt to break up Valerie's mother, Abby, and Kelly's father, Bill, after they announce their engagement at Valerie's birthday party. Brandon interviews for a job at a major daily newspaper and is hired on the spot, but he discovers there's a catch: Brandon must fill in as a scab for other agency reporters going on strike. Meanwhile, at the Beverly Beat, Janet begins to complain to Steve about being overworked and underpaid. Steve sets off in search of Jill's real penpal, Ted, to introduce them to try to mend the hostile situation he started. Noah goes too far in helping Donna with her work, bribing a local fashion company to set the stage for her designs and purchases.

Brandon lets his thoughts run wild after Peter Raitt, a Pulitzer prize-winning journalist, wants to collaborate with him for a potential sports story. Valerie creates problems between Noah and Donna when she claims that the diamond necklace that Noah gave Donna is fake. As Valerie does David's taxes, she also hooks him up with a filmmaker, Kyle Scott, who wants David to write commercial jingles for him. Kelly assists Chris Myers, a mentally-challenged man who works at the clinic, and tries to get through to his overprotective mother. Steve finds faults with Jill due to her obsessive-compulsive neatness and cultural interests that they don't share.