Props to Jason Katims. Actual props. Like couches and tables and kitchen knives and iMacs and stuff, falling from great heights and landing on his pointy, pointy little head for this latest, nonsensical massacre. Oh. You didn't think I meant the other kind, did you?
Seven weeks after pop culture so effortlessly moved on, the "writers" have decided that the narrative device of Maria "Shill For The Blackboard Industry" DeLuca standing in a classroom recapping the impossible-to-recap (y'all go ahead and trust me on that one) worked so well in "Leaving Las Vegas" that they'd again forgo conventional "previouslys" and work the quirk with her barking plot bullets all over again. Yes, it was mildly amusing the first time. But we know the routine now. It's over. Played. It's something not funny where something funny once dared to dwell in such a hostile environment, leaving poor Maria the Robin Williams of the opening Roswell montage, where once it was manically amusing and now it's just old and hairy and bloated and sad and will only work for a mass audience provided we all go back on cocaine and find outrageous costuming to be a punch line in and of itself. But I digress. Welcome freakin' back.
"Listen," she rationalizes, shrugging through her humiliation and sending the extra fabric straps of her Asian-themed, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Stylist kimono-ish top flying all around the place. "Just because you haven't seen an episode in quite a while does not mean that life in Roswell has stopped." No, of course not. You'd need a full televised hour of this show to accomplish that level of narrative stasis. "It's been quite busy around here…All right, let's review. Max and Liz, they've been in love ever since Max saved Liz's life at the Crashdown two years ago." Yup. All caught up. Who's for pizza? Pizza and sex, then? Max is an alien who is destined to marry Tess. Shot of -- natch -- the pilot. We learn that "recently, she's begun helping him remember where he came from, so he's been feeling more distant from Liz." Recently? Shot of Max and Tess sitting on a bench together, sharing a moment I can't even remember seeing the first time it aired in the dead of winter, and therefore offers the same "recent" urgency as learning that "recently, the continental drift caused massive volcanic destruction and the woolly mammoth was no more, and then later there was this park bench." Those extra fabric flaps are unbelievably distracting. The F/X folks on this show would do better to conceal those ropes that will help her climb walls and battle for an ancient sword on treetops, come this Ang-Lee-infused sequence's climax. But I wouldn't worry too much about Maria's skills in keeping perspective on the narrating issues at hand. After all, it is said that she trained in public speaking at Wudan.
More floats drift by in this endless Previously Parade. Liz has become close with "My So-Called" Sean DeLuca. Shot of Liz pillow-fighting with Sean, while one of the planet's plentiful dodo birds flies through the frame because that's how freakin' long ago all of this tired shit went down. But. But! "Let me explain to you why this is a really disastrous time in Roswell." Maria sashays over to the blackboard and, in all caps (just another one of the many reasons she'd get booted from the forums), scrawls the word "PROM," which she calls "the ultimate four-letter word." Then I think the writer's strike started early, because this attempt at development is stymied by Maria's sudden belief, "I'd better just get going." Eh? Jade Fox sighting, perhaps? She strolls off-camera, leaving us watching the blackboard and the word "prom." Prom prom primity-prompo prom. I guess that's the end of the episode. You nice folks missing Gilmore Girls half as much as I am yet?
Fade up on a shot of Liz "You Are The Weakest Link…Goodbye" Parker in a black dress and white tube socks. Hmmm. That's more "Coke and Pepsi" time at the Bar Mitzvah than it is "limo and nookie" time at the prom, isn't it? Coke and Pepsi. I loved that game. Anyway, Liz twirls and twirls in silence for a minute, and we pan back to note that she is spinning on some kind of endless black plane highlighted by neon blue parallel strips. Because if you're going to set the tone for the final, dramatic episodes of the seasonal (and series oh please oh please oh please) arc, it's always best to do so by harping the aesthetic style of the similarly self-serious Xanadu as often and conspicuously as possible. And then, it's back. Words come from Liz, but her mouth does not open. Oh, no. It's time for a new entry into The Exposition Journal, the clearest sign in this show history that the "writers" had no intention at all of fixing this show's problems and listening to the needs of their three remaining viewers. Up on The Moodsetting Roof Of Urban-Outfitters-Sponsored Angst, Liz writes and writes. This is a bit of what she says: "It's April 27th. I'm Liz Parker and I think I've figured out why I haven't written in this journal for nearly a year." Probably the same reason I haven't been a regular smoker in two years. Because it was killing me. Kiiiiiiiiiilling me! "It's just ironic that I would figure something out really deep from, like, the least deep guy in America." Is there irony? No. Is this deep? It is shallow. Is there a correlation between "I haven't written in this journal for a year" and "I am the experiencer of ironic depth"? There is none. Who is the least deep guy in America? Is it the "writer" of this episode, armed only with a box of magnetic poetry, a refrigerator door, and a copy of Magnetic Poetry, Closed Eyes, and a Really Strong Wind: Random Words in a Random Order for the Perfect Network Script? Or is it the actors deployed to puke such dialogue up onto the masses' collective carpets? Okay, both on that one, actually.
Non-deep My So-Called Sean prattles on while the product-placed soundtrack drowns him out at dinner with so-deep-she's-like-really-deep Liz, and we cut from there to the two of them in his vintage Volkswagen (punch-buggy! Smack!), because Kids In Prison usually get damn funky discontinued cars, for the ex-con on the go with a taste for all things kitsch. Sitting in the car in front of the Crashdown, My So-Called Sean asks Liz, "You want to go bowling?" Liz frets that the alley is closed, which means in translation, "Jeez, why don't we just go to the airport and watch the planes land after a romantic meal on my employee discount, oh ye of much charm but little cash?" Instead, she goody two-steps her way out of the plan, even at Sean's insistence that he "has access," responding, "Well, it's a weeknight, so I probably shouldn't…y'know, commit a felony." Comedy gold, that ol' bait-and-switch. Liz strokes (ew, not like that) My So-Called Sean's so-called ego, telling him, "Despite what people say, I think you're a really nice guy," even though all she'd really have to do to build him up would be to avoid calling him "ma sweet bitch" (his name on the inside) while his flaming mattress is tossed from the upper bunk and he's dragged naked to the hole. Because they want us to remember he's been in prison, people. He tells Liz there's "something about" her, blah she's-a-Small-Wonder-cakes, and after an unintended awkward pause, she bids him goodnight. And then they kiss, because someone was finally reading the forums about the whole nookie thing but apparently stopped just shy of the part where we were all, "Oh, and don't forget to make the show good, and…hey, where's everybody going?" She pulls away a second too late to avoid any number of clink-contracted infectious diseases and stares out the window, missing the transition when the game went from Coke and Pepsi to a particularly aggressive round of post-Bar-Mitzvah Huggy Bear without much advanced warning at all. Because apparently "you like my car? I made the license plates myself" is now the most successful pick-up line. Ever.
Opening credits: All I'm saying is when is Eminem going to return the favor, Dido dear? Why do I ask? 'Cause she's the real Shiri, yes, she's the real Shiri. And so forth.
Over in The Girl's Bathroom Of Perpetual Sexual Repression, Liz sits in between two sinks (which, in my experience of high-school bathrooms, are always completely dry and hygienic. Why doesn't she just run into a stall screaming, "Come, come, chronic staph infection!" and lick a ring around the inside of the toilet? On second thought, why doesn't she just go ahead and do that anyway? Actually, after Big House Bob getting all up in her mouth, it's kind of like she already has), frettink, "One minute I was letting him down easy and the minute he was kissink me!" Okay, not, but for the purposes of lying, she's right on. Maria dispenses wackiness seen only in reflection in one of the bathroom mirrors (okay, Frederican't Fellini, it's a damn WB show. Drop the artsy reflective stuff. It's not 8 1/2. It's not even, like, 5. Whatever the living hell that means). Liz brays further, "You know what the most annoying part about this whole thing is?" You? Is it you? Are you the most annoying thing about this? She believes otherwise: "I [you] can't stop [you] thinkink [you] what Max [you] would [YOU] think [yooooooou]." Oh, hello, cleverly bracketed intertext. Thank goodness you showed up when you did. Somehow able to sustain robot-esque simulation of human existence by only moving her palms and wrists, Liz hops off the petri dish sink and drives the point home: "I have spent two years of my life involved in this thing with Max, and I don't even have a date for the prom." Whazzat? Did somebody say prom? Flush! That was the sound of the Roswell creative staff having a funeral for neglected, undernourished Narrative Subtlety in one of the bathroom stalls, followed by a burial at sea. Poor Narrative Subtlety. Maria tells Liz not to feel guilty, seeing as "it's not like you would kiss Sean back." Lizbot's auto-generated response "I've been thinkink of kissink but he's missink somethink" trips up her internal spell-check, and a blown Lizbot fuse leads to a silence Maria interprets as Liz thinking, "He's got this valiant, devil-may-care, -ish thing about him I just can't put my finger on." Maria is all, "You'd be wise to keep your finger as far from Sean's as discretion will allow, if you know what I mean, and I think you do," screams something about thinking she might be "sick," and takes off from the bathroom. Liz, fresh off both Sean's jailbird lips and the sink still without seeing clear to wash her own hands, ambles over to the garbage can and rifles through, looking for something to eat.
Narrative Subtlety whispers a last-gasp "glub glub glub" kind of sentiment as Max "Solar Pexus" Evans and Michael "Ah-ooooo, Werewolf Of Five Triangulated Planets In An Alternate Subset Dimension" Guerin amble down a flight of steps inside West Roswell, making it up as they go along. Michael decides to go first: "So, you actually remember our planet?" Max whispers a reverent "yes." Michael, his character morphing from angry must-find-home-at-all-costs renegade to me-like-funny-booby-jokes in two seasons flat, queries foremost, "What are the chicks like?" Max, disappointed on so many levels that that's what Michael wants to know, warns all haughtily, "If you're not gonna take this seriously." Michael: "I seriously want to know what the chicks are like." Max responds that his memories of their home planet aren't well-written enough to be literal, but instead he has images that seem "so ephemeral." Okay, call me if you too thought he called his entire existence on Earth "effeminate," would you? Hello? Yeah, I thought so. Oops, hang on, I have a beep. And another. And then I…maybe I should set up a second line in here or something. Max grabs Michael's arm (hands off there, family) and even-more-whispers even-more-reverently, "I remember everything. You, Isabel." Facile Character Reintroduction rounds the corner with a gun in Kyle and Tess's backs as Max tacks on, "For some reason, Tess is the clearest." Oops. Same phone number, but this time the word is "queerest." Damn, I'm gonna need a switchboard operator if this shit keeps up.
Library. Isabel "Plot Of The Weak" Evans hides behind books and watches a boy ask a girl to the prom. Then all this other stuff happens. No, that's the only thing. Isabel smiles broadly but bittersweetly. The humans! So simple in their prom-going ways!
And, back in the hallway, Maria and Michael -- I'm sorry, people, but it is now, by official government dictum, a full-on mullet -- stare at a sign reading, "W. Roswell High Junior/Senior Prom," the theme this year being "2001: A Space Odyssey." The date listed on the billboard, incidentally, is April 27th. So unless we're in flashback, which we're not, because I had just assumed Liz was writink the journal entry the night of her date-gone-wrong with Sean, that would mean that this is the day at school and the prom was, well, last night. Sure would have been fun, though. This town hasn't had a cheesy theme party in at least three weeks. Michael claims that he doesn't "do" proms because he finds them "unnatural," and Maria pulls off arguably this episode's only good line with the not-entirely-audience-insulting, "I find it to be really unnatural that you're half alien-warrior and half Grandpa DuPree. But I make do." Heh. She tells him that prom night will be "one of the five greatest nights of [her] life" (failing to mention that the other four are all "the four times this show is canceled so I can avoid this exact conversation over and over and over and over and over"), which, even if this were a flashback, still necessitates further planning than the week or so in advance that's being implied here. She continues that, failing a commitment from Michael, she'll have to "seek other options." Michael assumes this means they're "seeing other people," and storms off into the same familiar fight. Gosh, I wonder how this'll shake out.
Kyle "Smoked Buddha" Valenti sits in school, holding a copy of a book called The Buddha Advises on Relationships. Now available in The Practical Buddha alongside its other essential volumes The Buddha Advises on Federal Taxes and Do as I Say, Not as I Eat: The Buddha Thinks You're Too Fat. See? Eastern religions are progressive. I mean, where's Yahweh's Guide To Scoring At Shul? I can't say I see it anywhere in the pantheon of religious texts, is all I'm sayin'. A dumb football jock guy (identified easily by those two famous clichés of 1) a letterman jacket and 2) a healthy distrust of Eastern religions) sits down to Kyle and puts an arm around him. Hello? Kyle puts the book down and crosses one leg all the way over the other, collapses his back, and folds his hands in his lap, an interestingly defensive physical maneuver known the world over as The Gay Teen Tango. And it only takes one. But Kyle, football dude himself, greets the fellow by name as "Malamud," his voice nervous and anti-pubescing all the while. Said "Malamud" asks Kyle if the Eastern religious crap will help Kyle "get into Tess Harding's pants." Kyle brushes it off, but Malamud is nothing if not persistent: "How long are you gonna let that blonde little hottie live under your roof before you make your move?" Kyle makes with the quizzical look I know so well that fairly screams, "Now just because the Nick Carter calendar is right above my bed doesn't mean he lives with me, per se…oh, you meant Tess, didn't you? Heh. Cough. Sigh." Don't be glum, Kyle. The Nick-Carter-calendar-buying sector of the populace knows just exactly how you feel. Wherever they may be.
The Liz-Free Zone demarcated by a red box painted in a fifty-foot radius around my television is violated once more, as we cut outside to Liz getting some work done at a table and Max approaching. As he warns, "There's something I've been wanting to tell you," two more Unfettered Humans run toward each other and embrace like The Big Red Commercial That Wouldn't Die, and Liz spins the conversation in that direction by noting, "The prom." Thanks, cruise director. She tells him she hears Michael and Maria aren't going, and Max flashes the ol' pearly yellows in responding, "Well, I think that one might be a little too early to call." Oooh. Election Lingo Humor. How very of the moment of you, great and powerful King Chad. Liz looks up and tells him that she pictured the four of them going together and my how things have changed flee flah this is the tiiiiiiime to remember 'cause it will not last forever flam. Max tells her they can go together. They should go together. They must and will go together. Now what was it Max had to tell Liz? Oh, that. "I'm starting to remember things about my planet. My life. My other planet." Liz stabs at "measured ambivalence" and comes up with the usual "eating cheese and bugs" snake-eyes facial expression when she tries to act casual. He can remember "what it smelled like, what it felt like to be there." Liz asks if he remembers actual people, and he lapses into some new-age hippie freak talk with his Mother Not-Of-This-Earthly response, "More their energy than what anyone actually looks like." Liz asks if Max remembers Tess. He smiles and says that he does. Then, he slaps a "save the space whales" bumper sticker on the back of his electric car and puts healing magnets in his shoes, harnessing the "positive energy" of his recovered memory and beginning to plan for his eventual trip to his sovereign home of Planet Poi Dog Pondering. Damn hippie.
An actual city bus with the word "Downtown" written on the front -- which has looked dangerously wrong in every city they've tested it in -- pulls away from a curb in front of the Crashdown. Lizbot rounds a corner, legs unbent from the factory's recalled knee-lugs scandal of the last seven weeks, screaming a chorus of "If I Only Had Some Cab Fare." Actually, she's just screaming "wait, wait, wait, driver, please, wait" because she's obviously heard the government dictum handed down from the New Mexico legislature that all students in fictional public schools in non-metro areas must take a leftover New York City MTA bus to school from now on, rather than a yellow school bus or the underground subway system I'm sure Ram's Butt, New Mexico now has that runs from that one street in the city all the way over to…y'know, that one other street. She misses the bus. She says "damn," because she is bad. But what's this? Just at that moment, My So-Called Sean rounds the corner in his beat-up car (punch-buggy! Smack!) and offers to drive her to school. No. He apologizes for "the other night," telling her he thought he "caught a vibe." She corrects him: "You didn't." Maybe he just ran across carpet in his socks before trying to (literally) flip her switch and the electricity he felt was, like, actual electricity. I know I get those two confused all the time.
Liz takes a ride with My So-Called Sean. Pulling up in front of a street sign reading "School Bus Stop, 400 ft," she asks why he's "stoppink." He tells her that, as part of his probation, he's not allowed to be "within a thousand feet of the school." She thinks he's "kiddink" (I know it seems like I'm going overboard with the hard "k" this week, but it really was rampant. Er, freakink rampant, I mean), but I'm guessing that jokes and juvee don't so much mix, and you wouldn't want to be known as "the funny fella" on the inside because of how "funny" can mean, y'know, raped and all. Other words that mean "raped" behind the prison walls include "avocado," "Antarctica," "soccer," and "not raped." God, someone please come over here and rip the HBO cable out of my wall. And then I will no more know of Oz and violent prisons and the bikini'ed women inside, pulling each other's hair in the mess hall and gaining the respect of their fellow prisoners by winning a spirited match of mud wrestling. On second thought, you'd better take the USA Network, too. Y'know, while you're here. Oh, man, where was I? My So-Called Sean apologizes again, telling Liz, "When we kissed, it was the first time I ever felt at home in this town." She heads him off, lettink him know, "I'm going to the prom with Max." Sean didn't know they were back together, adding, charmingly, "I don't feed off another man's taco platter." Aw, damn, that was elegant. Rather than being all impressed that My So-Called Sean keeps his nose out of already-purchased clams and doesn't stick his hand into the cooler for a few slices of someone else's roast beef, Liz tells him that they're not back together at all. Sean smirks, "My hat's off to the guy," interpreting things as Max having the kind of racket where he keeps Liz off the market while he plays the field. Blah Liz thinks Max is honorable blee. I'm going to vote for Alphaville's "Forever Young" as the prom song. For the prom. The one that was three days ago or so now.
Maria approaches Michael at his locker and tells him she'll allow him to take her to dinner and a movie to make up for his mean comments of earlier. Michael already has plans. Michael slams his locker door and walks away. Because he already has plans. The plans he already has, that is. And over to the library again, which Isabel must have read in a "Dear Abby" column was the one good place to pick up guys that wasn't "a church picnic event" or "a senior center" and please, Abby, I'm lonely and depressed and a steak dinner is riding on this -- sign me, Steak Dinner. She sits at a table with Alex "Bangs Make The Man…Into A Woman" Whitman, who works and works and kind of ignores Isabel as she dishes about who might be going to the prom with whom. Except she calls it "prom," instead of "the prom," which I've heard from many, many people who attended schools outside of major metropolitan areas and therefore lack the definite article abilities to realize that you go to "the prom," rather than "prom," and forget the "the" because they're already busy preparing for the Sadie Hawkins Dance and the pig slaughterin' festival and the party down at the old surf fagtory and so on forever. People who believe it is just "prom" use the argument that it's not "the prom" like it's not "The Batman" or "The Brooklyn," but I just don't agree. Regardless, these people need to pick one, because if there's any uniformity, it usually exists throughout an entire school. ["It's 'prom.' If they lived in The Manhattan, they would know that." -- Sars] Anyway, Isabel asks Alex to ask her to prom, and he responds that if he did, he would be right back where he was "before Sweden." A full-time actor? "Obsessed, pathetic, and lovesick." Oh. That. He says no. "I'm not gonna take you to prom." Denied! Onto the church picnics with you, eh, blondie?
Tess is looking almost creepily fourteen, sitting on her bed in blue polka-dotted pajamas, as Kyle walks in and tells Tess that his date from "THE prom" last year (Kyle does no wrong. He does none of the wrong) was "okay, but I didn't really know her, so we didn't have much to talk about." But he feels like he really knows Tess, "which is unusual for me with girls." Okay, we get it. He's not gay. It's all good. He asks if she would like to go with him. She'd "really like that." Awwwww.
Liz "can't believe we're breaking into Michael's apartment," and I can't believe she's even allowed to mention it so incredulously during this, the weekly visit with the good folks in the Medeco product-placement department. Maria brandishes a flashlight and a credit card, and she's a mere mayonnaise jar and drop of battery acid away from inventing a working aircraft and thus finishing her sudden and awkward transition into MacGyver. Maria knows that Michael is seeing someone else and has been doing so since they were together (I'm still not seeing them as being in a committed, monogamous relationship, seeing as their banter is less Gal Friday and more "I, like, fucking HATE you," but we've been down this alien spaceship runway before, so…), and she stomps around The House That Government Subsidy Built, looking for clues. Hello, what's this? A blank piece of paper, you say? The perfect place to begin, Watson! Maria instinctively picks up a pencil and begins scratching away at the piece of paper, because Rule #1 of Skulking School is "blank pieces of paper are your first clue." That is, if you are a degree-carrying graduate of The Kellogg's Secret Decoder Ring Institute Of Convenient Plot Development, trained under the professorial watch of one Doctor Tony, Tiger. On the piece of paper is written the word "Juanita," followed by an address and a meeting time, 8 PM. At the sound of the beep, Prom/The Prom began exactly four days ago to the minute. Oh, um…beep!
Further skulking outside of Casa Juanita, where Maria has traded in her Decoder Ring for a pair of high-powered binoculars. Does she have an entire room in her house just labeled "UPC Storage"? Liz notes, "I can't believe what's going on with you and Michael and me and Max." Maria notes that at least Max and Liz "are going to prom!" Grrrrr. Liz prattles on about how things change, as this "Juanita" stands in her lighted window and Michael falls into her arms. They dance a dance of lies.
Max and Tess sit on Max's bed, earthy candles burning on the bed and, I'm sure, patchouli incense burning in a nearby room and auras and energies and Casey Jones, drivin' that train. She tells him he's not concentrating on "what's important here," and he cops to the fact that he and Liz are going to "the prom." A-ha! "The"! But Tess doesn't care. And as Maria slams her car's steering wheel and totally overreacts to incidental music closely copying "Never Tear Us Apart," Maria screams that Liz has to go ask Max what's what. But inside, Tess is evoking memories of swimming on their home planet. I have never heard the word "Jell-O" spoken quite so reverently in my whole life. And that Bill Cosby had a pretty hard sell going. Liz runs up, sees Max and Tess, and misinterprets.
Want to remember 1995 but feel your memories are fading? Download something by Lisa Loeb before Napster shuts down for good. You won't be sorry. I was just not sorry three times in a row. Bet you didn't even know she had that many songs. Heretic!
Liz, still decked out in the same flowered grandma pullover she wore to miss The Cross-town School Bus in an earlier scene, walks in front of the Crashdown and sees My So-Called Sean leaning against his car. "God, you are, like, ubiquitous." Yeah, that dialogue isn't stilted at all. "Ubiquitous"? Jerome Shostak and his colleagues high-five each other and cash a check. Y'all have no idea who that is, do you? My So-Called Sean promises to find out "her problem," telling her, "You look like you're about to puke, at the very least." Heh. And at the very most, be sold for scrap metal and be seen in her starring role as a moneychanger in between the Skee-Ball and Frogger machines in the "Time Out" at the Sunrise Mall. She screams back that she doesn't "need this right now," and that she doesn't want to hear any more of his "stupid, inane comments" on account of the fact that her "LIFE IS FALLING APART!" He asks if she wants to go somewhere. The bowling alley in the first act goes off in the third. Cut to My So-Called Sean trying to teach Liz how to throw a ball in this mysterious new "Bow Ling" no one's ever heard of but him, apparently, and upon sinking a gutter ball, Liz turns almost directly toward the camera and makes with the biggest shout-out in show history, transparently offering, "I suck!" Hmmmm. My So-Called Sean tells her again that he has feelings for her, saying that Lizbot doesn't look at him like the freak everyone else sees him as. Sean wants to know about her arrangement with Max, asking, "You're not getting what you need from him, are you? You're suffocating, Liz. We both are." It's all clear now. She turns around and bowls The Perfect Strike Of White Trash Metaphoric Resonance. Cheesiest. Moment. Ever. Okay, until this one. My So-Called Sean takes his shoes off and tells Liz he's going to go "lane walking." Whazzat? "What the average American doesn't realize is that every lane in a bowling alley has about a million coats of oil on it." And what the average My So-Called Sean doesn't realize is that the average American doesn't give a crap about oily bowling lanes. Liz declines to join him. Which is a shame. Those kneecaps are screaming for any lube they can find.
Back in Max's bedroom, he becomes frustrated with his memory-recall progress and asks to take a break. Tess tells him that "it takes time. Everything is blurry at first. But eventually, the memories become clearer and clearer." She tells him that her memory is unclouding, and those things she remembers are more clear to her than anything on this planet. Max thinks, "I'm from Mars and she's from…aw crap, I don't know, let's talk about me," and asks if Tess remembers him. "What was I like?" Your only redeeming quality was your proper use of the word "the" before "space prom." I'm guessing you weren't that great. But Tess remembers that he used to "reach over" and touch her "in the middle of the night." She leaves out the part about calling the space cops to get him off her, and I can only hope for her sake that the gravity on their home planet was calibrated differently enough that The Pecs That Cut Glass weren't too painful in the Jell-O, or some such thing.
A knock on Alex's door dramatically reveals Isabel, who is really on the slippery slope down Pathetic Mountain without a pole. Cut to Isabel inside his too-dark room, telling Alex that she only needs one more class to graduate and that she's leaving Roswell at the end of the year. Alex asks, "Are you going to college?" She has no idea. But she does know this her "last chance to have a prom…ever!" This is sad and manipulative. Alex asks if she'll go to the prom with him. She says yes.
Prom pre-party at the Crashdown, eh? 'Cause there's no better smell you want sticking with you all night than the heady cologne of Eau de Corned Beef Hash on one of the five potential best nights of your life. Kyle is looking very Wall Street in his tuxedo and slicked-back hair, and approaches Maria at the counter. Banter about Porno (hi, Porno!) and DeLucawitz nookie-ing at a nearby table, and Maria turns the topic to Kyle and Tess. Kyle responds, "She's hot, but I feel really resistant for some reason I can't put my finger on." Maria: "Maybe you're just gay." Kyle flashes some more comedic brilliance in thoughtfully responding, "No, no." Okay, you guys. That's a freebie, but time the MBTV lawyer is stepping in. 'Cause that one's ours. And then, Max enters in his tux, and he and Liz meet and greet. DeLucawitz assembles the group for some photos, calling over the whole crowd and asking Sean to take the picture. We've descended into voice-over hell, people: "And there we were. All together, with everything we'd all been through over the past two years." Blah fleeeeeeeeeee. "But somehow, in this moment, I had this really strong, really upsetting feeling that this was the last time we'd all be standing together." The photo snaps. Because this is the Family Ties series finale, suddenly.
Awwww, Robbie Williams. An excellent prom soundtrack choice, I must say. We join Enchantment Under The Sea already in progress, inside a festooned hall we'll call, for the purposes of easy geography, "The UFO Center without the blow-up doll aliens." Alex and Isabel have their picture taken, and he takes her arm and escorts her off, his Gestapo Tux with no bowtie never actually having been worn to a prom by an actual teenager for fear that he would be ridiculed for looking different than all the other boys and having his outfit repeatedly referred to as "Gestapo Tux." Isabel thanks him for taking pity on poor, pathetic, tall, blonde, leggy, mid-twenties, push-up-bra'ed her, and Alex faces her and responds, "You just gotta promise not to be any more beguiling, or I'll be right back where I was." Ooooh! "Beguiling"! The fifty-cent words remain ubiquitous. Meanwhile, Kyle is standing at the punch bowl as the ubiquitous Malamud approaches and tells Kyle, "I envy you," adding, "Look at that compact little body," and, finally, the truly baiting "what do you say you throw her to me for a couple of hours after you're done with her?" And, as always happens if the world of "always" is the one lived out entirely on television, Kyle's moment of how-we-feel-about-Tess epiphany bursts forth as he grabs Malamud's collar and screams, "Don't you ever talk about my sister like that!" Oh, man. That was so below him I have no idea what to do. I will stave off my anger at the "writers" somehow managing to make Kyle look dumb by sharing with the world my ever-expanding list of Funny Prom Words. Number one: "cummerbund." The end.
A slow song starts just as Liz and Max decide to share a dance. How nice for them. For me, it was all about finally building up the courage to tap a girl on the shoulder and ask if she wanted to dance to "Eternal Flame," just as it ended and "Pour Some Sugar On Me" unceremoniously burst out of the speakers. But that was all about the seventh-grade dance. By the prom I was working it. And I went to four proms in high school. You now know that because this show is about me now. Liz tells Max that they have to "stop pretending," and that maybe "they're both holding onto something that will never be." She feels like she's suffocating. She picks her nose a little and Max looks away in recognition of the horror of the human condition. Alien condition. Bot condition. There were no actual people harmed during the making of this episode of Roswell. Liz spots Maria, reminds Max that she's "all alone," and makes her way over. Meanwhile, Kyle out-cutes the cute and drags Tess into a nearby closet (final imagery?) to tell her he loves her like family.
Max stands off to the side of the dance floor as Maria and Liz work it on the dance floor. Suddenly, Michael appears at the edge of the floor, and Princess Maria ambles over and asks what he's doing there. He came to see her. "Well, you should have brought Juanita." How blah blee about Juanita? "Juanita's my dance teacher." Incredulous "huh?" from his planet to ours and back. He explains that he knew this was a big deal, so he was taking dance lessons. Well, if the bastard knew this night was such a big damn deal to begin with, why wouldn't he have gone ahead and been her damn date? Why cook fries in the pictures and then put on the tux for a late grand entrance? Is the theme of this year's prom "egregious contrivances"? No? Then ask her like a gentleman, buy the damn corsage, show up on time, kiss her mother hello, and stop acting like a five-year-old. Dump him, Princess. He's not that valiant of a suitor if the only problems he saves you from are ones he personally caused. I can't watch this plot every freakin' time.
Max sits alone on a couch in the middle of the school. In the dark. With a frown. Note to Tess -- this is sign language for "convince Kyle to move to Alabama with you and get married as the siblings you are," not "throw him over and chit-chat about the cruel unfairness of the universe with Maudlin Max." Look it up. Tess fails to listen to reason, sitting down to Max and asking what's wrong. "I think it's really over." And yet, I still have no clue what's WRONG. Max continues that he always knew it couldn't last forever, but…
…do I really have to take you back inside that room and tell you that Isabel and Alex finally kiss…
…that he remembers something else about their home planet. "Our first kiss. It was at a party. Late at night. And…" Tess takes over that she whispered in his ear. Here on Earth, Max puts his hand on Tess's face and the nookie-cracker so long in its hermetically-sealed packaging finally explodes unceremoniously just as Liz walks outside to see it happen. She ditches her corsage and runs, arms straight at her side, and appears a cut later at the bowling alley, telling Sean, "I guess it's kind of an addictive sport." Let the alley-skating begin; the voice-over take us home during a montage of Nookiefest 2001: A Chaste First-Base Odyssey: "We try to live responsible, logical lives, but we can't tell our hearts what to feel. Sometimes our hearts lead us to places we never wanted to go, and sometimes our hearts can be the sweetest, gentlest thing we have." Huh. That's, like, ten to grow on. "Sometimes our hearts can make us feel angry, excited, miserable, and confused. All at once. But at least my heart is open and I'm writing again. I'm feeling. I'm breathing." I wish she could be stopped on all cylinders. Liz closes the journal and looks self-satisfied that her agent is a better leverager than the fifty or so characters brought in to quietly unseat her as the lead of this show. 'Cause that worked out great for us.