This episode is the first in series history to be rated "TV-G," ensuring that the season finale of Roswell is suitable to be maligned, ridiculed, and drowned out by the deafening roar of numerous continents raising their one collective eyebrow -- by parents and children of all ages. By the way.
Fade in on a dusty old sign affixed to a chain link fence reading, "Eagle Rock Military Base, Medical Research Facility." We join what appears to be the entire population of the desert southwest right smack in the middle of an already-in-progress dramatic chase scene, offering the feeling that we have been watching a sporting event that ran long and we've just cut in on some really generic action movie three minutes from the end we had no vested intention of sticking with anyway. Michael kicks off the brilliant verbal theatrics we've come to expect with his insistence that "we gotta get Max outta here," reiterating this essential piece of knowledge singularly for the benefit of Howie Dorough's new-to-the-show parents, who in turn express their gratitude by briefly coming up for air from the gigantic piles of their son's cash they've been swimming through, Scrooge McDuck-style, for the better part of the past two years. A suddenly omnipresent Porno, shifting again from always unquestionably bad to vaguely maybe good and right on back to unquestionably bad again, yells over the mayhem that there's a safe place he can take them all to, provided this place is filled with a name bursting with Native-American mystique, and I'm only able to blindly smash my palm flat down on the keyboard in hopes that I will come up with the correct spelling of said mystique-filled locale, finally settling on a phonetic representation and wishing that I had actually learned what exactly the "Key Caps" feature in my control panels does, as I know it would come in infinitely handy at this moment, though I'm not exactly sure how: gah-LEE-nus. Anyway, Porno volunteers the hideout of an old silver mine in gah-LEE-nus, off Horseshoe Road, where they can hide out for a while. Isabel and Liz load a dazed Max "Pecs-tra, pecs-tra, read all about it" Evans into the suddenly-under-new-ownership Jetta, and Isabel provides the valuable public service of handing Max his recovered clothes. Oh, Isabel, you bright shining beacon in a red-backlit world, you. Don't sign any contracts in the off-season without the express written permission of MBTV and its concerned-for-the-Gerard-Depardieu-free-evolution-of-your-career members, okay? Fabulous, then. Michael regards Porno warily before peeking in the window of the Jetta and expressing the too-telling sentiment, "I don't know about this." Max breathily responds, "I trust him," but all subsequent lines of dialogue are soon to be drowned out by the spontaneous appearance of a blazingly bright concert stage which appears out of seeming nowhere and contains Gloria Estefan, who performs her salsa-influenced eighties classic "1, 2, 3, 4Shadow" to a stunned audience that the "writers" seem to perceive is too obtuse to get it otherwise. Yes, Porno is of questionable morality. Put down the megaphone. Waiter, I'll have a tall of glass of subtlety to wash down the bitter pill of being a completely insulted audience member. And I'll take the check with that, too. Whenever you're ready. Thanks.
Cut to inside the Jetta, where a mercifully dressed Max means just the wrong damn thing (he means his hours and hours of bondage at the hands of The Initiative, rather than meaning this episode, their relationship, her life) when he tells Liz, "It's over." She puts her hand comfortingly on his shoulder in a gesture containing about the same amount of hefty emotional resonance as picking up a phone. But just as Max begins break-up attempt #314 with his it's-not-you-it's-me simper, "Look, Liz, if we ever get out of this," shots ring out behind them, and Liz just plum freaks. So much for wanting them alive. Shoot to kill, boys. SHOOT TO KILL! Government brutality has never looked so appealing as when it's enacted on Liz Parker. The back window blown out, Liz maroons the Jetta and the two leap from the flaming wreckage. Cue intensely inappropriate John Williams-esque high-drama-while-being-chased-through-the-grassy-marshes music, dangerous men in suits following closely behind. Skulking back to the highway, Max and Liz become trapped between military vans pulling up on either side. Cornered! Or are they? The always intrepid wonder twins approach the railing of the highway, steal a rather long and always unnecessary kiss while the sharp-shooting government ops are, I guess, manually loading the Civil War muskets they apparently brought along for this particular portion of the alien hunt, and leap in slo-mo into the darkened abyss below. A relatively long commercial break follows, necessitated by a lengthy meeting between the legal team from The Fugitive and the general arbiters of Non-Clichéd Good Taste Throughout the Universe, who begin compiling evidence for their extremely tenable joint lawsuit against the four minutes of my now four-minutes-shorter life.
This episode is the first in series history to be rated "TV-G," ensuring that the season finale of Roswell is suitable to be maligned, ridiculed, and drowned out by the deafening roar of numerous continents raising their one collective eyebrow -- by parents and children of all ages. By the way.
Fade in on a dusty old sign affixed to a chain link fence reading, "Eagle Rock Military Base, Medical Research Facility." We join what appears to be the entire population of the desert southwest right smack in the middle of an already-in-progress dramatic chase scene, offering the feeling that we have been watching a sporting event that ran long and we've just cut in on some really generic action movie three minutes from the end we had no vested intention of sticking with anyway. Michael kicks off the brilliant verbal theatrics we've come to expect with his insistence that "we gotta get Max outta here," reiterating this essential piece of knowledge singularly for the benefit of Howie Dorough's new-to-the-show parents, who in turn express their gratitude by briefly coming up for air from the gigantic piles of their son's cash they've been swimming through, Scrooge McDuck-style, for the better part of the past two years. A suddenly omnipresent Porno, shifting again from always unquestionably bad to vaguely maybe good and right on back to unquestionably bad again, yells over the mayhem that there's a safe place he can take them all to, provided this place is filled with a name bursting with Native-American mystique, and I'm only able to blindly smash my palm flat down on the keyboard in hopes that I will come up with the correct spelling of said mystique-filled locale, finally settling on a phonetic representation and wishing that I had actually learned what exactly the "Key Caps" feature in my control panels does, as I know it would come in infinitely handy at this moment, though I'm not exactly sure how: gah-LEE-nus. Anyway, Porno volunteers the hideout of an old silver mine in gah-LEE-nus, off Horseshoe Road, where they can hide out for a while. Isabel and Liz load a dazed Max "Pecs-tra, pecs-tra, read all about it" Evans into the suddenly-under-new-ownership Jetta, and Isabel provides the valuable public service of handing Max his recovered clothes. Oh, Isabel, you bright shining beacon in a red-backlit world, you. Don't sign any contracts in the off-season without the express written permission of MBTV and its concerned-for-the-Gerard-Depardieu-free-evolution-of-your-career members, okay? Fabulous, then. Michael regards Porno warily before peeking in the window of the Jetta and expressing the too-telling sentiment, "I don't know about this." Max breathily responds, "I trust him," but all subsequent lines of dialogue are soon to be drowned out by the spontaneous appearance of a blazingly bright concert stage which appears out of seeming nowhere and contains Gloria Estefan, who performs her salsa-influenced eighties classic "1, 2, 3, 4Shadow" to a stunned audience that the "writers" seem to perceive is too obtuse to get it otherwise. Yes, Porno is of questionable morality. Put down the megaphone. Waiter, I'll have a tall of glass of subtlety to wash down the bitter pill of being a completely insulted audience member. And I'll take the check with that, too. Whenever you're ready. Thanks.
Cut to inside the Jetta, where a mercifully dressed Max means just the wrong damn thing (he means his hours and hours of bondage at the hands of The Initiative, rather than meaning this episode, their relationship, her life) when he tells Liz, "It's over." She puts her hand comfortingly on his shoulder in a gesture containing about the same amount of hefty emotional resonance as picking up a phone. But just as Max begins break-up attempt #314 with his it's-not-you-it's-me simper, "Look, Liz, if we ever get out of this," shots ring out behind them, and Liz just plum freaks. So much for wanting them alive. Shoot to kill, boys. SHOOT TO KILL! Government brutality has never looked so appealing as when it's enacted on Liz Parker. The back window blown out, Liz maroons the Jetta and the two leap from the flaming wreckage. Cue intensely inappropriate John Williams-esque high-drama-while-being-chased-through-the-grassy-marshes music, dangerous men in suits following closely behind. Skulking back to the highway, Max and Liz become trapped between military vans pulling up on either side. Cornered! Or are they? The always intrepid wonder twins approach the railing of the highway, steal a rather long and always unnecessary kiss while the sharp-shooting government ops are, I guess, manually loading the Civil War muskets they apparently brought along for this particular portion of the alien hunt, and leap in slo-mo into the darkened abyss below. A relatively long commercial break follows, necessitated by a lengthy meeting between the legal team from The Fugitive and the general arbiters of Non-Clichéd Good Taste Throughout the Universe, who begin compiling evidence for their extremely tenable joint lawsuit against the four minutes of my now four-minutes-shorter life.
Credits: Everybody (yeah yeah)! Rock your body (yeah yeah)! Everybody, rock your opening credits right. Dido's back, all right!
Viva la chase montage! A rather extended, blissfully word-free sequence features Max and Liz running and falling and then standing up for the purposes of running once more. Through puddles and metal tubing, through hills and valleys, through the preexisting set for the last third of every John Carpenter movie ever, through Howie's smirk-inducing name in the endless string of opening credits, they run and run and run. Finally coming to rest in what looks to be the rotting carcass of the sadly felled Mystery Machine, Liz unsyntactically observes that "we gotta hide." Max, still glistening with fever dream delusion, looks to be just about the least aesthetically appealing representation of a governmentally-intervened-upon alien since ET turned all white and scary, but nothing stops Liz from leaning in for another ill-timed smooch. She is quickly punished for her wanton ways, however, with a flash from last week's episode of Max being tortured, Max being submerged in ice water, Max being fed after midnight. Oh, say, careful reader and angry critic, should you have just sneered away from your computer and muttered, "Yeah, he used that line last week," I will direct your attention back to the screen, where they used that entire sequence last week. So nyah. "Yeah, but it wasn't funny then, either." Shut up.
Over in the Alienmobile, Tesla berates the rest of her captive audience, insisting that they never should have left Nasedo behind. Michael observes that there was gunfire and that Nasedo might not have made it out alive, and Tesla responds that they should attempt to meet him at the pod chamber, where Nasedo would know to find them. Why? Who cares. Season finale. Isabel observes that they can't just change the original plan of going to the pre-established location (which I don't want to embarrass myself again trying to spell), but Tesla observes that without Nasedo they have nothing. All of which prompts Alex, who I wasn't even aware was in the car, to pipe up that "we said we'd meet at ga-LEE-nus," confirming for everyone else that they won't be leaving anyone behind anymore. Sigh. Thanks, Alex. For making me look like an idiot. Again.
Back to the Mystery Machine interior, Max has just finished, unsurprisingly, telling Liz "everything." She stands up morosely after determining that Tesla is Max's destiny, and, with huzzahs and high fives in copious supply, Liz once again begins to cry. Hey, they could be a Backstreet Boys song right there. "Huzzahs and high fives in copious supply/You are my baby, never gonna make you cry. 'Cause I looooooove you, Sexypants. Yo yo yo, BSB's so street/I'd like to find a girl who's really, really neat. 'Cause I loooooooove you, sexy sexy sexy pants." That snippet, by the way, was from Backstreet Boys upcoming album "Bad Career Moves in Cameo Form," and it's their first smash single, "I Love You, Sexypants." For those among us left wondering. Anyway, furthering the indispensable "it's written in the stars, you just have to leave me alone" platform that all of Liz's boyfriends longed for but just weren't smart enough to dream up themselves, Max says he just wishes that everything could go back to normal. You know, the kind of normal when Liz and Max saw each other twice a week in science lab and barely knew each other. That kind of normal. And I long for it myself sometimes. But we can't go back. Liz wishes that she could have stopped Max from saving her life that day in the Crashdown. Yeah, sister, get in line. Let me know and I'll be glad to reverse the effects. But if all of this were not enough, the true pathos of this scene stops the action dead in its tracks, as Liz stands up, paces a step or two in each direction, and, disturbingly and irrationally, begins to act: "Max, the day the you saved my life, your life just ended." No, Max insists, ripping chapters directly from his committed-to-memory acting guide Delivering Shockingly Exhausted Dialogue with a Glazed-Over Trancelike Sameness, "That's the day my life began." When he was trapped in the white room, where "they did [self-conscious wince + glacial pause = anal probe, and I simply can't say that enough times] what they did to me," she was the one who kept him alive, all he could think about was her, and blah blah blah cold-metal-against-fleshcakes. She is his destiny, always. He expresses his love for her and they kiss for a hundred hours.
Meanwhile, back at ga-LEE-nus, Porno pretties the place up a bit with some hanging lights in an attempt to subvert the stark lack of moody ambience of the "back of the bicycle shop" Arnold and Willis stumbled into on The Most Special Very Special Episode of Diff'rent Strokes ever, no matter how similar Porno's lascivious intentions seem to be to that store's proprietor. The remaining gang enters to discover Max and Liz still missing, even though the Alienmobile "took the long way" to the meeting spot. Er, why? Oops. Almost forgot the season-ending "who cares" clause. Michael expresses concern that it will be getting light soon, and Porno offers to retrace the route. Michael comes along for the ride, but before he's out the door Maria beckons him back with a worried, "Michael!" He runs back and offers up a comforting hug or two, Porno looking on impatiently with a sneering puss that sullenly observes, "Ah, yes, the girlfriend. There's ALWAYS a girlfriend, isn't there? Grrrr." Cut back to a final moment in the Mystery Machine, which actually appears by day to look disturbingly like the set from the Hilary Swank/Chloe Sevigny consummation scene near the end of Boys Don't Cry. It really does. Check that out sometime. Watch this episode again, I dare you. Anyway, Max and Liz hear the sound of a car approaching, so they bolt back off to do some more running, inspiring the solely-Backstreet-Boys-soundtrack I have singlehandedly invented for this episode to kick up anew: "Run run run, we'll run together into the night/There'll be no more anal probe, we'll put up a fight. They can't keep our love apart, baby/Won't do no gov'ment dance, We'll be warm and be protected, inside a pair of your sexy pants. 'Cause I loooooooove you, sexy sexy sexy pants." You just sit back and watch this be their biggest song, like, ever.
Cut to Porno's van, where Michael curiously inquires as to why exactly Porno is helping them. Porno responds that "there is a right side here and a wrong side, and I don't think Pierce is on the right side." That's fine. But then he continues on by invoking, for some absolutely baffling reason I am currently at a loss to discern, Kyle's name. Strange. I didn't even know Porno had a son. But it was important for him to mention it, I imagine, as even the vaguest reference to Kyle sets up the action for much of the second half of this episode and allows you, the viewing public, to take the reigns and create your own "foreshadow" joke, necessary as one may be in this situation. But before you do, hearken to the action of Liz and Max running madly into a clearing as a large red van comes tearing up behind them. Porno stops the van and Michael jumps out, holding out a hand and finally displaying his one mad voodoo alien power of thinking really hard and turning everything in the camera's frame really, really white. Which, considering the complexion of every actor on the entire network for twenty-three out of every twenty-four hours it spends airing original programming, that power might actually be just a little bit stronger than we'd initially anticipated. Max and Liz jump into Porno's van and he takes off, leaving Pierce and the other inhabitant of the red van stumbling about helplessly in said cloud of white. Hey, cool power. For a crayon.
Porno and the Alien Three arrive in some new, completely nondescript desert locale that looks like every freakin' dingo-ate-your-baby set we've been trapped in for the course of the last three episodes. Porno gazes longingly at Michael and promises, "You know what I want, and it'll get you a new bike, alien boy." Okay, that's not what he says. Can't it be? Can't it just be for one second? In fact he says, "You'll be safe here for a while," and Michael recaptures his recalcitrant James Dean bad-boy thing, which was once so unbelievably tiresome but would now be a welcome respite for the static drone of one character blending into the we've encountered since the show came back from euphemistically shrouded terms like "hiatus" and "respite" and "last-ditch creative retooling." He mutters, "There is no safe anymore," before exiting the van and storming into this new ambiguous "place they'll be safe for a while." Liz follows, and Max tells her that he'll be right in. With just the two of them outside, Porno flashes his pearly yellows at Max, a facial accouterment further accentuated by Porno's pre-pubescent, thirteen-year-old-Bar-Mitzvah-boy moustache he is able to cultivate without fear of rebuke, now that there are officially no women left for him to creep right on out of Roswell. He tells Max that he has to know "everything." (Fifteen minutes and twenty-eight seconds to the first "tell me everything." BO-ring. That doesn't even rank in the top five.) Max doesn't know where they're from. Max doesn't know why they're here. Michael and Isabel are also aliens. Max hilariously attests that "Liz, Alex, and Maria are the only ones who know," and I would probably waste the paltry remainder of HostPro's woefully limited bandwidth ranting about the vast quantities of everyone else in the world who knows, but with so many hands of the "who cares" clause left to be played, I'm going to let the "writers" off the hook for this particular bout of contrived, delusional, bereft-of-linear-narrative psychosis. Go, me. Okay, no I won't. I can't. Hey, Max. Don't forget about THE ENTIRE UNITED STATES GOVERNMENT. There. They know, too. Sigh.
Commercials: Yes, yes, yes! I want to dance. I want to laugh. I want to flirt. But if I have to spend the rest of my life wearing Payless shoes to do all that, maybe I'll just sit here quietly and frown.
And we're underground again somewhere, Tesla, Michael, and Isabel deep in conversation about Michael using his powers in front of Porno and what exactly it all means. Alex, who again shocks me just by his very existence in this scene, pipes up from a cobwebbed corner of the set, "So what's Valenti gonna do? What are we all gonna do?" At which point, from the top of the steps, lit by blazing desert sunshine, Max descends to what I envision should include a fanfare of trumpets and the shameless bowing of heads and averting of eyes as he utters the comfortingly character-appropriate line, "We're gonna think this through." Tesla suggests that the Alien Four find Nasedo and ditch the highly irrelevant excess baggage of everyone else on this show. And dramatic as it sounds, logic dictates that the key to happy survival and success as an out-of-this-world species is putting as many planets between yourself and Liz Parker as intergalactically possible, and just as quickly. Losing the other two in the process isn't exactly a deal-breaker either. Sadly, no one else seems to think this is such a fabulous idea. Safe earthbound counterparts win out yet again, leading to another round of those really awkward hugs the couples offer up in times like these. But even with her come-hither Pippi Longstocking pigtails and that crafty brain trick that can make people think that they like her for ten to fifteen seconds at a time, Tesla remains without anyone to hug. So what do they do? Well, according to an increasingly proactive Max, there is only one thing to do. They can't run, they can't live normally, they can't make another episode without the permission of a network planning to allocate actual American currency to create thirteen brand-new installments of Jack and Jill and probably, just because they're on a creative development roll, a spin-off of Movie Stars and an entirely new affiliate system called "The Safe Harbor Network." What possible actions can be taken in this bafflingly logic-free zone? And thus spake Max Evans: "We have to fight!" Thank you, oh Bill Pullman-esque underdog fighting guy. And then there's this Chinese riddle of a pep talk: "Pierce does know who we are. But we also know who he is. And we're stronger than he thinks. We may even be stronger than we think." Eh? Furrowed brows and curious glances all around, no one wanting to admit that Max's impassioned call to arms sounds like it came from a GRE reading-comprehension section translated from English to Japanese and then back again. Maybe, wonders the collective viewing public of me, it's a line from the Roswell-inspired smash pop single "I Love You, Sexypants." 'Cause I, like, totally love that song. Totally.
Outside at Indeterminate Rocky Locale, Porno forlornly removes his UPC-symbol badge (he never quite recovered from receiving that letter from Kellogg's telling him they were out of secret decoder rings, and I feel like he's never truly bonded with the badge) and places it in his pocket. Rather than doing just about anything, Porno is listening to his CB for the first time since the car came rolling off the assembly line, just in time to hear two officers discussing the disappearance of "six kids altogether and the sheriff." At this point, a sixteen-ton Acme weight marked "Foreshadow" plunges out of the sky to smash me into the floor of a ravine several miles below the weight's point of origin, all to hilarious animated effect. I push it off me, stand up, pop back into three dimensions, and brush the chirping cartoon birds away from my head just in time to hear a strangely Pierce-like officer responding to a request that "somebody ought to look in on . . . the sheriff's boy." Someone's looking in on him right now. Do you think Kyle is perhaps in some kind of danger? Dang, that weight thing really hurt!
Oh, wait. I actually like the refreshingly Liz-free portion of this sequence. Cut back and forth between this week's wacky caper in front of the Crashdown and the previously referenced agent showing up at the Valenti household. Kyle, a throwback to a simpler time when this show was a completely different kind of hilariously dumb, demands to know what the agent is doing at his house. Cut to the Alienmobile, in which Tesla and Liz sit silently under the ever-concealing bright desert sunshine. Nosiree, can't see them through that impenetrable disguise. Isabel and Michael walk in front of an agent-toting van, and Tesla makes the driver believe that he is seeing Pierce. Meanwhile, she performs the same magic voodoo trickery at the Valenti house, where the suited agent turns and addresses his responses to barked orders at absolutely no one. Through the Pierce hologram, Tesla informs both agents to meet him at another unspellable rendezvous point (sigh, fine -- HON-doh) at a given time. Kyle, incredulous as hell and none too pleased to be called into the script at pretty much the discretion of anyone who isn't him, shouts a "hey" to the suited agent, snapping him out of his Pierce-ified revelry and back into this world again. The following exchange, infuriating for a college lecture tour's worth of reasons, ensues:
Liz: You told them both at the same time to go to HON-doh?
Tesla: Pierce told them to go to HON-doh.
Liz: You just do that with everyone, make them see things that aren't even there?
Tesla: Sometimes it's easier to do that than to make someone see something that's right in front of her eyes.
"Gee whiz," I thought aloud while transcribing this dialogue that snapped, crackled, and popped like so many crunchy rice cereals. This virtual firestorm of filler dialogue is the perfect sequence to quote in its entirety. Why? Who cares. Season finale. Okay, fine, first of all, eh? EH? Haven't we covered my inability to cope with impenetrable phonetic issues already? 'Cause I thought maybe we did. Second, hasn't Liz asked Tesla about that power? Hasn't she seen it in action? Like eleven times? No, not eleven. Closer to a billion, maybe? And what does that last line, spoken for some deeply representative and metaphoric reason I'm at a complete loss to understand, even mean? Her? Her eyes? Does she mean Liz? I don't get it, which means Liz certainly doesn't either. Cut back to Kyle asking for an explanation of his own, but before the suited agent can start talking, kamikaze Max Evans comes bursting onto the scene, taking down the agent guy and rendering Kyle almost pointless enough to never have been on camera at all, a feeling he should be rather comfortable with at this point in the show's non-development. Max takes said ill-fated suited agent and locks his unconscious body in the closet, informs Kyle that Porno is okay, and takes off. But the many months of script neglect has led Kyle to a level of bitterness cured only by staring at one of his father's guns, lapsing into sinister slo-mo, and taking the damn law into his own hands. Think he's putting himself in some kind of danger here? As if we've had any clues to that effect encoded in the excessively agile script. And the incidental BSB-sanctioned scene-change music plays on: "I've loved you like no other, girl/It's always bright and fun. So let's take that step, and get real hep/When I blow you down with my love gun. I've suffered the slings and arrows/Of you playin' with my heart. I think you're funky and rad and rockin'/And shoot! Girl, you're so smart. Sexypants blah blah blah."
Cut to Porno's office, where Valenti walks in on overly-relaxed Pierce, lounging in Porno's chair and addressing Porno in that I-have-so-got-you-beat kind of way: "If you're here to kill me, Sheriff, it won't do any good. There'll be a new man in charge of the unit in twenty-four hours." Porno admits that he's scared. Pierce accuses Porno of having been sent there by the aliens, and Porno looks almost dazed and forbidding enough for me to believe that he's crossed back into eeeeeeevildom without so much as a word of warning to the coddled audience. But I'm almost entirely certain that this is not the true nature of plot development here, as that would qualify as an "interesting twist," and it's better for the "writers" not to get caught playing with story-writing toys too big and scary for them to understand. Porno tells Pierce that the intrepid alien youths are currently disabling his agents, and Pierce responds by actually turning on his radio, perhaps a tool he should consider monitoring a bit more stringently here in this time of worldwide alien panic. Porno lies and offers to help, telling Pierce that he and his family must remain protected following their full disclosure. Sanity wanes as we get thee to commercial.
Sidebar: After the commercial break, this episode of Roswell is now inexplicably rated TV-PG. Get ready for titties and beer in the second half, folks. Whee!
Meanwhile, over in the public-access, twenty-four-hour UFO Center, all covert parties have once again skirted the radar of any interested violent death enforcers and found the time to run home to their safe suburban houses, shower, freshen up with lotions and unmentionables of numerous varieties, let their parents know exactly what's what so the eight cell phones they for some reason seem to share between the six of them don't go ringing right out of their designer hand bags, and make their leisurely way back to the scene of this week's electrifying conclusion just after sundown. Again, I'll admit it, as I have so many times before: these kids are nothing short of astonishing. Isabel and Liz enter the upstairs private offices we've spoken of before, and we pan over to spy, amongst the red, Porno and Pierce lurking in the shadows. Pierce informs Porno that they'll have to "shoot to kill," civilians be damned, and Porno seems to take this news in a surprising amount of stride. Smell we a wacky caper bubbling in that black Roswell cauldron? I believe we do! The house lights are turned off throughout the whole UFO Center, prompting a snarky, "And so go the final, fleeting pennies of the sad, sad Roswell budget" from the couch-bound audience of me. An it's-easier-than-hiring-stunt-doubles scuffle ensues in the dark. The lights are switched on again soon after to reveal Max and Michael brandishing guns at Porno and Pierce, holding them in that bad-ass sidearm way that actually only typified anything close to "badass" in early-nineties Tarantino films. Cut to Pierce tied to a chair, guarded by Max, Michael holding Porno at gunpoint, and Max speaking the line, "I can't believe I trusted you." But what's this? Is that acrid odor of poorly placed plot twists, mixing with uneven character exploration, the smell of a wacky caper still in progress? Holy good cop, Batman! I think it just might be! Michael escorts Porno out of the frame, and we then cut to some other mysteriously unused and unguarded room of the UFO Center. Michael again rails against Porno, "I always thought you were out to get us." Yeah? YEAH? "And I'm glad you were wrong." Michael puts the safety back on the gun. Hello, ultra-non-realistic gunplay. Dear suburbia: Please stop telling your sons how to operate firearms with such conviction and proficiency. Did you see how Max had, by reflex, shoved the gun in the elastic waistband of his pants after securing Pierce to the chair? I too grew up in a middle-class suburban neighborhood. You had to procure three types of photo ID to buy a lottery ticket. I don't care if they have the law's resources on their side now, it's where all this Dirty Harry adroitness came from in the first damn place. Did I mention that I also grew up in a middle-class neighborhood? Kids in my town couldn't shoot a gun. Kids in my town couldn't shoot a basketball. I'm just sayin'. Anyway, Porno was on their side all along, and he even utters the channeling-djb line of the series, encapsulating all the manifold issues I've kept hidden for fear of being ridiculed for my subversive opinions: "It's time for this to be over." 'Cause he's real cool like that.
Clichéd as this is from a "yeah, but how could they have remembered the entire conversation?" perspective, it's much, much easier for me plow right on through this sequence, as Max and Pierce have reversed roles and now Max hurls questions at his captive audience. It's the same dialogue from the opening scene of last week's episode. Go back and read it. That recap was funnier than this one anyway. The camera pans upwards to the office overlooking the proceedings, where Alex doubtlessly opens his mouth only as some elaborate contract fulfillment to "give the Hanks kid some lines" in observing, critically to the action I might add, "Max is pounding him with questions." Oh, REALLY? I half expect the rest of the folks in the room (Maria, Isabel, Liz, Tesla, by the way) to launch into a color commentary on the matter: "Thanks, Alex, for that riveting play-by-play. The thing that's made Max such a success in this arena is that he's a fighter. He's not afraid to get down and dirty with a secret agent government alien hunter eeeevil death guy. And it's that kind of attitude that lets a guy go really far." Or something. Oh, and Isabel is going to try and walk into Pierce's mind and find out where Nasedo is. She finds out, but she thinks he's dead. Tesla says she has the power to bring him back. All she needs are a guy named River Dog, some healing stones, and the most dangerously nonsensical way to tie together all disparate elements of the plot before putting a show out to pasture. Hey, they already have the stones. What an unbelievable coincidence. Fompo, blompo, bompo. And I mean that.
Inexplicable shot of farmlands. Inexplicable shot of suburban tract housing. Previously slaughtered inexplicable shot of Howie. Inexplicable shot of the New York City skyline, which becomes one light less bright during the course of this sequence as I finally smash the glass on the "break only in case of renewal" box affixed to my wall, yank out the enclosed mallet, and smash it into a television set so desperately in need of salvation. Have a very pleasant summer, everyone.
Cut to Porno's van, where Michael curiously inquires as to why exactly Porno is helping them. Porno responds that "there is a right side here and a wrong side, and I don't think Pierce is on the right side." That's fine. But then he continues on by invoking, for some absolutely baffling reason I am currently at a loss to discern, Kyle's name. Strange. I didn't even know Porno had a son. But it was important for him to mention it, I imagine, as even the vaguest reference to Kyle sets up the action for much of the second half of this episode and allows you, the viewing public, to take the reigns and create your own "foreshadow" joke, necessary as one may be in this situation. But before you do, hearken to the action of Liz and Max running madly into a clearing as a large red van comes tearing up behind them. Porno stops the van and Michael jumps out, holding out a hand and finally displaying his one mad voodoo alien power of thinking really hard and turning everything in the camera's frame really, really white. Which, considering the complexion of every actor on the entire network for twenty-three out of every twenty-four hours it spends airing original programming, that power might actually be just a little bit stronger than we'd initially anticipated. Max and Liz jump into Porno's van and he takes off, leaving Pierce and the other inhabitant of the red van stumbling about helplessly in said cloud of white. Hey, cool power. For a crayon.
Porno and the Alien Three arrive in some new, completely nondescript desert locale that looks like every freakin' dingo-ate-your-baby set we've been trapped in for the course of the last three episodes. Porno gazes longingly at Michael and promises, "You know what I want, and it'll get you a new bike, alien boy." Okay, that's not what he says. Can't it be? Can't it just be for one second? In fact he says, "You'll be safe here for a while," and Michael recaptures his recalcitrant James Dean bad-boy thing, which was once so unbelievably tiresome but would now be a welcome respite for the static drone of one character blending into the we've encountered since the show came back from euphemistically shrouded terms like "hiatus" and "respite" and "last-ditch creative retooling." He mutters, "There is no safe anymore," before exiting the van and storming into this new ambiguous "place they'll be safe for a while." Liz follows, and Max tells her that he'll be right in. With just the two of them outside, Porno flashes his pearly yellows at Max, a facial accouterment further accentuated by Porno's pre-pubescent, thirteen-year-old-Bar-Mitzvah-boy moustache he is able to cultivate without fear of rebuke, now that there are officially no women left for him to creep right on out of Roswell. He tells Max that he has to know "everything." (Fifteen minutes and twenty-eight seconds to the first "tell me everything." BO-ring. That doesn't even rank in the top five.) Max doesn't know where they're from. Max doesn't know why they're here. Michael and Isabel are also aliens. Max hilariously attests that "Liz, Alex, and Maria are the only ones who know," and I would probably waste the paltry remainder of HostPro's woefully limited bandwidth ranting about the vast quantities of everyone else in the world who knows, but with so many hands of the "who cares" clause left to be played, I'm going to let the "writers" off the hook for this particular bout of contrived, delusional, bereft-of-linear-narrative psychosis. Go, me. Okay, no I won't. I can't. Hey, Max. Don't forget about THE ENTIRE UNITED STATES GOVERNMENT. There. They know, too. Sigh.
Commercials: Yes, yes, yes! I want to dance. I want to laugh. I want to flirt. But if I have to spend the rest of my life wearing Payless shoes to do all that, maybe I'll just sit here quietly and frown.
And we're underground again somewhere, Tesla, Michael, and Isabel deep in conversation about Michael using his powers in front of Porno and what exactly it all means. Alex, who again shocks me just by his very existence in this scene, pipes up from a cobwebbed corner of the set, "So what's Valenti gonna do? What are we all gonna do?" At which point, from the top of the steps, lit by blazing desert sunshine, Max descends to what I envision should include a fanfare of trumpets and the shameless bowing of heads and averting of eyes as he utters the comfortingly character-appropriate line, "We're gonna think this through." Tesla suggests that the Alien Four find Nasedo and ditch the highly irrelevant excess baggage of everyone else on this show. And dramatic as it sounds, logic dictates that the key to happy survival and success as an out-of-this-world species is putting as many planets between yourself and Liz Parker as intergalactically possible, and just as quickly. Losing the other two in the process isn't exactly a deal-breaker either. Sadly, no one else seems to think this is such a fabulous idea. Safe earthbound counterparts win out yet again, leading to another round of those really awkward hugs the couples offer up in times like these. But even with her come-hither Pippi Longstocking pigtails and that crafty brain trick that can make people think that they like her for ten to fifteen seconds at a time, Tesla remains without anyone to hug. So what do they do? Well, according to an increasingly proactive Max, there is only one thing to do. They can't run, they can't live normally, they can't make another episode without the permission of a network planning to allocate actual American currency to create thirteen brand-new installments of Jack and Jill and probably, just because they're on a creative development roll, a spin-off of Movie Stars and an entirely new affiliate system called "The Safe Harbor Network." What possible actions can be taken in this bafflingly logic-free zone? And thus spake Max Evans: "We have to fight!" Thank you, oh Bill Pullman-esque underdog fighting guy. And then there's this Chinese riddle of a pep talk: "Pierce does know who we are. But we also know who he is. And we're stronger than he thinks. We may even be stronger than we think." Eh? Furrowed brows and curious glances all around, no one wanting to admit that Max's impassioned call to arms sounds like it came from a GRE reading-comprehension section translated from English to Japanese and then back again. Maybe, wonders the collective viewing public of me, it's a line from the Roswell-inspired smash pop single "I Love You, Sexypants." 'Cause I, like, totally love that song. Totally.
Outside at Indeterminate Rocky Locale, Porno forlornly removes his UPC-symbol badge (he never quite recovered from receiving that letter from Kellogg's telling him they were out of secret decoder rings, and I feel like he's never truly bonded with the badge) and places it in his pocket. Rather than doing just about anything, Porno is listening to his CB for the first time since the car came rolling off the assembly line, just in time to hear two officers discussing the disappearance of "six kids altogether and the sheriff." At this point, a sixteen-ton Acme weight marked "Foreshadow" plunges out of the sky to smash me into the floor of a ravine several miles below the weight's point of origin, all to hilarious animated effect. I push it off me, stand up, pop back into three dimensions, and brush the chirping cartoon birds away from my head just in time to hear a strangely Pierce-like officer responding to a request that "somebody ought to look in on . . . the sheriff's boy." Someone's looking in on him right now. Do you think Kyle is perhaps in some kind of danger? Dang, that weight thing really hurt!
Oh, wait. I actually like the refreshingly Liz-free portion of this sequence. Cut back and forth between this week's wacky caper in front of the Crashdown and the previously referenced agent showing up at the Valenti household. Kyle, a throwback to a simpler time when this show was a completely different kind of hilariously dumb, demands to know what the agent is doing at his house. Cut to the Alienmobile, in which Tesla and Liz sit silently under the ever-concealing bright desert sunshine. Nosiree, can't see them through that impenetrable disguise. Isabel and Michael walk in front of an agent-toting van, and Tesla makes the driver believe that he is seeing Pierce. Meanwhile, she performs the same magic voodoo trickery at the Valenti house, where the suited agent turns and addresses his responses to barked orders at absolutely no one. Through the Pierce hologram, Tesla informs both agents to meet him at another unspellable rendezvous point (sigh, fine -- HON-doh) at a given time. Kyle, incredulous as hell and none too pleased to be called into the script at pretty much the discretion of anyone who isn't him, shouts a "hey" to the suited agent, snapping him out of his Pierce-ified revelry and back into this world again. The following exchange, infuriating for a college lecture tour's worth of reasons, ensues:
Liz: You told them both at the same time to go to HON-doh?
Tesla: Pierce told them to go to HON-doh.
Liz: You just do that with everyone, make them see things that aren't even there?
Tesla: Sometimes it's easier to do that than to make someone see something that's right in front of her eyes.
"Gee whiz," I thought aloud while transcribing this dialogue that snapped, crackled, and popped like so many crunchy rice cereals. This virtual firestorm of filler dialogue is the perfect sequence to quote in its entirety. Why? Who cares. Season finale. Okay, fine, first of all, eh? EH? Haven't we covered my inability to cope with impenetrable phonetic issues already? 'Cause I thought maybe we did. Second, hasn't Liz asked Tesla about that power? Hasn't she seen it in action? Like eleven times? No, not eleven. Closer to a billion, maybe? And what does that last line, spoken for some deeply representative and metaphoric reason I'm at a complete loss to understand, even mean? Her? Her eyes? Does she mean Liz? I don't get it, which means Liz certainly doesn't either. Cut back to Kyle asking for an explanation of his own, but before the suited agent can start talking, kamikaze Max Evans comes bursting onto the scene, taking down the agent guy and rendering Kyle almost pointless enough to never have been on camera at all, a feeling he should be rather comfortable with at this point in the show's non-development. Max takes said ill-fated suited agent and locks his unconscious body in the closet, informs Kyle that Porno is okay, and takes off. But the many months of script neglect has led Kyle to a level of bitterness cured only by staring at one of his father's guns, lapsing into sinister slo-mo, and taking the damn law into his own hands. Think he's putting himself in some kind of danger here? As if we've had any clues to that effect encoded in the excessively agile script. And the incidental BSB-sanctioned scene-change music plays on: "I've loved you like no other, girl/It's always bright and fun. So let's take that step, and get real hep/When I blow you down with my love gun. I've suffered the slings and arrows/Of you playin' with my heart. I think you're funky and rad and rockin'/And shoot! Girl, you're so smart. Sexypants blah blah blah."
Cut to Porno's office, where Valenti walks in on overly-relaxed Pierce, lounging in Porno's chair and addressing Porno in that I-have-so-got-you-beat kind of way: "If you're here to kill me, Sheriff, it won't do any good. There'll be a new man in charge of the unit in twenty-four hours." Porno admits that he's scared. Pierce accuses Porno of having been sent there by the aliens, and Porno looks almost dazed and forbidding enough for me to believe that he's crossed back into eeeeeeevildom without so much as a word of warning to the coddled audience. But I'm almost entirely certain that this is not the true nature of plot development here, as that would qualify as an "interesting twist," and it's better for the "writers" not to get caught playing with story-writing toys too big and scary for them to understand. Porno tells Pierce that the intrepid alien youths are currently disabling his agents, and Pierce responds by actually turning on his radio, perhaps a tool he should consider monitoring a bit more stringently here in this time of worldwide alien panic. Porno lies and offers to help, telling Pierce that he and his family must remain protected following their full disclosure. Sanity wanes as we get thee to commercial.
Sidebar: After the commercial break, this episode of Roswell is now inexplicably rated TV-PG. Get ready for titties and beer in the second half, folks. Whee!
Meanwhile, over in the public-access, twenty-four-hour UFO Center, all covert parties have once again skirted the radar of any interested violent death enforcers and found the time to run home to their safe suburban houses, shower, freshen up with lotions and unmentionables of numerous varieties, let their parents know exactly what's what so the eight cell phones they for some reason seem to share between the six of them don't go ringing right out of their designer hand bags, and make their leisurely way back to the scene of this week's electrifying conclusion just after sundown. Again, I'll admit it, as I have so many times before: these kids are nothing short of astonishing. Isabel and Liz enter the upstairs private offices we've spoken of before, and we pan over to spy, amongst the red, Porno and Pierce lurking in the shadows. Pierce informs Porno that they'll have to "shoot to kill," civilians be damned, and Porno seems to take this news in a surprising amount of stride. Smell we a wacky caper bubbling in that black Roswell cauldron? I believe we do! The house lights are turned off throughout the whole UFO Center, prompting a snarky, "And so go the final, fleeting pennies of the sad, sad Roswell budget" from the couch-bound audience of me. An it's-easier-than-hiring-stunt-doubles scuffle ensues in the dark. The lights are switched on again soon after to reveal Max and Michael brandishing guns at Porno and Pierce, holding them in that bad-ass sidearm way that actually only typified anything close to "badass" in early-nineties Tarantino films. Cut to Pierce tied to a chair, guarded by Max, Michael holding Porno at gunpoint, and Max speaking the line, "I can't believe I trusted you." But what's this? Is that acrid odor of poorly placed plot twists, mixing with uneven character exploration, the smell of a wacky caper still in progress? Holy good cop, Batman! I think it just might be! Michael escorts Porno out of the frame, and we then cut to some other mysteriously unused and unguarded room of the UFO Center. Michael again rails against Porno, "I always thought you were out to get us." Yeah? YEAH? "And I'm glad you were wrong." Michael puts the safety back on the gun. Hello, ultra-non-realistic gunplay. Dear suburbia: Please stop telling your sons how to operate firearms with such conviction and proficiency. Did you see how Max had, by reflex, shoved the gun in the elastic waistband of his pants after securing Pierce to the chair? I too grew up in a middle-class suburban neighborhood. You had to procure three types of photo ID to buy a lottery ticket. I don't care if they have the law's resources on their side now, it's where all this Dirty Harry adroitness came from in the first damn place. Did I mention that I also grew up in a middle-class neighborhood? Kids in my town couldn't shoot a gun. Kids in my town couldn't shoot a basketball. I'm just sayin'. Anyway, Porno was on their side all along, and he even utters the channeling-djb line of the series, encapsulating all the manifold issues I've kept hidden for fear of being ridiculed for my subversive opinions: "It's time for this to be over." 'Cause he's real cool like that.
Clichéd as this is from a "yeah, but how could they have remembered the entire conversation?" perspective, it's much, much easier for me plow right on through this sequence, as Max and Pierce have reversed roles and now Max hurls questions at his captive audience. It's the same dialogue from the opening scene of last week's episode. Go back and read it. That recap was funnier than this one anyway. The camera pans upwards to the office overlooking the proceedings, where Alex doubtlessly opens his mouth only as some elaborate contract fulfillment to "give the Hanks kid some lines" in observing, critically to the action I might add, "Max is pounding him with questions." Oh, REALLY? I half expect the rest of the folks in the room (Maria, Isabel, Liz, Tesla, by the way) to launch into a color commentary on the matter: "Thanks, Alex, for that riveting play-by-play. The thing that's made Max such a success in this arena is that he's a fighter. He's not afraid to get down and dirty with a secret agent government alien hunter eeeevil death guy. And it's that kind of attitude that lets a guy go really far." Or something. Oh, and Isabel is going to try and walk into Pierce's mind and find out where Nasedo is. She finds out, but she thinks he's dead. Tesla says she has the power to bring him back. All she needs are a guy named River Dog, some healing stones, and the most dangerously nonsensical way to tie together all disparate elements of the plot before putting a show out to pasture. Hey, they already have the stones. What an unbelievable coincidence. Fompo, blompo, bompo. And I mean that.
Freaky-deaky subplot ahoy! Cut to Michael and Porno in the back room of the UFO Center, where an unsubstantiated report of Porno being acquainted with a government worker turn out to be false. I have no idea why it came up, and I have no idea why I decided to pass it along.
Wrestling with the rope, the one confinement tool no captured television character has ever, EVER failed to escape, Pierce espies Kyle entering the UFO Center. Kyle knows Pierce as the deputy, and we are immediately clued into the innate bond the two must have doubtlessly fostered in the one episode the deputy appeared, in which Kyle, to no one's surprise, ultimately failed to materialize. I think the guy who plays Pierce must believe himself to be some kind of master of disguise, for when Kyle approaches, the deputy lapses into a vaguely different accent which he might describe as "soft-spoken southern," but which is less Lon Chaney as "The Man of a Thousand Faces" and more Alec Baldwin as "The Mimic" on Saturday Night Live. Pierce tells Kyle to untie him. Kyle does. And then he gives him the gun. This must be why dumb jocks are called dumb jocks.
Hellbent on being just as gosh-darn ruse-tastic as the rest of the folks he's been spending so much quality time with these last days, Pierce shoos Kyle off and pretends to remain bound. So when Max, Michael, and Porno stride sanguinely through the room like they're on their way to some interplanetary Tupperware party on the UFO Center's Golden Girls-esque lanai, Pierce rises, packs heat, and sets the one-second shootout in motion. He shoots once and takes down no one. Porno responds with an absolute shower, a hailing barrage of bullets that veritably lights up the sky around the UFO Center and fells in its path -- not so much as a folding bridge chair. Putting the Daisy Air Rifle down and settling instead for the tawdry ease of voodoo alien powers, Porno steps aside as Michael takes charge, turning the man a shade of white and blowing him straight through the background slide-projector machine in an unspecial effect brought to you this week by the fine folks at the pre-Lucas F/X house Industrial Light and Sawing the Lady in Half. But it's no bother. It was good enough to kill him. Porno picks up the gun Pierce used. It's his. Dazzling twist. For people who speak Cantonese and live in a world without subtitles. Porno finds Kyle. He's been shot, and Porno begs Max to save him. Bloody mayhem and Porno tears ensue. Another magical turn of events. Oh, you "writers," you. Can you never be stopped? And so it goes, BSB-style: "Baby, I know you are an alien/But no one said it wouldn't be any fun. Heal the man and I'll think you're so money/And don't forget to get the blood off of your sexypants, honey!" That one didn't really make any sense at all. Oh, well. Say it with me, folks: Season finale.
And then Max heals Kyle. Huzzah. Oh, come on, everyone. Stop looking so my-puppy-got-hit-by-the-crosstown-bus here. You knew Max was going to save him. The only person with any reason to look out of sorts is Liz, knowing that Max's predetermined counterpart is standing to her, and now Max is going to go through this whole "I guess you're my soulmate now" issue with the newly-revived Kyle. All of which moves Liz down to an underperforming third in the Max ratings, which is just slightly above, well, me. And I've never had a damn nice thing to say about him. Porno regards Max and practically conjures the damn Backstreet Boys to the set himself, bereft of communicators or rigged acting auditions, speaking the poetic, "I don't care who you are, or what you are, I'll be here for you." As long as you love me, Max. As long as we love each other. And as long as you always show up wearing your sexy, sexy pants. Roar!
That piece of drama firmly behind us with no new action immediately threatening on the horizon, I guess it's time for some more grousing! Michael whines to Max that "I kill people, you heal them. You're good and I'm bad." He uses this potentially sinister turn of events to try and ditch Maria one more time, telling her that "I don't need anyone." Maria asks for the four billionth time, "You can just throw me away. Why is that, Michael? Why?" And though I'm still sticking with "unflattering low-cut tank tops" as the probable truth lurking deep within his troubled psyche, Michael opts for the far more emotionally stirring lie, "Maybe because I love you too much." Yeah, maybe. Powerful choice of words, that "maybe." Oh, the jokes men tell. And then there's a horribly awkward kiss between Isabel and Alex, that to recap would necessitate a surgical procedure that would, in essence, force the removal of my entire brain. So I can't say that seems worth it.
Uh-oh. Mechanical failure in town. The Wacky Caper Train seems to have some trouble pulling out of the station this week, spreading a noxious gas that causes wacky capers to spring up in almost every scene and upping the normative one-caper-per-episode-ratio into, instead, somewhere in the high thousands. Max, Michael, and Isabel conspire to steal the armored vehicle containing Nasedo, knocking out the suited agents with mysteriously-appearing two-by-fours. Sorry, my roommate just came in and typed the following, in practice for a doubtlessly fulfilling and lucrative career as a court stenographer. Anyway, she made me leave it and she won't go away. But who really cares? After all, season finale. And no one's reading anymore anyway. So here it is, straight from the Noxema skin care commercial I accidentally fast-forwarded to: "Oh wait, wait, oil absorbing sheets." And she's not even stoned.
Back on the scoping fjords of Sandy Land, the Alien Four plus Liz kneel over Nasedo's most recent incarnation. I would be really upset that Liz is anywhere in the vague region of the rest of them right now, but I seek my solace in the fact that I've already watched the ending and [SPOILER WARNING] it made it me giggle. And so they invoke the magic healing powers of River Dog's stones, and they stare in a mix of shocked bemusement and just sheer embarrassment (if you think I'm inventing these emotions as a projection of my own horror at the continual river of cheese begat by the special effects, you didn't watch this sequence and you've never seen the show, have you? HAVE YOU?) as Evil Ed's body morphs into the creature within, a wholly "Judy the Time-Life Operator," lazy-as-hell approach to envisioning the large head, skinny body, and big black eyes that have typified the physical make-up of the "alien." And so Evil Ed wakes up. He doesn't know how the orbs work. Max suggests that Evil Ed become Pierce, so they'll have the inside track at FBI headquarters and no one will ever chase them again. This bodes well for season. I'll kind of miss Evil Ed and his signature brand of eeeevil. But for now he's gone, and there are larger issues to consider. So they concentrate on the orbs. And then they glow. And then the "writers" reach back into the interplanetary library and pull out a dog-eared copy of A Beginner's Guide to Derivative Holograms, perusing liberally the Star Wars chapter, and even stopping by the rather lengthy tome on Superman's home on Krypton and just what exactly those darn crystals do when you place them in the correct slots. The four find out that they have lived before, that their essence has been mixed with human genetic material, that Max and Isabel really are brother and sister and the hologram is their mother, that Tesla was Max's wife, that Michael was Max's second in command. Their planet's enemy has come to the Earth, an enemy which for some reason they need to combat here so they can resolve the conflict of slavery raging on their home planet. She even begs, "Help us," probably because they're her "only hope." Then she turns into a Tinkerbell white light and flies off, and oh isn't it just all so very, very touching. But not half as touching as what happens . Max observes that "things will never be the same." But he still wants to be with Liz. He grabs her arm and tells her so, but she woodenly (why oh why do I even bother qualifying?) observes that he has a destiny and she cannot stand in the way of it and blah blah blah ENDcakes. At which point the opening-credits sequence theme song kicks up, a delicate poetic circularity that informs me this is all very, very close to being over. Liz kisses Max and cries and runs away like she has steel rods instead of normal people arms. Buh-bye. This is all so very sad and touching. Except for the crying part. I even get a little bit greedy and hope that her soul-crushing jaunt down the rocky desert hill is accompanied by a tumble and fall of generally debilitating proportions. But that's just me. I strive for more.
And she's gone. Tesla turns to her fearless leader and brave husband and asks, "What happens now, Max?" But his answer, drowned out as it previously would have been by the planetarium music, mercifully obscuring the dialogue in pretty much every scene that isn't this one, is now shrouded by a Close Encounters of the Please Don't Renew This Trash Kind of beeping which becomes apparent all around them. Fade to blue blinking lights in a variety of locations, as yet another communicator of some kind is set off. And there he is: Howie. He wants it that way, and he wants to wait twenty-one episodes and fifty-five minutes to try and deliver his one line without the collective population of at least two planets bursting into unaccountable, spontaneous giggles: "It has begun." I know I'll spend the entire summer season wondering just exactly what that means, at least in between the times I'll spend obsessed with gaining a handle on just exactly what science fiction classics I can play catch-up with, so I can feel rested and ready to sign my contract for the second season of this bring-down-the-house sci-fi juggernaut that will be sure to define a generation of television that, when you look at it from its word for word basics, well, it just plain isn't very good. Suggestions?
Inexplicable shot of farmlands. Inexplicable shot of suburban tract housing. Previously slaughtered inexplicable shot of Howie. Inexplicable shot of the New York City skyline, which becomes one light less bright during the course of this sequence as I finally smash the glass on the "break only in case of renewal" box affixed to my wall, yank out the enclosed mallet, and smash it into a television set so desperately in need of salvation. Have a very pleasant summer, everyone.