Fade in on Liz "I'm Too Sexy For This Town" Parker walking home by herself at an advanced hour of the evening. Decked out in a designer leather jacket, boot-cut jeans, and what I'm guessing are Prada shoes retailing for around $400, Liz glances suspiciously around at the dark and empty street as if to say, "If they can see me, they can dress like me. Why, oh why, must they all dress like me?" She alters her pace and thinks she hears footsteps behind her, but cleverly decides to drown them out with the defensive tactic of thinking really loudly. Apparently this endless, nebulous diatribe is yet another entry into the journal of Liz Parker. The voice-over communicates a new paranoia replacing the security she's felt in her little town that she's always taken for granted: "Maybe it's not the world that's changed. Maybe it's just you. And then, suddenly, you begin to wonder all over again." The folks over in the Roswell Writer's Break Room need to keep pace with the "one highly undramatic and easily-resolved plot development per episode" ratio they have painstakingly maintained thus far, and I'll bet it's got something to do with that journal. So Liz arrives home, safely off the mean streets, digs through a bottom drawer in her bureau teeming with unwearable scarves and accessories crumbled up in a ball because they're, like, SO Fashion Week '97. But I think there's something she's looking for in that drawer, and I think it just ain't there.
Cut to Liz showing up at Maria's door and informing her that "my journal is missing." Maria shakes her head quizzically and so do I, hoping that she will repeat the last word of her sentence, which she very clearly pronounces with a hard "K" sound: "missink." She tells a now-panicky Maria that she "wrote things about Max." Everything, Maria asks? Yes, Maria, everythink. Maria: "Like where he's from, what he is, I mean, what he isn't?" Liz: "I mean everythink." Is this an affectation? A speech impediment that remains latent until moments of high drama such as this? Whatever it is, she'd better consider dropping it and fast; with no journal to keep her quietly pensive, Liz is going to have quite a bit of out-loud talking to do in this episode. And if she's having some trouble gaining a grasp on the tricky "gerund" form of the English language, well, we can only imagine what other problems Liz will soon begin havink.
Fade in on Michael, sound asleep in his fake wood-paneled bedroom of The House That Drives. He awakens with a start ("I dreamt I was horribly poor! No, no, that's real. Oh.") and jumps out of bed, searching madly around. He grabs a notebook and then looks frantically around for a writing implement. He seizes upon a pencil, finding it, much like this entire sequence, to have no point. I watch transfixed as easily twenty minutes pass, Michael staring pensively at the unsharpened pencil. I know he's going to sharpen it with his hand. He knows he's going to sharpen it with his hand. Cloistered monks sequestered on snowy mountaintops for generations who still believe that our moods are determined by "bodily humors" and who are unacquainted with any advent in modern technology since the invention of, say, fire know he's going to sharpen it with his hand. So WHY do we pass an eon of time staring at Michael staring at the unsharpened pencil in his hand? Finally, Michael gives himself over to predictability and sharpens the damn pencil with his hand (that's so COOL! I didn't know he could do that) and begins sketching madly.
Cut to Michael loudly knocking on Max's window, where a soundly sleeping Max ("I had a dream that I was Dumbo and that people were STILL NOT OVER making fun of my ears. No, no, that's real, too.") rises and lets him in. Michael produces the pencil sketch of "what I saw that night in Valenti's office, when I touched the key," a drawing of a half-circle that he probably could have been confident enough to just draw in pen and not wasted the entire first half of the episode. Not that I'm complaining. Michael admits to Max that he doesn't know what the drawing means yet, and Max suggests that three in the morning might not be the time to discuss in depth his friend's new-found passion for the semicircular arts. Michael unfurls his sleeping bag and decides to spend the night, for once, in a house that doesn't come equipped with a turn signal.
Meanwhile, back in school, Maria and Liz are involved in a conversation going in some semi-circles of its own. Maria suggests that they have to "reconstruct the crime" to trace the path of the lost journal. Liz tells Maria she had been studying with Alex (is THAT what they're calling it nowadays? Oh yeah, I think Alex might be gay. Turns out that IS what they're calling it nowadays) at her house, and Maria ups the paranoia ante by suggesting he might have taken it from her room. Maria: "Has he been feeling ignored, curious, asking questions we can't answer, seeking explanations we don't give?" At which point Alex arrives on the scene just in time to contrive, "So what are we talking about?" The usual hemming and hawing ensues, and Alex suddenly becomes intolerable to me now that I notice him aping mannerisms from his real-life father ["That's Tom 'The Money Pit' Hanks, in case you missed it." -- Sars]. And apropos of nothing, I think it's appropriate, for the sake of fairness, to point out that Alex's ears are not without their own sizable merit. Nevertheless, the conversation helps him recoup "good guy" status, and Liz doesn't think he could have taken her journal. However, Alex and his money and his father's sixty Oscars are all immediately forgotten as soon as a smitten Liz spots Max across the way. Because you know what they say about the size of an alien's ears.
Cut to Max at school vending machine, dropping in his change, only to have the machine jam on him. But not to worry! Max will have that bag of Bugles no matter the sacrifice, and he touches the machine in his alien way, yielding dozens of bags of candy. Max? All the kids hated you at birthday parties growing up. Why? Does a youngster's plaintive cry of "MOM! Max Evans broke open the piñata with his mind again" sound in any way familiar to you? Anyway, Liz enters with the intent of having a Serious Chat, but Michael approaches seconds later, munching a carrot (?), and essentially tells Liz to go away. I know it seems like a really small point, but have I mentioned that Michael is snacking on a carrot? It's odd. Why? I just don't know.
Liz sits alone in a dark, empty classroom, feeling downcast and with nothing to write in. Guidance Counselor Renee Zellweger resurfaces in this episode to dispense her usual pearls of wisdom unto students who will consequently leave Roswell High with the misbegotten notion that the guidance counselor serves any more effective a purpose in your average public school than, say, a coat rack or a lunch tray. But Renee is different. She's more annoying. Seeing Liz, alone and sad, she actually uses the hilariously ironic phrase "I wouldn't be much of a guidance counselor if" she didn't try to help Liz open up. Liz tells Renee that she's fine and that Renee can feel free to butt out right now, but Renee hangs tough: "Maybe I'm not the first person you'd turn to in a moment like this." Why, Renee? Because you are (a) a guidance counselor or (b) a total stranger or (c) star of the inexcusably uneven A Price Above Rubies or maybe (d) all of the above? I choose (d). That movie really sucked.
Cut to Maria and Alex, exterior school, where Maria apologizes, again without explanation, for her and Liz's behavior. She hopes the shoddy way they've treated him wouldn't make him do anything "out of character," and offers by way of example that stealing Liz's journal would be something he might do. So she accuses him, without actually accusing him, of taking the diary, and the words "Emmy Clip" blink madly on the bottom of the screen as Alex fumes, "Okay, you know what? The time you and Liz feel the urge to share with me, y'know, feel the impulse to really open up, do me a favor -- let it pass." Which I suspect they would have done anyway, Peripheral Guy, so I suggest you take yourself out of the high-drama spotlight and stop flattering yourself.
Back inside the school, Renee (whose name is actually Topolsky, and I'm considering losing the nickname as I begin to question the physical resemblance) accosts Alex, who in her office vents, "Things change. People change and you move on." Who's changed, Alex? You? No, not him. Your girlfriend? He shyly waffles on that one, "No. No girlfriend." Renee responds that that doesn't surprise her in the least, and I bask momentarily in the vindication that I called it that Alex was gay in Episode One, Minute Five. But that's not where Renee is going with this, and I realize that my proof is still yet to come. But it will. Oh, it will. Anyway, Renee segues into a speech about teenage girls always gravitating toward the bad boys, invoking Liz and Kyle's relationship. What a coincidence! How many students actually go this school, four? Alex takes the bait and spills it about the missing plot -- I mean, "journal" -- and she gets rid of him as quickly as possible, as people have a tendency to do once Alex serves some meager purpose or another. Once out of the way, Renee makes a conspiratorial phone call to the ambiguous "Control" that proves one more time that she isn't really a guidance counselor. I experience a "HE'S SHARPENING A PENCIL WITH HIS HAND" moment of total and utter non-shock at this totally and utterly non-shocking moment. She tells so-called "Control" that there's something going on here, and that they should get her "some backup." During the commercial break, there's a trailer for the movie that critics are calling "a romantic comedy -- that -- is -- romantic," The Bachelor. The Renee Zellweger comparison is a sound one. The name stays.
Under intense pressure to maintain a "more varied soundtrack" status quo, we return from commercial to, inexplicably, the wah-chick-a-wah-wah beat of cheesy '70s porn (or so I am told by aficionados of the genre). We are in art class, where an unnamed teacher walks from easel to easel making tremendously astute comments like "remember to maintain your perspective" about each student's sketch of a fruit bowl. Michael walks in for the first time in weeks because he "just kind of really wants to draw," which he does. This music is really distracting. It's so dirty. What's really going on with that easel? What's with all these furtive stares and sideways glances? What does the art teacher REALLY mean when he tells "Sydney" to "keep your lines clean"? It makes no sense from a sexual perspective, but I just hate it. Oh, in a less porny vein, can you guess what Michael has come to sketch? I will not insult the reader's intelligence by revealing the answer outright, but I will award cash prizes equaling up to $25,000 to the first person who can figure it out from this hint: not quite a circle, but . . .
Meanwhile, Kyle is really mean to Liz, in a tiny scene which exists simply to illustrate how mean Kyle is now being to Liz. Renee looks on from a distance, as always remaining behind every door and at the top of every staircase. I'll bet she can only imagine what the folks over at "Control" are going to think of this one. I hate tiny paragraphs like this, but really, nothing else happens.
Cut to the back room archive of the UFO Center, where Bania The Alien Curator is speaking fast in a language I'm not sure I'm ever heard. I think he's telling Max what books to read up on to learn more about aliens on Earth, but it's pretty much all mumble mumble to me. Except when he mispronounces the word "consortium" as CON-SOR-TEE-UM, rather than employing the necessary "SH" sound in place of the letters "T" and "I." All of which should really force Max to seriously reconsider the integrity of the source from which he's learnink. Anyway, Liz pops in again and informs him that there is one thing (pronounced, natch, "think") they really need to talk about. And then, over the course of what feels like another agonizing forty-five minutes or so, Liz chokes out the tale of the missing journal. We already know it, word for "last week on Roswell" word. But she'll find it, she promises Max. No more worries about anythink. I'll take care of everythink.
The suspect list grows as Liz comes home and turns the place upside-down in search of the missing book. The Mom That Does Laundry enters and sees Liz in her state of preoccupation, informing her that "Alex just called. Though I'm quite sure you're in no great rush to speak with him." Liz wants to know how her mom came across that information (a little bit I'm still curious of this myself) and all but accuses her of snatching The Good Book, but then recants and apologizes to her already servile and overburdened mother. Liz resolves the matter in her mind and apologizes again for being so edgy. Her mother had nothing to do with it. Hey, back in the kitchen now, Mrs. Parker! And change those sheets and draw me a bath while you're at it! Well, at least we can agree that this moment in the show does accomplish the one feat of subverting one clichéd convention: for once, the butler did not do it.
Back at the Crashdown, the alien triad are deep in arts-and-culture hour. Michael's half-circle (did anyone get the quiz answer right -- anyone?) is quickly turning into a significantly more elaborate half-circle that Michael can't stop sketching. "It's getting clearer," he says dreamily, and stops just short of building a semi-circular structure out of mashed potatoes when a court summons nailing Michael for plagiarism arrives from Spielberg's production company. Max, meanwhile, reads from an alien conspiracy book which figures prominently later, the name of which I forget to write down, furnished by Bania. Just as Isabel warns the two that they are becoming more careless by the second, Kyle (whose character has shifted from "amiably clueless" to "diabolically evil" in the five minutes or so since the breakup) and his hood friends enter the Crashdown. Kyle marches up to Max and, blessed with the neglected gift of succinctly communicatink not bestowed on certain other characters I might name, threatens, "I'm onto you, Evans." Suspect #3, your table is ready.
Cut to a panicky Max at Liz's house, telling her that Kyle stole the journal. Liz hilariously advises against jumping to conclusions, telling Max that "Kyle hasn't been here in my house for over a week." But Max discovers that this is not quite the truth, as he gets a flash of Kyle in Liz's room, recently and alone. Kyle, as a sympathetic character, continues his ugly descent. He's not above threatening. He's not above anger. And now an already tattered and torn Kyle Valenti may not be above that commandment-breaking sin known around the word by its heinous name: stealink. Har har har. Stop me. No, I cannot be stopped.
After hours in art class, Michael has on a Walkman and is listening to one of those really angry bands that made thirteen-year-old boys set fire to the upper third of New York State at Woodstock this past July. Alone in class, he paints. And paints. And then he continues to paint some more. I doze off for a bit and then wake up and write the following "Boredom Song," which I sing to the ceiling, the sink, and my toes: "Loo la lee lee la looooooo." I look around, hoping no one was home to hear that. My kitchen could really use a cleaning. And I saw these new dish towels in the Pier One catalog that were, like, totally fab. Michael, incidentally, continues to paint.
Also during that multi-volumed downtime, I take the time to practice my recap segues, which I often find lacking. Here's one: Liz, meanwhile, is painting herself into something of a corner (still learning), accusing pretty much everyone she knows of stealing her precious journal. She interrupts Kyle during a round of pick-up basketball, and Kyle and Liz talk to each other through the metal gate that fences in the court. Oh, puh-leeze! Thanks for the visual symbolism of the two speaking through a so-called "wall" which further emphasizes their separation simultaneously from a physical and emotional perspective. Thought up one night by the director while surfing Metaphor.com? Liz further belabors their breakup, which makes her look like she's the big loser who wants to get back together. Kyle accuses Liz of having secrets. Liz accuses Kyle of knowing those secrets. Is that semi-circle drawing done yet? This conversation is almost completely back to the point at which it began. Which some, but only those paying attention, might even refer to as the beginnink.
At some point in the past five TV minutes, Michael has, I think, become a famous artist. Max and Isabel stand staring at his completed dome painting at some public display of art at school. The auteur himself shows up, but his anticipated praise (your dome is good) is replaced instead by an icy sense of condescending concern (your dome makes us hate you). Max thinks that putting this painting where everyone can see it is "dangerous" and that "we shouldn't be taking chances like this." At which point Michael unbelievably trots out the ol' "you can take chances and I can't?" routine. Oy, that old chestnut again? Diva artist Michael has become, he storms off to find a community of dome-painting enthusiasts who may well be better equipped to appreciate his demented but roundly grotesque genius.
New characters! And they all wear suits. And they're all named "Agent." Oh, and as it turns out, Renee is not now, nor has she ever been, a guidance counselor. Renee walks in a field with two of these said "agents" far away from the maddening din of Roswell's twelve residents, deep in discussion. She informs them that Liz Parker's diary is a compelling lead concerning alien life on Earth and dispatches them to go and find it. Where? Well, "she's been having problems with her boyfriend." Which means what? Dunno, maybe nothink. Only one way to find out for sure.
Meanwhile, junior "agents" Max and Liz have cooked up a similar plan. Again, it's dark enough that no one has to waste time decorating any actual sets, and the two slide into an ostensibly empty Valenti home in hopes of recapturing the lost journal. Walking through an unlocked door, Liz whispers repeatedly that they "should not be in here," to which Max responds, "We'll get in, we'll grab your journal, we'll get out. And this process will save my life." And I'll say it again: puh-leeeeze! Who even knows if aliens CAN die? Ransacking the room to no avail, Liz and Max are suddenly made aware of the presence of someone else in the house. As Max exits Kyle's room to investigate further, the bright red chick magnet that is Kyle's car pulls into the driveway. Let's take stock: Kyle outside, unknown intruder presence inside, Max and Liz surrounded on all sides, correct? Sorry, the correct answer is "incorrect." Max and Liz just press the "escape" button on the Roswell interactive computer game, and they're back outside in a quick cut, thus depriving me of telling people that something happened this week. Because nothing has, and nothing will. And by the time you find out who really has the journal, well, you won't really care much about that either.
Meanwhile, back at the Sorbonne, Michael is once more sketching the dome, and again the music is eye-narrowingly bizarre (who ordered the ethereal flutes?). The art teacher tells Michael that he is extremely talented, but that he has to try and branch out into other artistic endeavors than just that of a geodesic dome. A what? Art teacher explains that the dome is a house, architecturally postmodern, plotted foreshadowingly. Then he shows Michael a sculpture of the Venus di Milo (I would suggest that it was Max who made the statue's head disappear in the pilot, but that would be an extremely pretentious joke, and also one that implies anyone still cares at all about the pilot) and suggests that Michael try sketching that. Eager to remain loyal to his biospheric heritage, Michael eyes Venus and quickly sketches a crude stick figure. Art teacher suggests Michael go back to the dome. I laugh heartily. Oh, no, wait. I actually don't laugh at all.
Cut to outdoor scene of the Alien Three, where Max finally comes clean and tells the other two about the journal. Michael looks off as if in shock, and we cut to the Crashdown to see Liz alone, cleaning. Michael strolls in for a chat: "He says you wrote it all down, Liz." Liz waits approximately the length of two normally paced shows (this show, for any Guinness judges out there, has just entered its thirty-fourth hour) before querying, "What do you want?" Michael wants to tell her that writing all those things down was probably not such a fab idea. Oh, wow, I'll bet Michael took it. He invokes a flashback scene not in any episode (believe me, I've seen 'em all) of Michael spying on Liz writing in her journal sitting in the Crashdown. So he tells her, "I had to know the risk. So I had to know what your journal said." Voice not rising, emotions not peaking, face not flushed, Liz remains deep in her practiced emotional coma in concluding, "You took it," the way other people say "there's nothing on TV" or even "I am the most boring girl in the world." Nevertheless, she's right, and I guess even a little relieved (I gather this because the music changes, not her facial expression) when Michael says, "It's nice to know we have at least one friend in this town." And in an actual "cute line" I'm at a loss to completely make fun of, Michael tells Liz, "And thanks for giving me one more reason to envy Max Evans." Awwwwwww. Maybe that's what this show needs: one of those laugh tracks that goes "awwwwwww" instead of laughing, like when the Olsen twins would do something super-cute on old Full House episodes. ["The Olsen twins, 'cute'? That's it, Blau. You're fired." -- Sars] Max Evans calls John Stamos "dada" for the first time: Awwwwwwww.
The one-note plot effectively behind us with at least two minutes left to kill, what could possibly happen ? My vote is for wacky out-takes of the scene where all the guys in suits call each other "agent," but I am overruled by the gravity of aliens in love once more. Liz finds Max in the UFO Center and tells him that the journal was returned by "a good friend." Gee, I wonder who it was. Oh, no. No, of course I don't. Liz apologizes once more for writing it all down, but she wants Max to know that the real reason she documented the day of the shooting in such vivid detail is so that "if years from now if anyone ever touches me the way that you did, I'll know what it's supposed to feel like." WHOA! I don't really know what that means, but I know there's some kinky '70s porno-guitar grooves around here from before, and I wait for them to kick up at any moment. Particularly when Max's follow-up question is, "Can I see it?" and it takes me another gutter-minded second for me to deduce that the "it" in question is Liz's journal. Oh. She politely declines in the name of embarrassment, and if you don't think that's amusing or at least a tad on the ironic side, please read Liz's above quote about good touching one more time. Wah-chick-a-wah-wah, the groove is Liz Parker's.
Spirits are high (read: one foot out of the grave) outside as Max tells Isabel and Michael that the journal has been found. Max puts down his alien conspiracy book, and he and Michael get up from the table. Isabel (sadly relegated to "girl who does nothing" in this episode) flips through the book. Inside the back cover, the author's photo depicts him standing in front of his large, geodesic home. Oh, God, is this a Counting Crows song? Action hero hitting the ground in slo-mo as the building behind him explodes with his wife and daughter inside: "NOOOOOO!!!"
Final thoughts are these: I discover the reason I feel vaguely unsettled with the prospect of Liz having her journal back, as it means she will now be audibly writing in it once more. So she resumes her incoherent babble that makes me wonder what any reader would have gotten from it to begin with, ending with this entry: "The bigger your world gets, the bigger your problems get, too." Yup. It's an important realization in the life of Liz Parker, who has only begun to understand that she was messink with things she should not have been messink with, dabblink in a world in which she should not have been dabblink.