Fade up on a small but subtly positioned collection of product-placed "On tonight's episode of" CDs strewn across a table, hopefully none of whose lead singers went out of their way to record more than the fifteen cumulative minutes of music necessary for the total approximate length of each band's career. Two hands lower into the frame to work some mad voodoo alien shit on two discs, and after the hands make the music as wigitty-wigitty-wiggity-whack as prefab hip-hop knows how to be, we pan up to find ourselves in the Crashdown during a rather festive night indeed. Disco lights swirl, the music's kickin', and Isabel, Maria, and Tess are smack in the middle of a dance well-learned at The Bring it On Institute for Budding Faux-Female Liberation, a school whose efforts are continually appreciated by dance enthusiasts and pedophiles everywhere. Predictably, Katherine (or, more specifically, Katherine's breasts, who are actually in contract negotiation to each appear separately and under their own names in the opening credits, so focal to the action of the show they have seemingly become. "Tit" and "Tat"? "Head" and "Lights"? "Twin Peaks"? "Heigl's Jiggles"? I don't know. Maybe we should have a contest) dances directly in the camera's gaze, while her two Flygirls are thankfully relegated to the background, dancing that "cock the head, push the floor, push the floor" dance that's angling for sexy and stopping at "Thriller Video." The girls are all at various levels of suggestively slutty undress, because everyone needs a gold miniskirt and knee-high red leather boots to run away from the bad alien hunter men. Don't they, Maria? Yeah, thought you'd be agreeing with that. Nice boots, by the way. Are those leather?
But not all is well. Cut to a nighttime street shot of Max "Mayor of Roswell, New Pecsico" Evans, illuminating the path of his travel with some hefty headlights work of his own. If you know what I mean, and I think you do. Running, running. He has a red handprint across his chest as left by Nasedo, a clear sign that the full, unforgiving force of coming into contact with the pecs is enough to destroy permanently even an entity which once defined itself as indestructible. The pecs continue to teach us lessons of their manifold strength. They possess the power to heal, the power to kill. The power for good and the power for evil. The power to calm, the power to comfort, the power to help you quit. But at least we know that whatever great Glowing Mysterious Orb in the sky Nasedo has gone to, his final action was to lay a hand on the magical pecs. With which he gazed into his shirtless -- er, I mean "fearless" leader's eyes, whispered soulfully, "I love you, Waxed Evans," and slipped from consciousness for the very last time. That's the shit they leave on the cutting-room floor, but you can tell from the repeated viewings: the subtext was screaming it.
Back at the Crashdown, we pan over to the counter to see the spectators of the girlie dance show. Alex sits at the counter thinking he has a chance with the Maxim cover model. Michael sits on the counter 'cause this week Roswell's resident ambiguous rebellious alien is ambiguously rebelling against comfy bar stools. Face it, folks. The man is tough. And, oh my, who else is sitting at the bar? Why, it's Liz "More Wooden Than a Fourth-Grade Teacher's Mythologized Story About Lincoln's Boyhood Home" Parker, leaning back and watching the action. Oh, burn! They won't even let her dance! Oh, she's kind of moving her arms a little. Oy. If she only had a heart. Or insert "Tin Man" humor of you own making. If you must.
Max rounds a corner, sheathed in perspiration. The folks at Fake Sweat Inc. high five all around and collect their Christmas bonuses early.
Dancing, dancing, dancing. Alex looks on, positively ogling. He had a dream just like this once, and didn't feel better about what happened when he woke up until he saw a filmstrip in Health class about it, telling him it's okay. But what will he tell his mom when she keeps asking him why he insists on washing the sheets?
Waxed Evans runs into some commoners on the streets. He keeps going and they utter some variants on "Hey!" and "Look out!" and "Sweet Lordy Jesus, what in the name of the the Seven Sisters are those?" Because no one understands. No one ever understands.
Back at Crashdown2K, Michael catches Maria's eye and Michael looks away. Maria dances (stay in the back, DeLuca. The BACK. Maxim's lawyers are there, and they wouldn't appreciate common street trash as yourself encroaching on their cover goddess's turf) over to Liz and asks, "He's watching, isn't he?" Then she adds, "Oh, I knew he couldn't resist," before trying to egg Liz onto the floor with her to show Michael what discomfort with one's own body really looks like. Liz refuses: "Me no dance good. Nooooooo dance. Lizbot assembled with no dance chip. No disassemble, Stephanie!" But after much goading, she relents and gets up. She's awesome! The girl's on fire! Or she would be, if it wouldn't be so detrimental to her physical composition. Seeing as she's a pile of kindling and all. Wooden. Right.
Waxed Evans runs at Mach 10 toward a man carrying outdoor patio furniture. The man stands aside. Max careens into a table and the pecs hit the floor. Seismic waves send shocks along previously undetected fault lines and California tumbles into the sea. The power. Oh, the power.
Is this the longest opening credits sequence in the history of the moving image or what? Yeesh. Anyway, back at the raging bash at Crashdown2K, Maria and Liz finally engage in that lost art of "dialogue," which will probably have a good streamlining effect on this recap, which was starting to veer off into the nonsensical haiku of the lunatic mind just now. Mid-dancing ("Dance fun! Me human! Me just like girl!" Liz's emotion chip shouts out), Maria inquires as to Liz and Max's current relationship. Liz tells her that there is absolutely "nothink" between them, but Maria begs to differ: "I saw the way you looked at him. Did you have a flash?" Liz admits that she did. Maria looks smug at having guessed. But lo, worlds collide just at this moment, as Max races through the front door of the Crashdown and the music screeches to a halt. He announces, "Nasedo's dead!" Liz and Alex help him to a chair, somehow each maintaining the proper footing to avoid getting through back against the wall by the awesome power of the oh, you know. "He died. In my arms. He died in my arms," Max continues, crying until the stage directions tell him soon after that it is no longer time to cry. And so he stops. Michael takes over as Big Boss Man, kicking into action and demanding, "We have to get Nasedo to the pod chamber and use the healing stones to revive him." Liz kneels down to the chair and notices a smudge of Unconvincing Blood on Max's face. She astutely observes, "Max, you're hurt," just as Tess kneels down and runs a hand over the wound and healing Max of the terrible condition known as Ketchupy Face. Liz looks jealous. Nice try, Tess, but couldn't he have just, y'know, done that to himself? Why would he let a skanky girl he doesn't even respect do something to him that Max could have just gone home and done to himself far more adeptly? If I had a nickel for every time I asked myself that very same question, I would have...well, five cents, actually. And I was very young. This was, like, junior high. Alex asks what the humans should do, and Michael tells them to go home. Maria asks if maybe they could scope out the other aliens or something, and Michael snips that he'll "take care of it." Tess observes that Michael "is not in charge here," setting up his Dirty Harry rip-off line of the week: "Well, somebody has to be." The Alien Four walk out of the Crashdown, leaving Liz, Maria, and Alex behind. Max turns around and steals a glance at Liz. Lizbot want more dance! More dance!
Still the opening. Over at Silly String Cave, Max, Michael, Tess, and Isabel's Breasts stand over a very damaged Nasedo while the mysterious orbs known at "the healing stones" glow in their hands. This glowing lasts long enough for a lingering shot of Isabel's hands cupped conspicuously underneath just below her ribcage, and then they go dark. Tess almost adopts Liz's funny-for-season-one's-first-four-episodes affectation in asking, "Why isn't it workink?" But at least with her you can understand a few slip-ups with an otherwise pretty decent American accent, lapsing back to her "G'day" tongue with about the same frequency as Nicole Kidman in the To Die For period of her early work. Anyway, Nasedo is dead, Max clarifying, "I think whatever happened to him is something we can't reverse." Tess comments that "he can't die" (prompting a completely unsympathetic "oh, but he can" response from the lonely peanut gallery of me. I'm so alone. Dude, I need to get a cat. I feel like four out of every five MBTV recappers talk about a cat "jumping off their laps" or "running under the couch" during a particularly egregious moment. I totally need a cat), and Isabel's Breasts attempt to comfort Tess with a "there, there" pat. Max reiterates the part about them all being "in danger" and that "the Skins are among" them. For some incredibly hackneyed reason, this jogs Michael's memory into relaying his finding near Pierce's gravesite: "It looked like a snakeskin. I tried picking it up, but it disintegrated." Speaking of which, Isabel directs the kids' attention to Nasedo's body, which suddenly begins to shrink and morph into a dusty ball, this week brought to you by the George Lucas unspecial effects house of Industrial Light and Stealing Cable. He's gone. Tess looks away from her sandy dad and forlornly inquires, "What do we do now, Max?" I say, how the hell about a commercial? Jeez. I can name tenures of royalty in the British Empire that lasted shorter than this sequence.
Opening credits: Which foreboding expression do you suppose history will prove as the most ominous harbinger of immediate doom in the English language? "Abandon hope all ye who enter here," "Fear the reaper," or "Developed by Jason Katims"? It's your call, really.
A large charter bus pulls into a nondescript parking lot, and out walks a character who looks familiar, but only very vaguely, as if he's a guy who maybe I met once at a party or was going out with a friend of mine or my junior high lab partner or maybe was to be found in a disparate series of shots accidentally left in the opening credits whoo, that's it! It's Kyle! Dammit, he's been gone a while. Well, he's back now, stepping of the bus and looking curiously around, carrying two bags and two significantly larger sweat stains under a ribbed short-sleeved girl's t-shirt from Contempo. Seriously, man. Look at that neckline. Femme fatale. Cue montage of Kyle impatiently waiting. Waiting. Waiting. Sweating like some Michael Guerin doppelganger for the new millennium who's at least able to fill out the tight shirts he's in the process of staining so embarrassingly. Finally, Porno pulls up in the police cruiser, hugs his son, apologizes for being late (isn't this town, like, four square blocks around at its widest? Walk it, spunky athlete boy, why don't you), and asks, "How was football camp?" Turns out, football camp was fine, but Kyle chides his father not only for being late, but for being "two hours late." Porno apologizes, telling Kyle, "You came back at kind of a tough time, Kyle." Wow, if that totally doesn't cash in on every "my parents are going to move" neurosis I fostered year after panicky year at summer camp, I don't know what comment would. Let's hear more: "Remember I told you about a man who was protecting Tess?" Kyle hazards a guess: "Noriega?" Ooooh, big words form a little character whose name I would have had trouble conjuring even after his TV father said it twelve seconds ago. But anyway: "Nasedo. He was killed last night. By another alien." Kyle pauses and breathes deeply before launching into a practicing-my-pranayama-on-a-beach-before-sunrise speech beginning, "My strength fails, my vitality exhausted, I cannot find the bull." Porno tosses off a yokel-esque "wha?" and Kyle regroups and admits that he doesn't feel like dealing with "the little green men again." Kyle thinks platitudinous fortune-cookie quotes substitute for hard-fought intelligence. Porno thinks he should cut them some slack. I think stilted foreshadowing is for suckers, and will move right along in accordance with this belief.
School. Michael and Isabel's Breasts stand at her locker, Michael grousing about the fact that their Cheerless Leader advised that they go back to school and "act normal." Michael says: "Come back to school. What a great plan." Michael thinks he is cleverly sarcastic. I think he looks like a very, very wet dog. Who needs to be put on the Diet Kibble if he wants to keep up with the upper body strength of the rest of the male cast we've perused in tight or no shirts so far this hour. Michael tells Maria that Max is going to get them "all killed," right before they run into him the hall and awkward drama ensues. Hi. Hi. Michael leaves. Max tells Isabel that they're doing the right thing," checking out numerous fan sites of the show as to sound as tired and repetitive as possible when he retreads the age-old, "Until we know what we're up against we've got to keep our heads down" for the twenty-fourth consecutive episode. Isabel looks down and responds, "I hope so. I'm too young to be dust." Satisfied that Breasty McTetons was finally allowed to uncork some of the sassiness that's been kept on ice since the finishing touches of puberty rendered any actual thoughts Isabel could hope to express completely obsolete, Cheerless Leader frowns and skulks off.
A new cheesy camera effect that looks like a fuzzy combination of life under a black light and my oft-invoked Bar Mitzvah video kicks into high gear once Max is alone in the hallway. He walks. He is being watched. He stands with his back against a set of lockers as he watches a door to a storage room helpfully demarcated "Storage Room" for our playing-along-at-home convenience. He approaches the room with the same sure-footed speed and effortless grace of a gazelle who is dead. He reaches for the handle and turns it. A green force field appears before him, and he discovers that the presence in the room was merely a man in a mask holding a blow torch. "What was that?" the man asks. The green fiend disappears. "What was what?" The blow torch guy takes off his safety mask and regards it warily. He is easily fooled because the common laborer typically lacks intelligence.
Max sits in history class, where a white-haired, bespectacled, very professorial teacher, hasn't gotten the memo that lecturing on a topic that can be directly applied to the life of a conflicted character is a deader plot convention than "and I would've gotten away with it if it weren't for you meddling kids" and "it was just a dream all along" combined. Photos of John F. Kennedy litter the front of the room as the teacher muses, "What does it mean to be a leader?" Oh, here we go. "In the Fall of 1962, John Kennedy was still a young man. The Soviets thought he was a pushover. And, at that point, most Americans would have agreed." Blah blah blah, he continues that Kennedy persevered when his nation at risk needed him most. Imagine what it would be like to hold the fate of an entire nation in your hands. "Imagine what it would be like to come face to face with the very real possibility that your decision could literally mean the end of the world." Imagine that we get it. Oh, wait, I don't have to imagine that we get it, do I? Why? Because WE GET IT. Thanks, though.
Cut to Max entering the amazingly unlocked UFO Center (did the SAG strike start with the continuity editors, or what?) and looks at a whole lot of action on the main floor. Men wheels dollies containing boxes here and there, and Max walks down the steps and is approached on the floor by Simon from Go, who had a surprising appeal as Simon even as the biggest dork this side of the Hoover Dam and continues to maintain it now. Maybe it's the accent. Because it's definitely not the hair. Simon marches up to Max, guesses his identity for some really enigmatic reason, and tells him, "I'm Brody Davis. You're working for me now." Max wonders as to the status of Bania, whose stores of crusty Ovaltine has clearly gone dry, requiring him to vacate his spot for someone a little younger, a little hipper, a little more dangerous in the hair. A little more "WB." Bania has been "bought out." Simon tells Max to "go home," warning him, "If anybody asks, you never saw any of this." Sigh. If only I could say the same.
With all this aimless walking, Max's lower half must be just as built, but for the love of all things holy, I hope we never have the misfortune to prove that hypothesis either way. Now he's walking (again, alone, a bit strange for someone in his amount of supposed "danger") across a field of some kind, where he runs into Tess sitting on a park bench. Hi. Hi. She's not okay, it turns out: "He tried to prepare me for this, y'know? Said there might come a time when he wouldn't be around anymore and I had to fend for myself."
Cut to Liz and Maria in the once-so-prominent Jetta, Maria annoyingly claiming, "It is just a matter of time before you weaken." She thinks Liz will get back together with Max, claiming that he will never care about Tess. At which very moment they drive past Max and Tess walking familiarly down the street. Liz looks appropriately dissed and horrified.
Back to the street, Tess unsubtly turns the convo toward the non-mating-ritual aspects of their non-burgeoning relationship, amazingly nailing it: "I know how you feel about me. How everyone feels about me." She claims that her feelings are inconsequential, and that Nasedo taught her not to get caught up in the human emotions stuff: "You lived another life, Max. A life completely different from this one. A life. When you loved me." She puts a hand on his face and he gently removes it in a defensive I-thought-you-just-said-you-know-how-everyone-feels-about-you gesture. He doesn't remember that life. But the reverie is soon to be broken by the sound of breaking glass which would be far more dramatic if I had any clue whose house they were supposed to be in front of right now. Is that supposed to be Tess's house? Because it looks completely different from the one she moved into with Evil Ed late last season. Anyway, they take pause. They run into the house and out another door in time to see the backyard gate slam closed. Tess proposes, "Maybe it was just a burglar." And then Max picks up a dissolving slab of yuck-o-la skin. "Maybe it was just a burglar with leprosy." Nah, she doesn't say that.
At home with Porno, our intrepid lawman sits at the kitchen table balancing his checkbook at what must be four in the morning. In a bathrobe. And even though it's really too dark in the room to see anything, I still feel as if the very presence of a bathrobe and the one total layer of clothing that implies is way too much information, thank you very much. There's a scratching sound at the door because everyone skulks excessively and no one rings a doorbell, and Porno ups from the table and grabs himself a firearm. He makes for the door as the nondrama unbuilds. He flings the front door open. Max and Tess. Oh, is that right? They need his help. They must be very nervous and preoccupied. No one even mentions the robe.
Cut to an alarm clock changing from 6:59 to 7:00; Kyle reaches up and lowers the volume (who doesn't just turn it off?) when the music snaps to life. He falls out of bed and immediately begins doing push-ups, which is literally identical to my own morning routine, except he left out the part where I hit the snooze alarm about sixty times and then finally conjure the necessary breath to yell directly at God for inventing alarm clocks, morning, and my nasty-ass hangover. Oh, and I don't do push-ups. ["Hi, we're separated at birth." -- Wing Chun]
Kyle walks shirtless into the living room, those push-ups hardly the extent of his morning ritual to in any way resemble the impressive chestal regions of several other characters on this show he simply can't, for a variety of reasons, ever hope to catch up to. Kyle has a normal, human-looking upper body. For a thirty-year-old, of course, but that doesn't really come as that big of a surprise. Seeing as he's thirty and all. Kyle spies Max and Tess sleeping on opposite couches. He calls out his father's name (though he goes with "Dad," rather than the more familiar and instantly recognizable "Porno," for some strange reason), waking Tess up from the couch. She bids him good morning, answers his what-the-hell-are-you-doing-here query with the highly amusing "I live here," stares at his boxers, notes, "Calvin Klein, I approve," snaps the waistband, and leaves. That was pretty funny. What show is this again?
Over at Christie Todd Whittaker's office, Liz, an unpaid intern and high school student, is suddenly the campaign's only employee. What of the "paid staff" she mentioned so optimistically in last week's episode? Whittaker enters and asks whether there are any phone calls, asking specifically about Pierce and adding, "Look at me, waiting for my boyfriend to call. Which one of us is in high school?" Liz follows Whittaker into her office and dourly informs her, "Agent Pierce isn't coming back. Ever." Whittaker nudge-nudgingly responds that Liz makes it sound "like he's dead," and Liz continues that he left a voicemail message that it was over and he's never coming back. But Liz erased it. Oops! Just can't get good help on the free these days, I guess. Liz leaves the room. Dreary music drears.
And, in history class, Max learns that he is exactly like JFK. Oliver Stone couldn't have said it any more blasphemously, that's for sure. We learn that during the Cuban Missile Crisis, "Unless he acts, and acts soon, he runs the risk of allowing events to control him. Right or wrong, a choice has to be made, and it has to be made right now." The aliens from Max's home planet line up their flying space pods in a blazing light show configuration visible from their galaxy to ours, which lights up the nighttime Roswell sky with words both worlds can clearly understand and relate closely to in their planet's dire time of need: We. Get. It. Mallet to the head hurts so very, very bad.
Cut to Max getting it just a few dozen scenes after the rest of us. He's alone in the UFO Center and uses his mad alien voodoo shit to break into the secret room with Simon's special computer. He hits one key and the computer tells him that there was a "pulse detected at 4:33 PM New Mexico time" on May 14. The day mom came to visit from Planet Superman Rip-Off. Max spots a mysteriously glowing orb. I know, I can hardly believe it either. He moves toward it, but just at that moment Simon appears behind him: "Don't touch that!" And he won't. Because now it's time for a big, fat commercial break. Let's just call this whole segment a wash and say that we'll start fresh after the ads, m'kay? Thanks, then.
We return from the break just exactly where we left off: Max standing stock still not touching that, Simon staring accusingly, and me face down on Wing's computer at MBTV Headquarters because I spent the entire day operating under the misguided notion that I was on something called "vacation" and now it's three in the morning and my glasses are broken and I'm really, really tired. Max insists that he's "just looking around," and Simon-Who-Likes-To-Do-Drawings asks Max if he recognizes the glowing orb that he's busy not touching. Rather than the appropriate, "Well, when you see as many of these things as I do over the course of an average season..." response, Max answers the question with a question (an infuriating habit), "What is it?" This really pushed Simon's buttons: "It's over, Evans. Go home. Don't come back. You're fired." Max leaves. Simon worries how he's going to explain the bottle of Sun-In he poured on his hair to his mother when he gets home from UFO Fantasy Camp. He'll tell her it was just the sun, of course. But she won't believe him. Because moms never do.
Meanwhile, Liz seems to have suddenly become the only employee at Christie Todd Whittaker's office, despite the Congresswoman's recent assertion that she has "a large paid staff." Except for the "large," "paid," and "staff" parts. Liz stands near her desk, careful not to block the WB Product Placement cherry iMac that threatens to overwhelm the entire action of the sequence, because there is no step three. Maria tramps around the office (Personal visits? On my second day at work? Um, not?), smack in the middle of a prepared speech about things that are, as usual, not in the realm of "her business." Here's some pap now: "I think I know why Max and Tess were, y'know, together last night. He was just playing boduguard. He was walking her home in case the killer was following her." Liz thinks Max "sent" Maria, and follows up that already snarky, non-vanilla (or, at least, vanilla with some colored sprinkles) barb, "Will you keep your big, fat nose out of this?" Giggles all around. Except at Wing's house. ["Oh, there were giggles. Not at that, of course." -- Wing Chun] Liz then sends Maria packing under the pretense that she has a lot of work to do, and she sets to task on tapping a few random keys on the glorified pink-tinted Tupperware container (God, how snobby have I become since switching to the PC?) until she hears a whirring sound coming from behind Whittaker's door. Because unpaid interns halfway through their second day are often invited into the boss's closed office door without being granted entrance, Liz sort of knocks and then barges right on in to find the Congresswoman halfway through a highball of whiskey, shredding documents into a trash bin on her desk. Oh, no! The script! Three in the morning, time for the easy joke. And there it was. "Not a pretty sight, is it, Parker?" she asks. "Not every day you walk in on your boss drinking and shredding." Yes, she would think that. But then again, she's not up at the corporate offices with me right now, is she? Drink, drink, shred, shred, boot pesky posters. Rinse, lather, repeat, laugh maniacally, sleep. And so it goes. Parker asks if she can do anything to help, and Whittaker tells her to "grab a file, feed the beast." Liz enters the room and picks up a stack of paper, on top of which is just coincidentally a piece of paper which reads, "FBI Special Unit: Classified Material." Liz asks if she's shredding (well, "shreddink," but whatever) all of the alien files, and Whittaker drunkenly asserts her need to destroy anything that belonged to Pierce. As Liz shreds, Whittaker sits on the desk: "You ever been in love, Parker?" Parker admits that she has, but that the relationship ended because "there was somebody else in his life." Whittaker offers a hackneyed, "You go, girl!" asking Liz, "Who is this bitch who moved in on your man?" Oooh, TV-14 language. Whittaker baits Liz into admitting that she hates the girl who moved in on her man. Liz offers up the name "Tess," and Whittaker slurringly responds, "Tess? What is that? I hate her already." Which is, y'know, actually kind of funny. Cough cough. The phone rings, and Liz retreats to answer it. Behind the closed door, music of high drama begins to play, and Whittaker's face loses the smile and the drunken glaze: "Tess."
Hey, look, it's Tess! Sound the clever alarm! She's lying on Kyle's bed reading a magazine and wearing just a long shirt. Dude, could Kyle's room be any cheesier? It's all '70s and wood-paneled and suburban rec room creepy. Like underage Calvin Klein models are lining up outside to shoot censored commercials in skimpy cut-offs even as I type these words. He walks in and discovers her: "Hey. This is my room. And that's my jersey." She apologizes and begins to remove the jersey in a very Mork-from-Ork ignorance of normative human behavior kind of way. She snarks that he is "kind of uptight about nudity, for a guy who reads Juggs." He patronizes her further about her inability to respect his privacy, and she plot develops, "You Buddhists have, like, no sense of humor." She found Buddhist literature under his bed, see, and he closes the door and tells her not to tell anyone because he has a reputation to protect. He needs clarity during this time of aliens-are-among-us upheaval. He tells her she can't understand, and retorts with a touching tale: "I'm a girl from another planet. No family, no friends. Only three other people like me in the world. And the man I grew up with? The man who raised me? He was just murdered. You're right, Kyle. What would I know about needing peace of mind?" And she leaves. I don't know why I care about the two of them together. But, in fact, I do.
Ambiguous outdoor locale appropriate for talking really loudly about being aliens. Isabel, Max, and Michael discuss the mysterious orb in the hands of a total stranger. Each toes his usual party line: Michael is hotheaded and thinks that Simon killed Bania and Nasedo, Max believes that Michael should keep his voice down and recommends tracking down Bania, and Isabel sits in black leather pants with her legs spread, offering yet another soft-core alternative for teenage boys concerned about getting caught buying actual porn. Michael suggests, "Instead of all this talk, why don't we just break into the UFO Center and take the damn thing?" Max frets that it's too dangerous. Michael turns to Isabel and requests a tiebreaker. "Don't put this on me, Michael. I'm just a girl!" Well, just the first part. Max again asserts the he's made his decision, and Michael snipes that as his second-in-command, he's sure Max used to listen to him.
Cut to Michael breaking into the UFO Center. He skulks behind poles while Simon walks around the place, orb in hand. When Michael walks in range, the orb begins beeping in Simon's hand, sending a wave through the room that knocks Michael off of his feet. He stands just in time for Simon to spot him from across the room. Michael runs out and the chase is on! Ugh. Sars, pass the Schnapps. Oh, you, um, finished it all, you say? Yeah, well, Dawson's was pretty bad, after all. Okay, forget it. Sigh.
Back at Chez Evans, Max complains, "Nice move, Michael. How many times do we have to have the same conversation?" Isabel tells him to back off, adding that they have to do something about Simon, accusing him of being a Skin and killing Nasedo: "Max, we have to kill him." The rest of the scene, sadly, is soon to be drowned out by the defeaning roar of metaphors being strangled to within an inch of recognizable existence. We're back in history class. A collection of JFK-oriented shots actually fills my television screen as the teacher tells us, "Whatever course he chooses, history will be his final judge." Outside the school, Max frets to Maria that he doesn't know how to be a proper leader, and she actually contextualizes her wackiness pretty elegantly, for once, sending up the faux-seriousness of the whole dour mess with the sentiment, "I have a thought: What are you talking about?" So she decides to help him by demystifying the whole JFK myth, beginning, "JFK. He's not so great. He cheated on his wife with tramps. Oh, so there's something you and Jack have in common. How is Tess, anyway?" Max innocently denies being involves with Tess in any way, and Maria counters with her spying of their moonlit stroll. Max gets all Melty McDewEyes in whining, "I love Liz. What am I supposed to do?" She tells him to follow his heart.
Cover of darkness at the UFO Center, where The Original Alien Three too-easily enter looking very, very much like the Holy Trinity of otherwordly badasses from Superman II. General Zod...er, I mean "Max" rallies his troupes with the proclamation, "Let's do it." And so they do. Max looks around the UFO Center, and we are treated to an actual montage of first-season episodes, from the shooting at the Crashdown to the shooting of Pierce, moments that have been previously recapped and thus skipped without guilt here. Gotta love the unrecappable montage as a time sucker, eh? How very Real World Roswell of them. Montage ends. Max pipes up, "We can't kill him." And then he throws up that green force field thing. They ask him when he figured he had the capacity for that particular parlor trick, and he tells them that he's known how to do it for a while. He then says that he has to face Simon himself. Michael asks what happens if Simon kills Max, and Max has his barbed retort at the ready: "Then you get to be fearless leader." Max puffs out his chest and the pecs ripple briefly with pride, causing an ostensibly dormant volcano to erupt underwater, halfway around the world.
Showdown. Max walks into Simon's office to find him smack dab in the middle of his one case: What IS the deal with May 14th? Max launches right in: "What are you doing in Roswell?" Simon asks if the disgruntled ex-employee has shown up to kill his boss. Max cuts to the chase: "You're one of us, aren't you?" Simon agress he is and then speaks: "The only thing I can remember about my abduction is the color of the wall and the smell of burnt hair." Oops. He's not really one of them. He's a loony with an abduction story. Ah, well. Again. Seven years ago aliens abducted him on the Mass Pike. On May 14th, the orb started glowing.
Cut to this week's disappointed expectation coming to a close. Back in the Crashdown, Isabel and Kyle fill in the gaping plot holes, including the millions of dollars worth of Internet start-up money (obviously an early MBTV investor) that landed him billions of dollars before he was twelve. Kyle enters and tells Tess that she can have his room during her temporary stand at Porno's House of Porno Wood Paneling. Courtney (whose entire existence on this show I don't think I even would have remembered without the forums on this site) asks Michael what he thinks of piercing. This clearly means she is a Skin. Max enters and finds Liz. He tells her he's not over her and doesn't care about his destiny: "All I care about is you. So know this. I'm coming for you, Liz." Yawn. Courtney's a Skin. Further proof: she bails the scene of the Crashdown floor and asks perpetually put-upon Maria to cover for her. Courtney walks into the mysteriously appearing Crashdown bathroom and looks on the mirror. Something's wrong with her skin. Her SKIN, I say. She pokes around in the general area of HER SKIN for a moment, finally reaching for a spot underneath her chin and pulling her entire face off, ripping off Poltergeist even more than she's ripping off her face. Sad, that. She throws her old face in the toilet and walks out of the bathroom. And even though the clue of this strange and unexplained woman's actual origins left her home planet billions of miles away traveling light years before it even enters our galaxy, we could still see it coming.