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.
Opening credits: "Don't blame me, I voted for Sadler."
Back in The Classroom That Logical Speaking Volume Forgot, the TV-within-a-TV reports that the Congressgal was a Democrat who took her husband's place on the ballot when he died six months before the congressional elections. And because this episode was clearly scribed by a "writer" trained in news journalism by the production template of a particularly juicy episode of Behind the Music, the report takes a turn for the but-it-was-on-a-cold-night-in-New-Haven-that-it-all-started-to-fall-apart-for-Milli-Vanilli kind of turn as easy plot development silences the peering cast: "But all that ended yesterday just outside her home town of Copper Summit, Arizona, where a tragic, single-car accident cut short a life of public service." The kids take the time to be incredulous that the news -- the local news, no less -- should be reporting such misinformation, and only Tess has the wherewithal to posit, "So who's conveniently covering up her death for us?" Isabel makes a too-big deal of noting, "Nasedo said the Skins were among us. Skins, plural." Thanks for the updated style guide from the Federal Bureau of I-Already-Knew-That, Isabel, but haven't we previously ascertained that Courtney's presence in Roswell constitutes the plural? She connects the non-dots to magically come to the conclusion that "maybe other Skins created a fake car accident to keep the Feds from looking too deeply into Whitaker's background." What is she, paraphrasing spoilers? Where did that come from? Tess puts a "help me, Future Max, you're my only hope" hand on Max's shoulder and tries to make talk of skin-shedding freaks at least as sexy as she is (success!), asking, "Max, what do we do?" Michael snarks in the foreground a line I thought was pretty knowing the first time I heard it, "Let me guess, nothing." But really, if Max were any kind of leader, he would have put Michael right back in his Wrong Hand Man position with a retort of the "just because I haven't suggested we skulk around in empty houses searching for answers in mysteriously-unlocked locales overflowing with relevant information, Don Derivative, it doesn't make me a crappy King" variety. Max pauses for a moment; the others regard him before Max formulates his game plan: "Liz." Sigh. Just kidding about that whole "not a crappy King" part.
Over at Whitaker's office, Liz talks on a fake phone, not pausing to wait for an alleged response of any kind in between any of the following sentences: "Yeah, we are in total shock. No, we haven't set a date for the memorial service yet. Yes, I will let you know as soon as we do, of course." Looking up at the rest of the assemblage watching this display, Liz stares back with an "I gotta go, they know it's a fake phone" sheepish glare and hangs up in a big ol' hurry. She huffs a martyred, "The phone has been ringing off the hook for the past hour!" Though as soon as the plot-developing dialogue begins in earnest, it completely stops ringing altogether. Max announces that someone covered up Whitaker's death, and asks Liz if people have been calling the office. Have they been asking questions? Like "Where are the police right now?" or "What about this so-called 'paid staff' of Whitaker's we once heard so much about?" or "How can one glorified secretary field so many calls from a phone whose plug is coiled in a rubber band in a supply closet?" or even "Hey, where are the police right now?" People have been calling, she responds, but Liz has just been telling everyone that the Congressgal is on vacation. Max worries that the Skins already know she's dead and wonders how anyone could know, "unless it came from here." Liz takes this as a veiled accusation of some kind, just so Max and Liz can insert the governmentally-sanctioned doe-eyed stare that must inevitably find its way into every scene featuring the two of them. Tess, all Gal Friday, picks up an envelope off the desk (looks like someone has been taking lessons in Sleuthing Within the Confines of Your Own Peripheral Vision from a certain Mikey G. I might mention here) and notes, "The postmark says Copper Summit. It's from something called the Universal Friendship League." Isabel notes that the name of this organization couldn't "sound any creepier" (it would, if it were called "Scientology"), and Tess makes a big ol' foofaraw about the fact that it's marked "Personal." Ooooooh. "Personal." Dun-DUN-Duuuuuuuuuuuuun. Like every credit card bill and coupon book and brown-paper-wrapped porno mag (er, this happened to a friend of mine) isn't marked with that red rubber stamp that costs $1.99 at your local Staples retailer. There's also one that reads, "Confidential" and another regally advertising, "First Class." Darn good thing the already risky Whitaker didn't supply Ed McMahon with her work address, what with the three-part episode that would have been required when Tess picked up a letter marked "Personal" and fearfully intoned, "Oh my God. Max. It says she may already be a millionaire." Everyone just calm down. They must be all jumpy from the phone, which has been not ringing off the hook for the duration of this sequence.
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.
Well, it wasn't record time, but it was bound to happen eventually. Cut to two shadows creeping up to an open house door under the cover of darkness. Through said door walk Maria and -- wait for it -- Michael, wielding flashlights and whispering. Maria excruciatingly references that pop-cultural bastion of our time, if "our time" is "Winter of 1996," in giggling, "I feel like we're Scully and Mulder or something!" It's Courtney's house. Michael magically ascertains that "no one is home," so they can begin talking at full volume while, oddly, leaving the lights off and the flashlights on. Maria shines a beam on Courtney's nicer-than-mine CD player and reads from the selections sitting on top, "Culture Club? Wham? The Backstreet Boys? God, she really is an alien, this one." Hey! First of all, way to bite the celebrity-guest hand that fed you for one brief, shining line last season, lady. off, shut up, Maria. Just because you can't as easily conjure memories of the time when those bands ascended to the status-confirming American Bandstand darlings they so clearly were doesn't mean they're not culturally viable anymore. They were big, man. Huge. Bigger than Jesus. I mean, hello? Did Jesus ever guest star on The A-Team? That's right. He did not.
Michael suggests they look for "clues" such as "an address book or a calendar," and Maria snarks with jealousy with a line my closed-captioning interprets to the best of its capability with the pretty accurate, "I am having a seizure and seem to have swallowed my tongue." Seriously, what the hell did she just say? Michael is all fake mad, essentially asking, "Do You Really Want To Hurt Me?" She picks up a telltale skin and wonders what it is, and is horrified to discover that she's been holding an entire piece of this skin-changing "Karma Chameleon" right in her hands. Walking over to a slatted closet door, Maria decides to give her fake boyfriend "One More Try" before shining a light into the closet and yelping for her "Father Figure" to come and protect her. And why? Because in numerous shades of red, gold, and green, red, gold, and green appears before them a huge shrine to Mikey G. himself, replete with photographs, hearts, and a shirt he lost at work (Metallica? Has she no musical superiority dis here?). Michael wonders how he became "Everything She Wants," and Maria pulls off a pretty good line in responding, "It's Graceland. And you're Elvis." They discover that all of the pictures are shot from the same angle, and Michael decides that she's been staking out an apartment across the street from The House Government Subsidy Built. "Oh," Maria fills in. "That's where she goes to spy on you." But they're on to her now, and Courtney will be caught. Because, as the educated population of the world knows without hesitation and what Maria could afford to come to a more comprehensive understanding of...is that guilty feet have got no rhythm. But I digress. And screw you if you can't take a joke. Ahem. Sorry.
Back in the Alienmobile, Max is now driving as they pull into the EPCOT Center re-imagining of the American Southwest. Looking around the deserted streets of Frontierland, Max pulls up in front of a building marked "Stagecoach Museum" and engages in conversation with a flannel-clad male of approximately their own age with superlatively curly hair. They ask him for directions to the Travolta Center, home of this Dianetics from Hell cult, and he happily asks if they're there for "the harvest." They flinch. Nice poker faces, long-oppressed aliens. Curly points in the general direction of the only other building in Frontierland, then disappears into the Museum, dials The Most Powerful Cell Phone Ever (dude, I can't get a signal in my tiled bathroom, how are you getting one fifty miles from the highway?) and alerts the called, "Four on the way. Non-members." Dude, no need to be all Testy McGillicuddy. Kirstie Alley was once a non-member, too, now wasn't she?
King Max pulls up in front of the Travolta Center and recites from memory the Lonely Planet entry on lovely downtown Copper Summit: "From this point on, trust only each other. Be aware. Be careful. And don't go anywhere alone." He and Isabel hop out of the car, leaving Liz and Tess in the back. How many times did they switch drivers just so it would be convenient for the ensuing conversation in the scene? Pick a seat and stay with it, people. Were they filming the "Ironic" video on their long lonely tour down I-10? Really. I'm curious. Anyway, Tess kicks things off: "So, you and Kyle." Liz sheepishly responds, then remembers that Buddha Boy has also been, er, "slipping his wisdom" to another one of Roswell's visitors, and apologizes to her for again treading on her turf. But it doesn't matter. Because she's detached, people. "All you did was sleep with him. How was he, anyway?" Liz looks confused -- does Tess mean "made love"? -- before recovering her senses and realizing she has to lie the lie to everyone: "It was great." Tess nods approvingly, secure that she'll, er, "ride that sacred cow" sometime herself -- and smiles, "Noted," like she's been there before and has every intention of going again. Wow. The forums have been right all along. Tess really IS a whore. Go, us.
Max and Isabel approach the Travolta Center as the hallowed anthem of their Planet Arium continues to pulsate. A man filing his nails and waiting for them to knock on the door turns around and throws it open. His glassy eyes and wan smile prove that the fine folks of the Roswell Casting Department have left nothing to chance when putting together their ensemble to represent a cult of crazy people. And as a member of the official MBTV order of the Stonecutters, conveniently located on the basement floor of our corporate offices in Dayton, I find these hackneyed stereotypes to be patently -- well, scrapy is what. Dude, if we want to sleep in coffins and rent Center Stage over and over and over again in our spare time, should we be persecuted for our...oh, I'm sorry. Did I write that out loud. Sars, how fired am I? I'll get my things. Sigh. ["Don't dawdle." -- Sars]
Anyway, this T. Greer tries politeness and then blatant "get offa my porch ya dang varmint kids," and just as he primes to slam the door in their faces, Isabel goes for the last ditch, "What's the Vilandra Project?" T. Greer pauses too suspiciously and pleads ignorance. Max tells Greer the story he should have led off with, informing Twitchy, "We were friends with the Congresswoman, and before we leave town we would like to pay respects to the family." He points the way: "That's be the Crawfords. Two blocks down, turn left, red mailbox." Slam. Finally. The Skulls had better security than this. Koresh had better security than this. The freakin' Gap at my local mall had...okay, I'll stop.
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.
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.
Downstairs, Gage tells Isabel that "it's taken twenty years nursing them from spores to maturity. Now they're almost ready to harvest." More your-destiny-is-with-us for Vilandracakes, and Gage tells her that she is eagerly awaited by a certain "Khivar." Which, translated from the official language of the sovereign nation of Planet Arium, literally means, "Even cheesier a sci-fi name than 'Vilandra.' If that's possible." Gage celebrates the fact that he is "here to take you back to him, Vilandra. The leader of the rebellion. The man who currently sits on your brother's tarnished throne. The man for whom you sacrificed a kingdom. Your lover. Khivar." Except that she found him. More pointless Gagecakes, during which Isabel reaches for a lead pipe lying conveniently in the corner. Ooooh, death by Clue weapon. I can dig it. Otherwise: What. Ever.
The Jetta pulls up as Tess joins Max in keeping the Skins at bay, and Gage asks Isabel, "Where's the Granolith?" Isabel picks up the pipe and slams Gage square in the head, but Gage just corrects his neck fracture with a tilt to the left and right and reports, "Okay. Now I'm pissed." Erk. Michael runs in and joins the party, and Gage regards him sardonically: "That gleam of dull stupidity in the eyes. If I'm not mistaken, you must be the king's second-in-command. I killed you myself in your last life. Ready to die again?" Michael tries to be taken seriously: "Bring it on." Ack! I'm losin' my hearing from all the shout-outs! Have I used that line before? Sorry.
But the force field can't hold, and Greer advances on Max and Tess, who are thrown to the floor when their powers give out. Meanwhile, Courtney runs downstairs, grabs the lead pipe, and smashes whatever system it is that keeps the pod people gestating. As the room fills with smoke and Michael regards Courtney's doppelganger inside a pod, each of the Skins at Whitaker's funeral inside Travolta Center falls to the ground for no logistical reason, besides it making for an interesting visual effect. Michael runs outside, holding what appears to be a body in a burlap sack. Hi. Thetruth.com called, and they want their body-bag imagery back. The pod chambers short out, and the Stagecoach Museum explodes as the citizens of Roswell hop into their cars and make their way back to the big city beyond. In painful slo-mo, the Skins walk into the cloud of smoke that housed their harvested pods, and stand in silence looking over the remains as white flaky Skin Bits float in the air. Oh, dude. It's Planet Eczema in there. Gage dramatically observes, "We may be as good as dead. But it's not the end." Oh, yes. It is.