This is totally off-topic, for those of you keeping score: Yeah, I know "Father Figure" is technically not a Wham! song. Let's make that clear right up front. No need to let me know again. Turn your e-mail off. Don't send that e-mail. No need to. You don't have to click that button that says...oh, now see what you've gone and done?
Fade in on just another day at West Roswell High, where Liz "Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Sappiness" Parker and Maria "The Star-Spangled Yammer" DeLuca stage direct a meeting at the far end of the runway...er, I mean "hallway," and vamp toward the camera in sync to the product-placed soundtrack. Maria asks Liz if she is "okay," and Liz responds that she "didn't get much sleep last night." Maria makes it All About Her with the non-segue, "You look like you got your heart stomped on. No, wait, that would be me," before tossing out the at-least-I-was-listening-before-I-nodded-off concession, "It's possible you look worse." Says the girl with the über-beehive hair pile that leaves her one shapeless housedress and a Jell-O mold away from being a 1950s suburban housewife. But anyway. Liz wonders as to Max's whereabouts, and Maria surmises, "He did this to you?" Liz explains that she can't explain, instead asking of Maria, "If you see him, just don't tell him I asked." Maria smiles a broad, non-sequitur kind of smile that in no way constitutes a rational reaction to Liz's request, just so she can register a radical shift in facial expression when Michael "The Shaggy D.A." ambles up and effortlessly fulfills the stage direction of, "Through pursed, too fleshy lips" which seemingly precedes all of his lines these days. If by "these days," you mean "forever." And thus he spake: "Hey." Maria wants none of his "hey" or his "lips" or his "flesh," shooting out this week's Contrived Speech of Faux-Female Liberation in record time when Michael evokes Courtney's appropriately-reviled name: "You listen to me. She made a play for you and you went for it. So what, now she's screwed you over and you've come to realize she's a cheap, manipulative tramp? This is not news to me." Well then, is this? "She's an alien. A Skin, like Whitaker." Judging from her slow, "I. Am. In. Shock." turn and the abrupt disappearance of the "Featured on tonight's episode" Top 40 poor-man's-every-other-band-with-three-chords-and-a-pair-of-leather-pants rip-off (a band I would probably take the time to nickname "Destiny's Bile" or some such other thing, if I thought popular culture was ever going to hear a peep out of them again), this is quite the surprise indeed.
Cut to a conveniently empty classroom, where the introductory seminar "Conspiracy For the Feeble-Witted Mind: We Loudly Discuss Being Aliens 101" brings the Alien Four plus Maria together for this week's lesson, "Maybe A Megaphone Would Do The Trick There, Shouty." Michael orates that he knew "there was something wrong" with Courtney even before he found something called a "pitcher" of her in Whitaker's office. I think he's trying to say "picture," but it sadly seems that the oft-mentioned SAG strike has already taken the WB diction coach down with it, so quickly did the put-upon man want to get out of town to catch some fall "foilage" before the fall-out of the "nucular" war about to take place. Michael claims that Courtney got away "out the window," and Maria interrupts that it must have been tricky to catch her "with your pants around your ankles." Tess "Warren G." Harding leaps in and demands they "settle the personal crap" on their own time. She also deduces that Courtney and Whitaker must have been working together, seeing as they were both Skins and both in Roswell, and Isabel "God Shed Her Grace On Thee" Evans agrees that Courtney must know everything about them. Michael snarks at a dazed Max "Garnering Votes For The Pectoral College" Evans, and Max returns to this room again to ask, "If Courtney is a Skin and she was working with Whitaker, the first question is does she know Whitaker is dead." Proving that the excess volume of their conversation has alerted the local media to conveniently air stories in an order that favors contrived plot development for the Alien Four, just at this moment a conveniently placed TV practically turns itself on as an oddly Jennifer Love Hewitt-esque (the most significant distinction between them, I guess, is the fact that this one is still allowed to appear on television) reporter lets the kids know, "A controversial New Mexico congresswoman is dead. We'll have that story in just a minute." JLH leaves out the teaser for the fluffy entertainment news that reads, "And also tonight, not me. Never me. Never, ever again." Because really, it's just too sad.
Max is the King, so he gets to opens the letter with that trademark "I defy the letter opener, paper cuts be damned" non-bravado of his. "Dear Member, Your failure to report as scheduled violates protocol. We must receive word by the 25th of this month or terminate your membership effective that date." The 25th was yesterday! It was the day Whitaker died! Max continues, "Sincerely, T. Greer, Senior Coordinator, Vilandra Project." Music from the Alien Four's native land of the Planet Arium (see what I did there?) forms a somber chord as Isabel flinches at the word but claims she has never heard it before. Liz calls this T. Greer, who asks suspiciously what she wants. She shrugs her shoulders like she's in the middle of enacting a wacky ruse, when in fact all she does is tell the man on the other end the truth: that she just opened the letter, that Whitaker is dead. This T. Greer fellow thanks her for calling and hangs up, and Liz regards the rest of the group and grouses, "He just hung up." Dude, he said thank you. What more did you want? Besides, you'd better keep calls short so that line remains free in case one of your hundred of thousands of callers who...oh, never mind. Seriously, that phone hasn't rung once. Anyway, Max pioneers a plan to drive out to Arizona, and Michael claims that he's not going anywhere until he tracks down Courtney. Max ups the social ante ever so slightly in amassing the most uncomfortable dynamic available, because what are hijinks if they can't be hijinks of the wackiest kind: "We do need you to come with us, Liz. You're the only one who has a legitimate connection to Whitaker." But shouldn't someone stay and take care of the phone, just in case the phone is...oh, that's right. NEVER. MIND.
Liz mans the wheel of the Alienmobile, Tess sleeps on Max's shoulder in the backseat, and Isabel indulges in the in-flight entertainment known to frequent travelers on Casual Viewer Airlines as Grainy Black-and-White Flashbacks Of Whitaker's Grisly Death. "Your name was Vilandra" this and "You had a great love" that. Liz, hands at the ten and two positions and religiously checking the rearview mirror for future episode spoilers (seeing as how the plot progression seems to be taking place completely in reverse), makes eye contact with Max, who wastes no time: "I haven't slept since I saw you with Kyle. Liz, I know you. And I don't believe that you would do that to me. It doesn't make sense. Tell me what happened." And this time, please do it without using any conjugated form of the verb infinitive "to make love." Because you're a seventeen-year-old girl, not Blanche Deveraux after a randy night of Strip Bingo at the Dade County Community Center and a glass of Merlot before getting yourself some "cheesecake on the lanai," if you know what I mean, and I think you do.
Two blocks down, one left, and a red mailbox later, the Alienmobile pulls up in front of the Crawfords', and Max asks a slowly departing mailman, "The Crawfords'?" The mailman points to the house with the red mailbox, two blocks down and one left from the Travolta Center. I know this show hasn't been quite as boring as last season lately, but I can all but smell time passing during this sequence. I'm just sayin'. They all step out of the car, Liz holding a brown package. She introduces herself to an older woman standing on the porch, and announces, "I just wanted to drop off some of your daughter's personal effects." Er, "effects"? Is that what you drop off after you've been "making love"? What? Decade? Is? This? The lovely Mrs. Dead Whitaker melts at Liz's gesture, walking down off the porch and calling her husband, Mr. Walt Dead Whitaker, to the car. He's curmudgeonly. Mrs. Dead Whitaker tells them to come inside the house so she can make them something to eat after their long, long drive wah blah blee. Countrybumpkin-cakes, and we go inside. The music is suddenly a surprisingly jaunty synth that sounds like it was composed by Howard Jones for the unreleased sequel to One Crazy Summer. Not that Maria would know who that is or anything.
Chez Dead Whitaker, interior. The Traveling Four sit fidgeting on a couch while Mr. Dead Whitaker takes to an easy chair and puts his cowboy boots up on the nondescript wooden table, because they are normal people and Not. Aliens. Spoiler? Feh. They banter about directions until Mrs. Dead Whitaker reemerges and ooohs a bit and aaaahs some more that the kids would come all this way "for her service." Liz, who can't convincingly act like she cares about Whitaker's life because she can't convincingly act, y'know, at all, takes a stab at emotional investment: "We felt like we should come. The Congresswoman, she was special. To all of us." Isabel takes it one plot-developing step too far: "Like a mother." Just at this moment, a young teenage boy appears at a door across the room and stares, stares, stares. Isabel offers a "hello," and Mrs. Dead Whitaker insists that this "Nicolas" come in and meet the guests. Isabel and Nicolas lock eyes. Thank you IMDb: Nicolas played three-year-old cutie and Mack Truck casualty "Gage" in the creepiest and schlockiest horror movie ever, Pet Sematary. ["Consider yourself granted permission to yell, 'Fuck you, hairball!' at will." -- Sars] Much cuter then, considering what Runty has morphed into here. And it's only going to get worse as puberty gets its claws in him even further. This kid's got Ben from Growing Pains written all over him.
Ah, yes, another stakeout. Maria is in full-on Wacky Mode as she and Michael stare through binoculars into Courtney's hideout from The House Government Subsidy Built. Bantercakes, until Maria supposes that "she booked. Out of town." Michael knows one thing for sure -- "She wouldn't do that. She's obsessed with me," leaving the door way too open for Maria's return volley, "I guess that makes two of you then, doesn't it?" He imagines that she'll show up "sooner or later," and a voice from behind them moves things right along, "How about sooner?" And there she is. Michael stands in a big hurry and holds out a palm, and she defensively calls for a "truce." He sits her down and Perry Masons right in, "So you're a Skin like Whitaker?" Maria launches in with her own line of inquiry that ends with, "Why are you obsessed with my good-looking if badly-groomed boyfriend?" Heh. Funny. But in a purely shout-out kind of way. Except for the good-looking part. Courtney's not obsessed with him: "I follow him. In the political sense." It turns out that she's a renegade Skin, one who believes that Michael is the key to peace on their planet or some such thing. She calls him their planet's "salvation," King Max's brother who would not betray his family even though it meant the death of everyone he knew. Pause. Maria steps in, yelling, "Michael, if you can hear me now over the sound of your rapidly inflating ego, could you please tell me you do not believe what this Michael worshipper has to say?" And, you know, she has a point. Because as much as I've respected certain political figures throughout history, I've never constructed a shrine in my closet containing photographs captured with Bond-weapon spy cameras and cardboard cutout hearts, just as they don't do in the rest of America or the rest of this planet (those "Te amo, Fidel Castro" shoebox dioramas are amazingly scarce south of the border, indeed) and hopefully on the rest of the planets altogether. Michael accuses Courtney of being a liar who is just trying to divide and conquer, and she simply and sadly responds, "I knew you weren't ready to hear this." He changes tacks, asking about Copper Summit. She tells him to "stay away from there," citing only the fact that "there aren't any Michael worshippers in Copper Summit." Je t'adore, Francois Mitterand!
Another mental vacation to the sovereign nation of Grainy Black-and-White Flashback overtakes Tess inside of Chez Dead Whitaker, when she picks up a picture of the Congressgal and goes back in time to her kidnapping in "Surprise." Mrs. Dead Whitaker skulks in and offers, "Penny for your thoughts." Tess asks about young Whitaker. Mrs. Dead Whitaker reports that she was "wonderful." She smiles too happily. This is the shortest death-in-the-family grieving period that has ever, ever been.
Outside, Lizbot walks solemnly alone on the streets of Frontierland. Max catches up with her and is all kingly pompousness, telling her they weren't supposed to go anywhere alone. And so Max decides it's time for another round of that thing they call ACTING (if by "ACTING" you mean "SHOUTING"), telling her "what I saw can't be true because it means everything I felt in my heart for the last year is a lie." She asks him to quit shouting, claiming to be "scared." He continues on, all seventh-grade-play-audition, "What the hell is going on, Liz? We never lie to each other." Liz retorts that she and Kyle "made love" (as opposed to the radically updated "making whoopie," clearly nixed by squeamish censors), and Max walks away all sad. No love for Max. No making love, neither.
Isabel makes herself bizarrely comfortable for someone staying in the room of a woman reported dead to her family yesterday, spilling her toiletries out all over a bureau. From behind her, Gage makes an appearance and begins spilling it to Isabel that he had planned to visit his sister in Washington year. Isabel asks Gage how much time he spent with his sister, and he lets her know, "When she'd visit, she'd make time." She told him stories about a world beyond Copper Summit, "stories about this planet in another galaxy, and how there was this war going on. Like a revolution." Hey, that information was pretty easy to come by, eh? I guess they're sprinkling a layer of pay dirt over the topsoil these days, so quickly is essential information communicated rapid-fire-style in this unstoppable plot. Not like they could have taken one second to develop this relationship previously in the episode, as they needed instead to attend to that essential sequence earlier on called "twenty-minute still frame of people standing in front of a red mailbox." But anyway. Isabel hazards unwisely, "Did she ever mention Vilandra?" Gage wants to know where's she's heard that name, and Isabel responds that "Vanessa told me some stories, too." Unwise, I'm thinking. Tess barges in and Gage takes off, and Tess starts right in: she just found out that Whitaker was adopted, leading Isabel to surmise that the rest of the family might be human. Or they might have supersonic hearing that would allow them to hear interlopers talking of matters private and life-threatening IN THEIR HOUSE. Idiots. Oh, also, the Universal Friendship League is just a simple civic organization, "like the Elks." They're handling all of the arrangements for Whitaker's funeral, so no one has seen the body. Endless, thumb-twiddling pause. Wonder what's going on with that mailbox.
Jetta. Courtney warns Michael that he's going to get himself killed, throwing a red flare against the sky that reads ESSENTIAL PLOT DEVELOPMENT before fairly screaming, "I didn't spend fifty years finding you so you could throw your life away out of misplaced loyalty." Maria surmises that this passage of time would make her "sixty-five or seventy," and Courtney retorts that "Husks don't age." A wha? Fine, Alien Biology lesson. Anal probes at the ready? Here we go: "This planet's atmosphere is hostile to our race. The husks are a life form technology that we can genetically manipulate to resemble human bodies. Our relationship to it is essentially parasitic." The husks peal after about fifty years, and Michael celebrates the fact that "if the Husks die, we're home free right?" Not so much. Why not? Courtney tells them why: "The Harvest."
Travolta Center. Gage wears a suit and walks in. Meanwhile, the Fabulous Four are wearing exactly what they wore the day before, and Gage beckons Isabel over to the door. She follows him into the Stagecoach Museum and beyond that to an underground lair (of course) of some kind, where she looks up to notice a row of glass pods containing replicas of the collective personages assembled upstairs at the Universal Friendship League. Hello. What's this? Gage appears behind her and smiles, offering a "glad you're here," and takes her down by putting up a palm. "Hello, Vilandra. It's been a long time." No fair, daddy. No fair.
Upstairs at the memorial service, the Skins sit patiently watching while a director with one too many rentals of Heathers on his Blockbuster card ("I love my dead gay Congressgal!") directs the sequence down to its moodiest minutiae, with only the 3-D sunglasses from Winona's dream sequence absent from the mise en scene. Tess, Max, and Liz approach the casket and regard Whitaker inside. Tess observes that she's a "good-looking pile of dust," and Liz touches her hand. It cracks under the pressure like papier-mâché. Liz hastily arranges flowers to cover the hole, just as Greer walks before them to deliver his sermon, scratching his Husky face all the while. They turn around to walk out, and notice suddenly that everyone else in the place is starting to scratch furiously, all simultaneously and too-kitschily and less reminiscent of quality science-fiction television programming and more ripped from the "you used to call me paranoid" verse of the "Pressure" video. The Four have almost reached the door when Greer notes the hole in Dead Whitaker's hand and calls out, "Leaving so soon?" The door slams closed on his command and the three fall to the floor, Max flying backwards and standing on Greer's line, "It appears our long search for the Royal Four has finally ended. How convenient of you to deliver yourselves to us." Max tells them to let Liz go, but Mrs. Dead Whitaker is ready with the retort, "She's a human who knows too much. It's a damn shame, 'cause she's awful cute." Shut up, Mrs. Dead Whitaker. Greer guesses that Max and Tess are "the once and future king and his bride," holding up a hand and telling Max, "This is a moment I've waited for for a long time." They each hold out a hand, Max blocking Greer's death hand with that green shieldy thing. It's all bad.