The opening sequence offers a pretty apt representation of how far this show has strayed from its original premise, not to mention its ostensible intention of "not sucking donkey ass." Allow me to expound, if you will: exactly thirteen wordless sci-fi-themed introductory seconds are followed consequently by a hundred and fifty-seven minutes (somehow it permeates even the commercials and ends on an entirely different network sometime during Dateline) of teenagers lasciviously fondling each other. So dust off your archived V-chip jokes and someone get Jerry Falwell on the horn, 'cause we've got an hour of TV-MA (D, L, V, general ookiness) coming your way posthaste. While you're on the phone, page the Christian Right for me, will you? They always seem to have the answers.
Fade in on aforementioned futile stab at plot coherence. A desert landscape shot reveals a collapsed radio tower of some kind, over which appear the words "February 2000, Lincoln County, NM, 2 miles from crash site" in the font Pathetic MT Condensed Season. This absolutely essential moment is accompanied by a high-pitched beeping of some kind, which I think is meant to convey a "Danger! Keep out!" kind of fever-pitch tension but whose only accomplishment is getting me off the couch at least twice in this short span of time to find out why a truck keeps backing up outside of my apartment.
Suddenly we're in school, where the new dress code at West Roswell High appears to include the strict policy "No Clothes Allowed." Inside the girls locker room, it's as if we've stumbled into all the scenes in Porky's that they're not permitted to air when they show the edited version on this very network during really off-peak hours. Like Wednesday at nine, for instance. Pan to steamy, steamy shower stalls, where the waterproof and quality-proof Good Book of "Are You There God It's Me" Liz Parker details some physiological changes afoot: "Lately, I've been having these feelinks." She goes on to clarify that these feelinks are "stronk and dangerous," looking around to discover that she's alone in the shower. Where is everyone? Well, speaking as a representative for the boys' locker room, I can pretty much answer for those who were gone in a matter of less than four seconds after class ended, wearing shorts underneath my jeans, velcro shoes so there's no precious time wasted tying, fiddling, or fumbling, and certainly not a moment squandered glancing over at the moss-encrusted and long-deserted shower stalls thinking, "Who the hell would go near those?" Give me a first-period gym class and a subsequent day of cowlicks and uncontrollable perspiration any ol' time. Just get me the hell out of the locker room, and do it now. How unfortunate for me that I didn't attend the prestigious WB Academy of Prurient Reverie and Never Clogged Pores, else perhaps this sure-footed display of nakedness at sixteen in front of all of my peers (not to mention the six remaining viewers of this show) would have been just another day at Naked High.
She's not alone for long. Liz finally appears poised to exit the shower, as her hands disappear out of the camera's perspective to turn the faucets off ("That's not what she's doing," my roommate takes a moment to observe. "That's not what she's doing at all." Yeah, Parker. Keep those hands where we can see 'em) and turns around amidst the obscuring steam to see "Cli" Max Evans sex his way into this decidedly off-limits arena. They stare lustily as the stench of series cancellation hangs heavy in the stifling locker room air. But even dreams can't come true on Roswell, and the vision is interrupted before anyone has a chance to get physical, physical, I wanna get physical, let's get into physical. The voice-over line "Nice strawberries" prompts a radical cut to the Crashdown, where a surprised Liz upsets said bowl of, er, passion fruit and sends it tumbling to the floor. Maria "If You Don't Look Good, We Don't Look Good" DeLuca joins Liz on the floor and informs her during clean-up that "you have a visitor." I'm sorry, but was that a misguided attempt at referencing aliens? If not, how about Max's more blatant response to Liz's inquiry of why Max has shown up: "I have orders from my planet to take over the earth." Oh, waka. Waka. Waka. Insipid dialogue of the "I'm sorry, Mr. Strapping Plumber Man, but the sink wasn't working before you got here" variety ensues as Max follows Liz at close range into the steamy, steamy kitchen to fill the bowl with more of those in-season sexberries everyone seems to be requesting. In the bathhouse, I mean kitchen, Max tells Liz that he wants to make sure they can still be friends, even though they haven't really talked since "that night." What night? I imagine he means the night of Liz's blind date sixty or so weeks ago, and I actually respect Max's ability to subvert the each-episode-is-an-island-unto-itself sitcom nature this show has taken on, not to mention the fact that episode cross-referencing allows for a moment of personal contemplation during which I find myself thinking, "Wow, and I thought THAT episode was bad?" Fine. So they're friends. Whoop-de-freakin-ha. Just friends? Yeah. In that spirit, Max forcibly grabs Liz and spins her around. Tongue. Everywhere. Really, it's just horrible. They back up into the bowl of sexberries, some of which trip the Pointless Slo-Mo camera feature on contact with the floor. The F/X coffers scraping bottom (most of that cash has been reallocated for the impending barrage of "catch Roswell on it's new Monday time slot" ads and filed under "Futile Expenses"), the backwards-truck beeping commences again in earnest as stock footage from The World's Shoddiest Planetarium unspools before me. Oooooh! It's a vision. A vision of Max's home planet, which from all current cues indicates that Max is an expatriate from the inside of a white chocolate Nestle Crunch bar. Oh, special effects. We barely knew ye. Mmmmm - chocolate.
Credits: Dido -- pop-cultural asterisk or pop-cultural punch line? You decide.
Look, people: I'm not immune to sub-par television, okay? In fact, I have been known on numerous occasions to develop an affinity for the television genre of "Overhyped and Underperforming," tuning in week after week because I so desperately want to believe the ballyhoo of a heralded new series. I mean, for what other reason would I not be able to excise from my head the grating musical riff, "You're not the boss of me now/You're not the boss of me now/You're not the boss of me now and you're not so big." There's no other reason. But this show has become just. Pure. Evil. So to illustrate my inability to relive some of the more galling moments I barely made it through the first time, I will digress slightly during scenes of full-on coitus, providing instead a close reading Cliff's Notes-esque retread of this show's literary antecedent, the Roswell High books from which the earliest plots are taken. That is, until someone's personal copy of Penthouse Forum began to determine the revised, ratings-grabbing artistic direction of said show. What's that? You say I should rip off Wing's latest Dawson's recap, transcending the true evil of an episode by replacing it with something more palatable? Why yes, I think I will! It's cheap, I know, but not as cheap as ending up with a twenty-five word recap because every nine seconds I cover several minutes of screen time with the description, "They fondle. I hurl."
Back at the Crashdown, Maria grills Liz on her multi-second tryst with Max. Liz says it was different this time than it's ever been. She "saw things," and upon Maria's rather legitimate inquiry of just what the holy living hell that means, Liz offers that she saw "stars." Cut to school, where we ride the Filler Dialogue Express Train to brief conversations between Alex and Maria and Max and Michael. All aboard the Filler Dialogue Express! stop: this scene! Maria tells Alex that she's "never seen her like this" and Alex quite pointlessly dubs the kiss evermore "The Kiss of the Millennium." Look, Alex, I don't want to rain on anyone's Rockin' Eve here, but aren't millennium jokes pretty much resigned the ol' "Out Box" at this point? I'm no, um, time-ologist or anything, but aren't we like halfway through it by now? Meanwhile, Max and Michael briefly discuss the same sensation, Michael claiming that Max has never experienced anything he himself has not experienced, or some such convoluted proclamation there can be no point in examining any further. Max enters science class #2,399,019 in which Liz is his lab partner, and thus his readily available conquest. She spots him entering. Cue "Mr. Mojo Risin'" expressions on both of their faces. The teacher lectures on - no, really - "the conceit that alien life forms would be like us in any essential way," as Liz coyly tosses a pencil to the floor and allows Max an opportunity to, ahem, go down and have his very own "essential way" with her. He touches her hand. Cheesy space effects kick up hopefully. The Jetsons offered a more realistic vision of life beyond earth than this. Liz squeals in orgasmic delight as I realize it is time for a) me to bathe myself in some sterilizing liquid such as, for instance, flesh-eating acid or a cauldron of boiling oil and b) our first foray into Melinda Metz's Roswell High book series:
Roswell Book Series Fun Fact #1 (Book 1, Page 8, on Max): "He saw the world in a different way from most people. He said things that made Liz stop and think. Like when those scientists in Scotland cloned that sheep. A lot of people talked about who they would clone if they could -- scientists or athletes or movie stars. But Max was more interested in whether or not the soul could be cloned -- and if it couldn't, what that meant. Spending time with Max definitely wasn't boring." It definitely wasn't boring? Oh, I'm sorry. I thought someone told me that the TV series Roswell was based on this here series of books. They must have been mistaken. Very, very mistaken indeed.
When I look up, the teacher has sentenced the two to an afternoon of detention. Max slides Liz a note reading, "Eraser room? 6th period?" in an extremely feminine handwriting that implies, "and while we're there, we can clean erasers and talk about window treatments." I hate this show.
Maria, clearly readying herself for the yearly "Flamenco Dance Through Hell" competition at West Roswell High, strolls out toward the bleachers in her black and orange striped top with the flared, almost hooped, sleeves, complemented (or should I say "insulted") by a black and red striped skirt with cowgirl fringe and black knee-high boots. Optional "ay-ay-ay" castanets sold separately at a Charo 'R' Us retailer near you. She spots a black-clad Michael sitting alone on the bleachers. He greets her with his usual "my parents are either vanished shape shifting aliens- or clichéd abusive foster fathers who drink Pabst Lite so I live by myself on the outskirts of town but at least I know how to dress myself" sneer. They discuss, as briefly as possible without stringing together a series of words prolonged enough to qualify as dialogue, Max and Liz's alleged flashes. They agree that it is "extremely unlikely" that Max and Liz have discovered a new sensation of some kind. The conversation should carry with it a vague sense of mistrust, and perhaps even a whiff of jealousy. But only in that universe where the word "subtext" doesn't carry with it the identical connotations of the word "appendix," in which a neglected process ceases to have any relevance following a history of underuse when said vestigial entity impedes the use of other bodily necessities. Like neckin' under the bleachers, for instance.
Roswell Book Series Fun Fact #2(Book One, Page One): "Liz Ortecho slid two thick burgers onto the table...." Besides my patented refusal to even glancingly reference the repellent phrase "slid two thick burgers," perhaps someone took the time to notice that Liz's name in the series is "Ortecho." Nice sleuthing. Go, you. Apparently in the book she's some Spanish siren who uses feisty expressions representing her cross-cultural appeal including adios [Metz 3] and hasta la vista [ibid] before getting the traditional Whitey Makeover in her character's lackluster transition to the WB. Meanwhile, Duchess of Wacky Bantersville Maria DeLuca's defining ethnicity remains firmly in tact, proving once and for all that while Italians are really zany and talk with their hands a lot, cliche WASPy blandness didn't die with Thurston Howell III.
Meanwhile, Maria lies to Michael for some reason about what she sees when she kisses him. Max and Liz get caught in the eraser room while havink visions of the opening credits for Third Rock from the Sun but lacking John Lithgow's patented brand of otherworldly hilarity. And for the entire span of recapping the previously elaborated upon "Fun Fact #2," my VCR remains steadfastly on pause as Michael and Maria are frozen in fornication mode. This plan isn't going quite as smoothly as I'd hoped. Let's alter our course slightly: "They fondle. I hurl."
Not that I advocate even one more conjugal visit to the eraser room over the course of, say, my five lifetimes, but I can't claim I'm so enamored with the rare instances of consistent dialogue in this episode either. In the principal's office, the first ever African-American character to be spotted on this show (we'll call him "Principal Quota," on the extremely unlikely gamble we'll ever see him again) explains to Bangs and Julianne Less (a.k.a. Mrs. Parker, formerly "The Mom Who Does Laundry") the following:
Julianne Less: What exactly is an Eraser Room?
Principal Quota: It's a small room we use to clean the erasers.
Wow. Good thing I decided to stick around for that heady explanation. Just make sure you're around for the very special moment when Bangs requires some elaboration on the specific purposes of that enigmatic expression "class room," which she's heard is "a small room we use to hold classes," but she isn't really sure. But, as it turns out, that description wasn't quite as lucid as she's hoped, and she continues, "You mean Liz and Max were cleaning erasers when they created this disturbance?" Principal Quota patronizes (as well he should) Bangs and informs her in plain ol' black and white (but, as is customary for the WB's Wednesday night line-up, quite a bit more white) that Max and Liz were "what we used to call 'making out.'" As opposed to now? When it's called something entirely different? Necking? Heavy petting? Pinning the pin on? Parking? So the three walk out of Principal Quota's private office to face Max and Liz, the latter of whom explains that this is totally wronk that they should all be here. Cut to the hallway, where Liz and Julianne Less argue further. Mom leaves, and Liz turns to encounter Alex. She runs past him with the sentence, "The most incredible thing is happening to me but I don't even know what it is." Is it a commercial break? IS IT??? What if I march over to the Pets.com corporate office and write them a freaking check myself to do a sixty minute infomercial on the many Chicago songs that wacky hand puppet dog has in his karaoke canon? Okay, then, what if I settle for David Arquette's 1-800-COLLECT spots? I know they're annoying, but an hour of him traversing the world and teaching developmentally disabled citizens of our planet the ins and outs of that cunningly cryptic device known as "the telephone" simply must be better than this. Hell, I'll take an hour's worth of co-branding featuring the Snuggle Bear and the Snap Into a Slim Jim wrestler to supplant the insipid (I'm sorry, have I used that word already? Allow me to use a more relevant descriptive adjective. Let's try "insipid") mess unfolding before me.
Isabel has been sitting dormant in her trailer for so long her muscles are starting to atrophy. When we check in with her for the requisite four seconds of screen time, she's outside eating pizza. For an episode in which that activity actually passes for a viable and diverse subplot, I'm still happy to see her. Alex "Walk It Like You Stalk It" Whitman lurks in close proximity, eventually approaching in time for Isabel to burn the roof her mouth on said slice of pizza. She dares to speak a sentence concerning her own sagas, but Alex non-segues ungracefully to the Max and Liz situation and informs Isabel that "in the interest of science" he's available to offer himself for experimentation. Isabel doesn't even bother to hide an eye-rolling so dramatic that if I tried to match it in sheer circumference I'd probably spin right along with them and accidentally turn a cartwheel right there at the lunch table.
Liz. Detention. The sentencing teacher enters to find Liz staring at a map of the cosmos, and a brief chat about the chart before them reveals that a star called a "red giant" might not be seen through a telescope. Thank you, Mr. Wizard. I know nothing gets me jazzed for some after-school lovin' quicker than lessons best learned on a Sunday-morning episode of Nova. I'm sorry, but did I just use the word "jazzed" in an entirely unironic context? 'Cause I think I did, and I can only hope that I didn't. Anyway, the teacher asks Liz what has inspired her sudden interest in astronomy, and Liz comments that "it's just beautiful" as Max enters the room. The teacher gives Max and Liz their detention assignments. Then he leaves. Uh, moron? Way to go ahead with the punishment thing. I'll bet they've never been so jazzed in their whole life to be trapped together in an empty room where no one can see them, under the adult-sanctioned unwatchful eye of their teachers and parents. Oh, and Liz tells Max something about thinking that maybe she saw the crash when they kissed. Jazz!
Upstairs at the Parker house, Liz is talking to her mother. Scanning for sexual energy - it's clear. And for that I give thanks to all things sanctified in the universe, really, because I'm running out of passages to lambaste in those books. Anyway, Julianne Less, fresh from a bout of loveless marriage and proto-empowering films on Lifetime, The Woman's Network, which initially appear liberating but are in fact poorly-written opiates satiating the escapist desires of oppressed females with no creative outlet besides Harlequin novels and extravagant craft projects like knitting their family's entire wardrobe and weeping at validating episodes of Oprah called "I was trapped in a loveless marriage until I found the Oxygen Web site," tells Liz she needs to talk to her. She co-dependently begs Liz thusly: "Don't ever have sex, don't ever leave this house, don't ever stop being my baby girl." Liz actually broaches the emotion "bemused" for the first time ever, laughing in a self-satisfied way and responding, "Yeah, I'm sure that worked when Judith Light said it to Kelly Martin in the 1995 ratings boon Daddy Was a Wayward Circus Performer, but I'm late for this sex date I made, so I gotta go." Okay, she doesn't really say that.
Apparently sitting on the school bleachers looking really bad-ass is a more lucrative career direction than I had originally anticipated. How else to explain Michael's phatty paddy the Alien Three are in the process of unpacking in this scene? I spy at least three doors off the room we're in, and regardless of my MBTV stock exploding the way it has lately, even I don't have an eat-in kitchen. This place needs a nickname and I'm just cashed on the nickname genre right now. Suggestions? I'll send you prizes. Yeah, I know I've made that promise before. Incidentally, I think a CGI Isabel was digitally added to this scene after the initial taping, perhaps as a result of test audiences bring bored into comas and the subsequent risk of losing another Nielsen point by filling in a few tedious moments of stultifying silence with someone who has really luminous hair. Seriously, though, she throws out a few poorly timed lines, few of which elicit responses from Max and Michael, mostly about the smell of the refrigerator. And no one looks at her in the rare occasion they should respond. The futilely plot-conscious residents of Roswell, meanwhile, discuss Liz's visions of their home in the sky. Michael says these visions can't possibly be real, and advocates Max's continued research on the matter. Meanwhile, he claims, he's off for a little reconnaissance of his own:
Roswell Book Series Fun Fact #3 (Book One, Page Four): "Max Evans, tall and blond, with killer baby blues . . ." 'Nuff said.
Meanwhile, Michael and Maria get loud and smacky, Maria admits that she never really had a vision (ludicrously obvious winking reference to "faking it," so insulting to the viewers' intelligence that I will discuss it no further), and Michael becomes angry and leaves. Late for a haircut appointment? Somehow, I think perhaps not.
Liz and Maria walk through the girl's locker room, Maria trying to explain why she exposed herself as the non-visions-seeing sham she is. But before she has a chance to delve, she spots an irregularity on Liz's neck and sends her to the mirror for further examination. But they're getting in trouble again, as the gym teacher barks at them to step on it. No, no, it's fine. No need to introduce us to any character's nuances. I'm perfectly satisfied with the multi-faceted array of diverse personas this show has established thus far. I'll just have to take it on faith that if you're butch and holding a soccer ball, you're obviously the girls' gym teacher. Gotcha. Good thing she's so mean and butch or I might have mistaken her somebody else entirely such as, oh, I don't know, Mother Teresa? Maria leaves Liz alone to check out what is so obviously going to turn out to be a glowing space hickey (no, I haven't already watched this. Why do you ask?). But she gets waylaid once more as she runs into Max in the locker room, who's there to ask "if something was real." Liz figures out (twenty-five minutes and eight seconds later than the rest of us, according to my VCR's timer) that Max can see into her fantasies. She's embarrassed. He's amorous. I'm nauseated and shaking from a sweat-glazed fever this scene has inspired. The gym teacher again screams for "Parker" to get in there, so Liz grabs Max's hand and pulls him into the shower stalls. Max notices the hickey. It's glowing. Just like I said it would. He touches it. More heavy breathing and truck-backing-up ensue, this time the disparate images vaguely depicting some armed-forces men running through a desert. She breaks out of it and turns to Max: "This is getting really weird." Yeah, everything's changed radically. Let's take stock, shall we? For instance, Liz now knows that she wants Max but realizes that they'll never be able to be together. Been there. She also knows that he's different from all the other guys, and that he has the power to see into her soul. Check. And to really prove that this is radical TV-making at its most revolutionary, the show has gone that extra mile one more time in casting a bit part "female gym teacher" role and making her more mannish than Jodie Foster in - well, pretty much anything she's ever done. Yeah, things sure are getting spooooooooky, all right.
Back at Michael's pad (a ping-pong table! Djb seethes with poverty-stricken, rec-room-free rage), the un-hardest working man in Roswell expounds on his theories regarding Liz's visions. He now believes that perhaps humans are an important element in their discovery of who they are and where they're from, and it is necessary to somehow channel this energy. Digital Isabel, afforded barely a moment to not make eye contact with Michael, questions Michael's definition of "connecting" with humans before Max enters. Liz is coming over. Michael and Isabel offer to leave by reflex, as if Michael has been out of The House That Drives for so long he's going to start using his hard-earned domicile as a cheap, roadside motel with no ID on check-in and hourly rates. But before he has a chance to leave and take the Jessica Rabbit-esque here-but-not-here Isabel along, a small scuffle ensues. Michael effectively gives Max the "Go Get 'Em, Tiger" speech, to which Max piously counters that he doesn't want to treat Liz like she's "a thing." Michael babbles incoherently about how Max has to "use" something, and even the close-captioning reveals only a series of about thirty question marks followed by the rebuke "Do you really care what it says anyway?" No, close-captioning, in fact I don't. Thank you. Now where were you for the first three parts of The Tenth Kingdom? Michael and Digital Isabel encounter Liz on their way out. Cue awkward non-exchange of time-wasting dialogue. Once alone, Liz shows Max the hickey, which he makes disappear. And speaking of digitally enhanced, Max's put-them-away-they're-scaring-the-children pecs fairly jump out of his clothes for a rather surprising cameo of their own. They fondle. I hurl. Beep beep beep beep beep. Hey look, naked writhing teenagers. Yeah, this is the perfect companion piece for 7th Heaven come spring. I don't know what the hell everyone is so worried about. More visions, this time of something being buried. Perhaps it's the show's programming position in the schedule come April under it's new title Safe Harbor's Subsequent Casualty. I'm just sayin'. Oh, and then Maria busts in and they stop.
Cut to what was once the most promising new character on this show, the Jetta, taking Liz home. Maria expresses concern. Liz tells her that she wants to go further with Max, and Maria compares the uncertainty of Liz's desire for him with the plight of "certain spiders" who mate and then devour each other. How does she know that won't happen? Oh, man. How freakin' perfect would that be? You people want a science fiction slant, do you? Well then, let's leap headfirst into some scenarios. Okay, fine, I'll go first: Liz and Max copulate. And like "certain spiders," he violently bites her head off in the moments following completion. Suddenly multiplying to three thousand times his original size (though the disproportionate pecs become drawn to scale and remain the same size as they are currently), he ritually ingests the terrorized citizens of Roswell after forcibly requiring them all to watch each episode of the series and write six-thousand-plus-word recaps on every. Single. Painstaking. Freaking. DETAIL. Episode over. Series canceled. Shiri goes to sleep for a very, very long time.
Liz enters her house via the window to find an incensed and always put-upon Julianne Less sitting in Liz's bedroom. She whispers between clenched teeth, "Do you think I'm stupid?" Liz evades the question, answering her mother's inquiries with the time-honored Valley Girl affectation of excessively punctuating each sentence with the airtight legal defense, "Ih!" An example? Sure! We've got time: "Ih, I do every single thing you want, and, ih, you, ih, you always think I'm gonna be that way! IH!" Julianne Less approaches and tries to hug her thankless and, if you ask me, totally in-the-wronk daughter. She begins to worry that Liz feels feverish, but Liz breaks away and locks herself in what I think is the bathroom. We've spent so much time in Michael's house that I'm not automatically sure if a room with a toilet is the bathroom, the bidet, or the water closet. Ih.
Back at Round Two of Sleeping for Dollars, Michael accrues this month's rent check by napping on the roof of a car that isn't his. Shouldn't he be living in it? Y'know, for the sake of realism? Has he no respect for the little people? And for chrissakes, hasn't he ever read an interview with Jewel? Maria approaches to let him know that she found Max and Liz at his apartment, but that they have since vacated. "Great," Michael responds in his usual detached garble, "I won't have to miss the hockey game." The, er, what? Man, if I were Maria, I would just about grab that boy's collar, yank him toward me, lustily wail, "You have cable, don't you, you magnificent bastard, you!" and have my way with him right there on the roof of someone else's black Camaro. If, that is, I were Maria. Sadly, she doesn't get her chance. I think Michael was mad about something a while back, but for the life of me I have no recollection of what. Thus, it makes precious little sense when he storms off without a glance. And then it all comes together: he's going home so quickly so he can watch cable.
Back on her roof, Liz hears a call down below and finds Max climbing up toward her. She tells him about the image of something being buried, then shows him a drawing of the radio tower from the opening shot. He says he should go there with Michael, but Liz's "you never want to hunt down clues to the location of your home planet with me anymore" nag emerges at the worst of times. Liz says that if they're going, they have to go now. Does she really want to be alone in the cold, dark desert night knowing that those pecs could leap out and attack at any moment? Brave woman, Liz Parker. Brave, foolish, simpering, dim-witted, simple-minded, moronic, obtuse, oblivious, thick, deficient, wanting of but one vague, lonesome thread of something, anything that resembles a shred of intelligence, the flicker of light distinguishing the smart from the stupid, the mortal from the dead. But brave, too. So very brave indeed.
The drive is on and the dialogue off in a merciful sequence that just involves driving. Then they start making out again. They fondle. I hurl. They lie down. I feel for some reason as if I've seen this sequence before, but the tick-tock of the Roswell clock informs me that if they keep the action and verbal investments to a bare minimum, I may actually have a bit of weekend to spare when this is all over. So kissy, kissy, kissy, 'cause I want to watch The Practice. But no, the truck noise begins anew and Liz spots a tangible locale from her vision. They run over with quickly materializing shovels and begin to dig for painstakingly arduous moments adding up to at least nine cumulative seconds. Suddenly, a ray of light bursts out of the ground and Max leans down to retrieve a glowing orb from the planet Sephora Insignia. Have I used that joke before? Well, maybe when they start rotating their cheesy glowing orb collection, I'll start rotating my material. Deal? Deal.
Cut to morning, specious thematic symbol, I mean "fallen radio tower" shot which pans to Liz and Max asleep on a blanket in the desert, where a shadow falls over them. Cut to Julianne Less entering Liz's room to once again find her gone. No, really, thank God I was alive when the brilliance that is this sequence came to be. I mean really: If scenes like this didn't exist, how would we know when we were watching good television?
Alex, looking just fine, opens the door to his house to find Isabel. Her brother's missing. Maybe they should kiss and see if they can conjure up his location. Yeah, this plan is turning out to be pretty foolproof. So they do, and the parade of unsubtle performance anxiety references comes clanging into Town Square, loud enough for the townspeople to recoil from its unsavory din. I remain awed at the brilliance. Moving on.
Desert again. A two hour lingering shot on an unfamiliar face reveals it to be Nasedo's current incarnation, the goatee guy from the closing seconds of Episode 15. He tells Max and Liz that they're on private property. Why are all these scenes so short? Everybody knows that the casual surfer just scanning a recap will only read the short paragraphs and expect the slaying wit to leap out at them, regardless of their own lazy and half-hearted investment in the project, whereas the creamy nougat center can be wrapped into a far longer monologue. Hell, this isn't funny. This isn't clever. Which is fine, because I don't think this paragraph is really even that short anymore.
Michael's house. Maria has come to request that Michael not be "cold or mean. If that's impossible, you can just let me know." So he lets her in, motions her though the conservatory, past the wine cellar, and into the south garden overlooking the squash courts and Hugh Hefner's pool. She apologizes. I weep. She's the one who's scared and shut down, and not Michael as she has repeatedly accused. Michael says that he did see visions when he kissed Maria, and she counters that "didn't care about the stupid flashes. I just wanted us to be close." And now they are close.
Cut to the Crashdown, mysteriously closed in the middle of the day for absolutely no reason, housing the peanut gallery that is the Roswell PTA, featuring Bangs, Slackjaw, Our Father the Savior, and Julianne Less. Julianne suggests that, though their kids are usually trustworthy, "maybe they shouldn't see each other for a little while." But where are they? Cut to where they are, outside at the Crashdown gettin' down with the nookie one more time before sundown. Liz asks Max if their relationship can ever be just about them, then gives up grousing because the credits are about to roll and her acting range requires an arsenal of "ihs" to get her even close to tears. They walk into the Crashdown, the disbelieving parents staring slack-jawed (well, one of them, anyway) at the girl bearing pecs sauntering into the diner.