Maria "Chalk, Bored" DeLuca hates wardrobe, her life, and us. But mostly she hates us. When we join her in this week's tired classroom opener, her outfit is yet another take on the wraparound skirt. As opposed to last week, though, this time the fabric straps are mercifully tied around her waist, at least removing the immediate danger that she's going to start walking around this empty classroom she now calls home and start collecting pledge donations for "Jump Rope for Heart." She erases the word "prom" from the board, and deadpans her first line directly into the camera because she is Malcolm and this, clearly, is the middle: "I told you. Prom sucks." Oh, so it was you who told us that, then? She recaps that episode practically in real time, cutting deeply into the promised "Alex Killing Hour" we knew was to reward us. Spoiler? I think not. What with the dozens of promos intoning, all sinister, "Alex Whitman has died," and the threat of imminent cancellation, and the public huff recently made by actors on this show loudly trumpeting to the press and other public forums that they, in fact, hate it more than I could ever have possibly mustered the energy to. Maria recounts that Sexy Prom didn't quite work out as planned for Max and Liz or Kyle and Tess, but that "there is a silver lining in this gray cloud of prom disaster." Shot of Alex. "The death of a close friend." Anyway, that's not what she says. Maria and Promo Pete are apparently unfamiliar with each other's work, because everyone in WB Land knows he's dead but her. "He came back from Sweden a new man and Isabel finally noticed. And I think with a little help from Liz and myself, those two crazy kids might actually find true love." Oh, perfect. Miss Lonelyhearts and the Lizbot are matchmaking again. He'll become the perfect composite of all they hold dear in men. What with Alex sporting a haircut befitting a seventies forward on a Canadian hockey team by week's end and composing love sonnets to his beau of the "It is you I do love datink/I hope we never stop lovink" variety, he's sure to find himself under-the-bound in no time. Oh, and Alex? Rhyming "ink" with "ink"? Genius. Just genius.
Alex "Cast Away…And Don't Come Back" Whitman holds his bass in one hand, miraculously not mindlessly fingering the chords to "Killing Me Softly," and his phone in the other. He's telling Isabel "Knock Knock Knockin' On" Evans "Door" that last night was "a great night for [him], too." Isabel wants to know what he's doing tonight. "Dying bloodily." We pan over to Liz "" Parker and Maria sitting on Alex's desk, shaking their heads and keeping Alex stronk in telling Isabel he's unavailable tonight. Isabel wants to know what's keeping him so busy, and Liz stage-whispers for my continued recapping ease, "Studyink! Studyink!" Try and tell me she's not, y'all. You'll be "Wronk! Wronk!" The routine may be old, but it doesn't make it any less valid. Isabel flirts, "An 'A' is the best you can get," and I tack on a screamed and intended-to-frighten-the-children "IN HELL," as I do after many such deserving pearls of dialogue in this mortality-obsessed episode, much the way people who see clear to leave their houses every so often tack on an "in bed" to the end of their fortune cookies. I don't do that. I think dead teenagers are funnier than sex. Apparently. Alex vamps that he has "a monstrous final in…" In hell? See? How that works? Right. Scrambling, Maria grabs a book of The Transparently Foreshadowed Death Poems Of Robert Frost from Alex's desk and shows and tells it to Alex, who vamps that his final is in "Robert Frost…uh, English." Hee ha blech. From the darkest sadness comes comedy. Which is why this scene is neither funny nor sad. Isabel glances around her room impatiently, thankful that four more TV minutes of pretending to be all gaga about L'il Hanks even though she's three inches taller than him and looks old enough to be his very-much-older older sister are nearly at an end. She flirts sympathetically-for-the-barely-pre-dead, "Well, if you'd rather stay in studying and not go out to play with me." Alex turns away all dramatically and bites his knuckle, which is totally shorthand for encroaching sexual desire, provided you've been born and raised on that far-off land Planet Dirty Dancing Choreography with the dramatic hand motions and what have you. Liz now stage-screams, "Stay stronk!" and makes muscle poses like she and Maria are there to pump [clap] him up. Which, frankly, he could use. IN HELL!!! Ahem. Sorry. 'Cause that one, like, didn't even make sense. Isabel lets Alex know that she's going to retire to the Crashdown and await official news of his impending death. Or perhaps she says some such other thing.
Alex hangs up the phone, lies down on the bed (is he dead? IS HE DEAD?), and editorializes like a Tuesday Morning Sadler Forum, "This blows!" Maria and Lizbot stage direct over to the bed, celebrating, "You've got her chasing you!" Not Quite Dead Alex slips into Who's My Daddy mode on his line, replicating Biggun Hanks's cadence exactly when he complains, "She's thinking about me. Even now, she's on her bed, and she's thinking about me." Maria and Liz toss a quarter into Alex's hand as an involuntary reflex to the sound of that vocal timbre because, well, that World War II memorial ain't gonna build itself, you know. Maria threatens Alex's waning mortality with a segment from her new Fox reality special If Segues Could Kill, for no reason changing the subject: "Max kissed Tess." Because, see, Alex is their confidante and they've been friends forever and wouldn't it be sad if some horrific tragedy were to befall him even though he disappeared for ten weeks to Sweden and not a word about him the whole time? Liz tells Maria that it's time to go to work (she ended "work" with a hard "k!" Can you believe it? Ha ha ha ha ha ha…oh, wait), and they sit up on Alex's bed, Liz demanding in a baby voice, "You be strong, okay? You be strong!" No hard "k." Maybe I was mistaken all those other times I heard her talking with all the glitches and fuzz of the SAM Interface voice simulator on my Commodore 64. In fact, I'm almost convinced I was. That. And "not." Not in hell.
On their way out the door to the outside that apparently exists smack in the middle of Alex's room, the two girls (fine, girl and bot. Whatever. What. Ever.) pass a guy holding a bag of food and an ancient credit card machine that looks like the props folks picked it up from a discarded Life: The Board Game. Alex approaches the guy, forcibly removing his other foot from the grave in trying to make his last screen moments memorable ones, ACTING, "It's about time." Hey man, cut The Ill-Intentioned Delivery Boy Of Doom some slack, okay? Until this scene, there was exactly one place in town you could call for a delivery of poorly-prepared, rarely-delivered fast food, and for those limited instances, the menus read, "Delivery For UFO Center Employees Only/Free Order Of Plot-Forwarding Contrivance With Every Order/Pepper Jack Eat-In Only." Hell, until this scene, there was exactly one place in town where you could eat at all, but really, we've talked about all this before. Regardless, the gatekeeper of Death's Door Café forks Alex the bag, and Alex peeks inside to note, "This isn't even warm." Without peeling back his black hood or relinquishing his scythe, the slacker delivery guy tells Alex he'll have to "nuke it," displaying the wanton disregard of alienated teenage and blue-collar workers everywhere. We get it. He's a delivery guy. He's oppressed and underpaid. He cares about his product less than we do. Thanks for the sudden adventures in script doctoring, Mr. Marx. Alex forks the guy over a credit card, which the delivery guy runs through the giant, ancient machine, which Alex recognizes from the last time he used this credit card to purchase one of them new Dumont Brand Televisions down at Gimbels before swinging past the speakeasy on his way to the moving picture show down at the nickelodeon. And who charges a take-out meal on a credit card, anyway? Alex shakes his head and whispers something about being "so sick of this," and as Doomsday Delivery Dude asks for a signature on the credit card slip (jiving effortlessly with the obvious prop anachronism, Alex signs his name in Middle English…and then [spoiler] dies in five seconds [/spoiler]), Alex asks, "Why does life have to be so wrong? Why does everything have to be a lie?" Doomsday Delivery Dude doesn't know the answers to these knotty dilemmas. Just take the credit card back and choke down the damn cold food. It's called "cash," Alex. And it can be exchanged for goods and services. Rich bastard. Alex sits down at his desk and cracks open a No-Brand Cola ("Why do the bubbles have to be so light? Why can't my spirits rise, like airy carbonation to the top of the can? Is perpetual metaphor a symptom of approaching death? If so, exeunt!"), taking the picture of him and Sweden's Svetlana off his mantel and staring at it longingly. Yes, Alex. We all miss ABBA, too. But they've gone to a better place now. He ignores his cold, miserable food, dreaming of a place where the pepper jack melts warmly and evenly. Somewhere far away and warm all over. In hell!
Nighttime. Officer Jim "Porno" Valenti (yay!) drives somberly as a George Winston Piano Sampler Soundtrack Moment indicates emotional turmoil ahead. Traveling at night = metaphor for death. Check. He comes upon a rather elaborate accident scene. Well, for the WB. Do two stepped-on Matchbox cars and a lit match qualify as "elaborate"? He notes that his own Deputy "Sometimes Evil" Hanson is already on the scene. He steps out of the car and Hanson lets him know that this accident is "pretty bad. Sedan doin' about seventy did a head-on collision with a semi." Porno asks if there are any fatalities, which goes to show that he and Promo Pete haven't so much as been introduced at a party. Because we already get it. Porno asks, "Anyone I know?" Hanson goes silent as Porno approaches the wreck, but stands close to the side should a sensitive police sheriff I might mention here need to fill Hanson's disproportionately large hat with ten gallons worth of tears.
Longest. Intro. Ever. Everyone at the Crashdown is much, much happier than usual, so there's farther to fall from their usual maudlin selves just as soon as they find out there's really something to be sad about. Except Maria, that is. Maria's mad so she can be counterpointed more in a life-is-so-precious-let-us-forget-these-petty-concerns kind of way. On shift for no customers at the Crashdown, she drops a few plates and mutters a pissed off, "Great!" Sitting at the counter are Max "Siskel" Evans and Michael "Ebert" Guerin, Max making with the pre-dead-friend-bad-news happy banter, "You can't compare The Matrix to Crouching Tiger." Oh, come on. This old thing again? And here I was, all worried about my excessive nods to the way passé Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon in last week's recap. Thank you, this scene, for reminding me that no matter how exhausted my pop-cultural references become, I am always at least one week less cheesy than this show at any given time. Have these movies even opened in their market yet? Max argues that Crouching Tiger is "about something." Crouching Tiger? Is the comma in the title a shorthand grammatical sign for "ignore all words after it to increase your edgy-sounding film cache"? Use the whole title, please, oh heartthrob star of Ros. Anyway, Max, what is Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon about? "Love, honor, duty." Hee. "Duty." Cough. Sorry. He continues on, snarking at Michael, "You simply cannot prefer Keanu Reeves to Michelle Yeoh." Oh, Jason. There's plenty of Keanu to go around for all of us. I'll keep out of your hope chest if you stop peeking in mine. "You can't," Max goes on. "I won't let you." He flexes his comedy muscle on the delivery of that line, and a long-dormant volcano erupts in Malaysia. No more flexing of any kind of muscle, Max. Earth's tender topology just can't take the strain. Hi. The winner is The Matrix and everyone knows it. Because, in The Matrix, you couldn't see the ropes.
Over at a nearby table, Tess, Kyle, and Isabel laugh loudly over prom pictures as Liz sits just off to the side with a pencil and a calculator, figuring out pi to its ultimate digit because, damn it, that's what Bicentennial Liz was built and programmed to do, man. Maria makes past her and into the kitchen, where the hulking shadow of Porno walks toward Maria, who asks, "What?" Cut back to the dining room and the sound of Maria. She screams and runs out of the kitchen, hugging Liz. Porno follows her out and announces, "There's been an accident. Alex is dead." The shocked assemblage present doesn't even reside in the same congressional voting district as Promo Pete, and shock and standing replace frivolous talk of prom photos and pi and Max's sweet, sweet November. Can you hear me, L'il Hanks? Can you hear me? In hell?
Opening credits: So can these be, like, shortened now? Er, I mean, "Farewell, you sweet prince of a glorified tertiary Swede sympathizer!" Sniffle.
Nighttime on the set of Gus Van Sant's shot-by-shot modernization of The Monkey's Paw. The more-so-even-than-usual somber alien/human axis stands in front of a building façade marked "City Hall." My best friend is dead! Who's up for a town-council meeting and a secular marriage? Good. Because y'all have come to the right place. A van drives up to a building marked, by virtue of a neon sign, "The Morgue," and uniformed workers step out of a truck, the back of which reads -- oh, if only I were kidding -- "County Coroner." Gee, I knew the aliens weren't home yet, but I guess I missed the episode where they took off from Earth and crash-landed on Planet Sesame Street for a refreshing bout with the labeled and literal. This episode of Roswell is brought to you by the letter "C" for "County Coroner," and the number "1," for the monetary value of each of the pennies on Dead Man's eyes. Porno runs up to the uniformed men (they too have something written in large white print on the backs of their shirts I can't quite make out…"Me Carry Dead Boy," 'haps?) as they approach The Neon Morgue, and as soon as they are out of sight, Max walks with great meaning toward the van. He throws the back doors open as Isabel narrates from Melinda Metz's Roswell High Volume XXVI: I Don't Want to be Buried in a Whit Sematary book on tape for the benefit of the rest of the assemblage, "He'll need to use his powers to open the doors." Max uses his powers to open the doors. "He'll take a deep breath, put his hands on his chest, and bring him back to life. And Alex will sit up suddenly, and Max will jump back, and the whole wagon will shake a little." Wagon? Yee-haw!
Inside, Max unzips the body bag. Maria and Liz pretend, as the stage directions and their publicists repeatedly insist, to like each other with a small hug. But the "wagon" does not shake. Isabel repeats her assertion that the wagon will shake, adding, "The whole wagon will shake and they'll come running back here with big, goofy grins on their faces." Oh, please let me mourn without the added fear and sadness brought about by the scourge of the pearly yellows. "We'll have to come up with a cover story for Hanson and everybody…" But, not so much with the Hanson and the cover story. Go, Metz, for deciding to go the brave, seemingly outmoded Choose Your Own Adventure approach to failed contract negotiation. Just like at the ending of The Green Slime. Max, dejected, walks out of the van just as Porno hears the soundtrack's sad clarinet and exits The Neon Morgue to find out why The Jesus Clause in Max's contract has not yet been invoked. Max looks sad. Porno instructs, "I think you should all go home now," as the laying-it-on-thicker-than-Jell-O director of this episode cuts to a lingering shot of the Me Carry Dead Body professionals wheeling Alex into The Neon Morgue. Everyone from Earthy Girlfriend Liz to Spacey Girlfriend Tess looks really, really mad at Max, and he looks at his useless non-healing right hand and barely stops himself from saying aloud, "Wow, I guess I'll really be needing to discover an alternate purpose for this hand after all, if you know what I mean." Isabel, The Thirty-Second Girlfriend, gets to be saddest because she and Alex were, like, together and stuff. She walks away by herself, and Tess tearily (were she and Alex ever even in a scene together?) walks up to Max and advises, "Go after her." Max looks at Liz, who looks back at all him steely-eyed (steel? Alloyed metal? Shout-out?) and repeats between gritted teeth, "Yeah, go after her, Max." Porno grabs Kyle and Kyle grabs Tess (follow them, confounded cameraman! Follow theeeeeem!). They walk off, Three's Company opening-credit style, but with one more dead teenager than the usual quota for slapstick seventies sitcoms. Liz stands alone, staring at The Neon Morgue, thinking of happier times. Not yet able to cry, she enters that well-known psychological first stage of the grieving process: really bad acting. I take a hearty swig of embalming fluid directly from the bottle.
A moody panning shot across The Desert We're Told They Live In (alternately known to the S1 viewer as "The Scoping Fjords of Sandy Land") lands us inside The Den Of Porno, where an alarm clock goes off and Kyle, already awake, turns it off. He rolls from the couch, shirtless, and hits the floor for a few completely-excessive-but-complain-and-you're-booted push-ups. Porno walks into the room (that doesn't mean you have to stop, Vice President of Pecstopia), and Kyle crawls back under the covers on the couch. Porno sits down and notes that this "isn't a very happy day, is it?" Feh. It's perfectly nice out here, with a little breeze you don't find too often in the…oh, wait. Dead Alex. I knew there was something. Porno assures his son that, though this may not seem that important just at the moment, "Alex died yesterday. He didn't die today. And I don't want you remembering it as if it happened today." Hoo? Ha? Wha? "Happy birthday, son." Ooooooh. I see. And yet, with the shirtless calisthenics, it was you who gave us the gift. Always, always giving. Whispery, flirty, blonde-wigged renditions of "Happy birthday, Mr. Valenti" can be heard ringing out all around the MBTV community even now.
A pair of legs walks through the open Crashdown door, and we pan up to Alex, approaching a booth, proving not only that the dead will rise again, but also that heaven has gone corporate casual, allowing its denizens to ditch the white robes and twee harps and glowing haloes and shit and instead wear that celestial fashion staple known the heavens over as baggy, baggy pants. Seriously, what the hell is he doing here? Shouldn't he be in negotiations for the hit cinematic follow-up Look, I Got Over It…Now Somebody Please Love Me somewhere? Instead, he's walking up behind Isabel. She's, like, really happy to see him. Because of the suspected deadness and all. He tells her, "No, that was just a big misunderstanding." Dernit. He sits in the booth across from her. Yow. Ain't no stylist on Cloud Nine? Look at those sunken eyes and that fifth-grade-boy-after-gym-class part. Are you sure you're not really dead after all? But he's alive! Alive! Oh, but wait. What's up with that soundtrack with the celestial chimes and ethereal Enya-for-people-who-find-Enya's-voice-too-strident vocal noodling from this week's featured musical selection, Now That's What I Call Dream Sequence! Volume I? I don't want to say anything, but…Alex cuts to the route of least narrative resistance, asking Isabel, "So have you made any decision about college yet?" She has. She's going to stay and graduate with everyone. Alex is dead -- I mean, "happy" -- because, as he puts it, "I'd miss you if you were gone." She doesn't want to be away from him anymore. "I'm not going anywhere. Well, except for band practice." He kisses her goodbye and leaves, and the long-forgotten voice of Mrs. "Bangs" Evans calls Isabel's name and wakes her out of a dream. Sniffle. Sorry. Must be something in my eye. Waitress? I'll have the bitterest thing on the menu. Something bitter…but also just a little sweet?
DeLuca residence (formerly "New Set"). DeLucawitz and Maria behave in a sad fashion on the couch, while Michael makes himself busy acquainting himself with the most common facets of a suburban home ("They don't have these so-called 'coasters' where I come from…oh wait, I live door") until a ringing phone distracts his attention. He picks it up to discover plot filler o' the week "My So-Called" Sean DeLuca on the other end. Sean makes some hilariously ribald comment because he's been in the clink and doesn't give so much as one damn, and Michael shuts him up with the news of Alex's death. Sean tells Michael that he's "got this court thing in Albuquerque" and asks Michael, "Could you, y'know, look after my family?" Because of the bang-up care-taking job he's done before then from juvee. Oops. "Bang-up." Car-crash imagery. Sorry.
And over to the Parker residence, where the cast reunion that required some poor PA to call up each individual temp agency in the greater Pasadena area to track down all these forgotten folk continues unabated. Mrs. "Julianne Less" Parker picks up a ringing phone in her house and asks, "Sean?" Er, no? But that kid's reusable quarter-imitating slug was the best parole-violating purchase he's made since stealing that vintage Volkswagen from the torn-down set of a particularly psychedelic episode of Laugh-In. Actually, it's just Max, and Julianne Less apologizes for the mistake, explaining, "Sorry, Max, I though you were Sean. I just got off the phone with him." Uh. Huh? And he'd call again…because? And you'd want your daughter hanging out with a stalking ex-con…because? And even though hundreds of people could potentially call to offer arrangements or condolences, you'd arbitrarily decide to answer the phone calling out Sean's name…because? Right. You wouldn't. Back to admin obscurity with you, Temp Mom. Julianne Less continues on that "this is horrible." Big word. Max asks if he can talk to Liz, and Julianne Less responds, "She went out. I don't even know where she went." The remainder of the conversation takes place over a shot of Liz walking through a garbage dump, foraging for replacement parts on the cheap. She comes across a blue tarp. She knows it's Alex's car. Of course she does. She looks inside, feels the dried blood on the seat, and looks down to spot the photograph of Alex and Svetlana. But Alex's head has been cut out! It's a clue! How ritualistic. Looks like Liz is discovering that Alex has been taught a valuable lesson on the consequences of tangling with the brute Swedish Mafia. They're coming for you. With their small, folding knives and corkscrews and ergonomic toothpicks. ["Wouldn't that be the Swiss Mafia? Wouldn't the Swedish Mafia just run you over in a Volvo?" -- Sars] ["No, no, the Swedish Army Knife, which…oh, yeah." -- Djb] Well, I guess it was either that or wake up with the head of Björn Borg to me in bed and, all things considered, well, I'd like to go ahead and choose the bloody death, if it's all the same to the folks at home.
Chung chung! Sheriff Porno-Briscoe and Deputy Hanson-Green are inside a hospital room with a decidedly infirm-looking patient, who is reporting, "The last thing I remember was hitting my brakes and trying to turn away." Porno asks if he turned to the left or the right, and just as it seems that the patient's story actually corroborates with the accident report, Porno makes it personal: "How many beers did you have at the Bison Pub?" Oh, I love that hastily invented bar. They have the best jukebox of any hastily invented bar in the whole of the desert Southwest. Infirm says he had "one beer, three hours before [he] got on the road." Porno reminds the man that he said he was driving sixty-five. Infirm claims that he has stuck to his story that he can drive fifty-five, and this scene's most unfortunate by-product yet reveals itself when the voice of Sammy Hagar rips into my head, thankfully at least replacing "Dancing Queen," which had been around all up in there since the pre-credits sequence. Infirm doesn't like where these questions are going, and he claims, "You're trying to pin this on me. When the truth is that boy deliberately swerved into my lane for no reason." Okay, "writers." The facts of his death are mysterious and now we get it. Shut up, "writers." Shut up, Hagar.
Back at Chez Evans, Isabel is midway through that second stage of the grieving process -- inability to control the volume of her voice -- in shouting at Bangs, "He wanted to stay home! If I hadn't called him and put the idea in his head, he would have never gotten in the car! NEVER GOTTEN IN THE CAR!" In the wha…oh, the car. COULDN'T hear YOU! Bangs grabs Isabel's arms and tries to comfort her, Good Bangs Hunting-style, "It's not your fault." Isabel sighs, "I can't stop thinking of the people I love who end up hurt or dead." Dead: 1, Hurt: Liz. That's the final tally. Try and chill about it. Walking behind a giant floral arrangement sitting on the kitchen counter ("In lieu of flowers, send flowers to dead teen's thirty-second girlfriend," the obituary doubtlessly read), Bangs is able to deadpan a line best cut: "I wish I had some kind of special powers to make all of this go away for you." Geddit? Because of the…"Special powers don't help." Deeper than deep. Isabel looks around wildly and says, "I have to get out of here." Bangs asks where she's going to go. "Mom, there's something I have to tell you." And I think we're led to believe that this is where Isabel outs herself to her mom that she's really an alien looking for her home planet, rather than a really smart high-school junior looking to ditch town for a college I can't imagine when she ever would have applied to. But it's hard to imagine Isabel bringing up her alien-ness to her mom, seeing as she doesn't so much seem to remember its existence herself.
Lizbot walks through school and looks toward Alex's locker, which has been all memorialized with stickers and the like. Because nothing says "I miss you" more than a Yahoo! product-placement. She meets Maria, and more hugs and encouraging words about how they both need to "keep movink forward" and "keep breathink" are exchanged. Sorry I didn't directly attribute those quotes. Wanna guess who said them? Keep thinkink. Michael stands off to the side, and Liz notes again, "I'm fine." She then pulls the Back to the Future evidence of badness out of seeming nowhere, and informs Maria, "Alex and Leana in Sweden." Maria, impressively, starts freakink out, falling into Michael's arm and yellink, "Oh my God, oh my God, I can't believe you went there." Liz wants to know, "Why is Alex's head missink?" And then, with gusto, with drama, with flourish, gosh darnit, she adds, "This means somethink." And then she's gone. Third stage of the grieving process: Really. Bad. Acting.
Chung-chung! Porno-Briscoe works alone in this scene, inside his slatted office, interrogating The Ill-Intentioned Delivery Boy Of Doom and generally stretching out this character's relevance in silly and untoward ways. Much like the egregious two-season cameo of the "lead" whose death he's currently in the process of investigating. Delivery Boy remembers that "he just got really depressed. It was weird, y'know? I mean, I deliver a lot of cold food. And usually people just get pissed off. They don't act like it's the end of the world." Delivery Boy quotes pretty verbatim what Alex said to him when The Turkey Club Of Utter Despondency was charged on the Whitman gold card. Porno thanks this "Jerry" for coming in. That Jerry passes Hanson on his way out of the office, and Hanson hands Porno a report about talking to Alex's teachers, who reported that Alex was alternately "sometimes confident, even cocky" and at other times "moody, sullen, and unfocused." So many of those words meant the same as the other words that Roget just sat up in his grave, smiled broadly, and spoke aloud, "Thanks for buying a new copy of my book!" Porno broods, "That sounds like every teenager I've ever met." Isn't it more every person you've ever met? Hanson tells Porno that "there's a pattern here." Porno argues, persuasively, "No, there's not." Hanson hopes he's right as we pan down to Alex's file and the tiny passport photo Colin's agent will allow to represent him for the rest of the season. Fourth stage of the grieving process: shoddy police work. Sorry. I'll stop. Okay. I won't really stop.
Whoa! Standing corrected with the dimensions of the average Alex Whitman Memorial Photo. In the middle of a field near the school, a general bustle ensues, like the post-death scenes from Heathers but without the irony. Flowers. Balloons. Sad-looking dudes. A photograph so terrifyingly large propped on an easel that I hope no one mistakes it for the sign-in board at the Whitman Bar Mitzvah and scrawls a poorly-spelled "Your Haftorah was great! I'm having an amazing time! Congradulations!" across it. That word was always misspelled. Why sully my thrilling day of religious ascension with such a hazy grasp of the language? I just chanted in Hebrew for two hours and you've been speaking in English your whole life. Get it right, junior. And God said: and then, there was recap. Underneath the school bleachers (awww…this reminds me of the opening shot of the first episode of Freaks & Geeks! Until they start talking and suck, of course), Tess sits behind King Max, listening to the incessant yakking of a life less saved: "There was so much blood. I wasn't prepared for that. I didn't want to touch him. And then his skin was so cold." Max starts to cry. Tess puts a hand on his shoulder as though Max is cold and bloody and she doesn't particularly want to touch him, either. Smelling his sadness, Isabel, Michael, and Maria walk under the bleachers just then. Michael warns them that the high school has brought in a grief counselor, and Maria looks at the assemblage of people and gets all incredulous that "they're sitting there, praying and crying and putting on this show that they gave a damn about Alex when he was alive. God, it makes me so angry." Kyle ups the pathos ante then too, walking up and telling Max and Michael that Mr. Whitman called him and asked if they would be pallbearers. Max looks insulted that he wasn't asked to do it alone, using only his pinky, but he's resigned to reserve his feats of strength for another time. This is, after all, a time to come together.
Scale Pay Delivery Boy regales a group of extras with sensationalistic tales about his last few moments with Alex: "You could see it in his eyes. He was on his way out of this life." Everyone hates Liz, so the crowd disperses quickly when she walks up behind him and spits, "Is that a fact?" She continues on when it's just the two of them: "I'd like to ask you some questions. If you have the time." She overenunciates the hell out of the letter "t" in order to throw us all a bone and offer up a different angrily-pronounced letter for us to make fun of for a minute.
Isabel has slunk under the bleachers at some point, and she now announces, "I know this is a bad time, but, um, I'm graduating early. I'm leaving in June to start college in the fall in San Francisco." Oh, you mean The College Of San Francisco, where applications can be submitted by telepathy and the autumn starts in June? A magical place, the hallowed halls of this institution for higher learning. I guess she'll be reuniting with young Colin after all in her first class, "Contract Negotiation 101-102: How To Make Your Consistent Network Job From A Dream Sequence Into A Reality." But this is not what the others want to discuss right now. Max, in fact, wants to know, "When did all this happen?" Isabel responds that she's been thinking about it all for a while, and that she talked to Bangs about it and everything. A small kerfuffle breaks out about snap decisions and this is my life blah retread, and Maria groans from her corner with Michael, "Do we have to talk about this right now?" Michael agrees, "This isn't a decision we have to make today." Isabel grits, "This isn't a decision 'we' have to make at all. It's my decision. I've made it. I'm leaving Roswell." And I have to quietly celebrate that little moment right there, because it's refreshing to know that, as far as her character is concerned, there is a direct correlation between Isabel's decision to leap off the sinking ship of this show and her sudden and thrilling rediscovery of her spine. Welcome back, stranger.
And back to Liz and Scale Pay doing their conversational tango, Liz askink, "And then what did he say?" Scale Pay tries to recall Alex's exact words: "Life isn't right or life is wrong or something like that." Pretty close, actually, and delivered with approximately the same heart-tugging investment in the dialogue. Liz continues, "And then what did you say?" He said, "Whatever, dude." Liz fumes, "'Whatever, dude'? That's your reaction to a man who is devastated and on his way out of this life?" Hey, um, Liz? You guys? People of Earth? People of five triangulated planets in an alternate subset dimension? He's the delivery guy. This whole subplot has got "dead end" -- rather than "actually dead" -- written all over it. Besides, wasn't Liz with Alex five seconds before he slipped into this well-documented coma of despair? What of those warnings signs? Delivery. Guy. Don't make me fast-forward through six hours of this and crash-land on a scene at the Roswell Mobil Station, Liz all donning a trench coat and holding up a badge while barking, "And you say you checked his oil level and tire pressure but that you FORGOT TO CLEAN THE SQEEGEE?" Step back, Mourning Glory. Angie Harmon's replacement has already been named.
Liz still knows that "this photo means somethink." She's sitting in The Den Of Porno with the place's namesake, Porno trying to evade her questions. But she knows that he's onto something. "You have a theory about this, don't you?" Porno tries to send her home, but Liz knows that "what happened to Alex is not an accident," begging Porno, "Cut the crap and tell me what the photo means to you." Except "photo" is with fifty "f's" by her pronunciation. Damn. The bot is smoking mad. Or should I say smoking, mad. Porno warns her that he has news he fears she won't like. Liz makes like, "Don't tell me the car is totaled! I'm very close with the family!" Because she's metal. Sigh. Moving that joke from the scene where Liz looks at the car for the first time down to MS Word page ten. How many episodes left? Porno gets on with it: "It's beginning to look more and more likely that Alex might have deliberately turned his car into oncoming traffic." Liz wants to know "w-why" he would do that. Weird. Glitch in the Lizbot's matrix. Porno tells her that he's culled together corroborating evidence from the truck driver and Alex's teachers that Alex had been depressed and distant for the last few weeks, and Liz barks, "You are saying that Alex killed himself over bad grades?" Dr. Porno notes that the ppppppphoto Lizbot pulled from the car is proof enough, seeing as "he deliberately defaced his own image!" Fifth stage of the grieving process: inventing directly correlative symptoms for suicide.
Liz storms out. She takes a few wayward steps away from Porno's house, and then stops abruptly on the sidewalk, leaning down to puke up the drywall of Porno's living room, a direct result of having chewed through so much scenery in her blaze of glory through the Subtle-Acting-Free Zone. No one on this show gives a crap about that zone anymore. We cut from her dry heaving to me dry heaving while Max, in his shadowy bedroom, tries on his black designer funeral duds (y'all, if you could get Hugo Boss on the case of wardrobing my funeral, I'd be thankful in life and death) and wishes his confidantes would make with some more farm-buying, because he knows how kick-ass he looks in black. A knock on the window reveals Liz who, still wiping the last four scenes or so from her lips, tells Max, "I don't want to be alone. Can…can I stay here tonight?" Max responds, "Sure." She makes her way awkwardly into his bedroom. Sixth stage of the grieving process: doors are for suckers.
Liz? Can you at least try and be annoying just a bit more quietly? Thanks. Wait. How come you're not doing it yet? Max sits on his bed, quietly whispering, "That's crazy," and Liz rants around him, just braying, "I know. That is what I said." Said has fourteen syllables. She frets that "Hanson is gonna go and he's gonna put that in his report and it's going to be in the newspaper for every single person to read, all of his friends, his family: 'Alex Whitman's death was declared a suicide yesterday by the Roswell Sheriff's Department.'" His friends? I thought he wasn't allowed to have any friends but y'all. Liz screams that his parents shouldn't have to go through all this, and sits on the floor to his bed with her hands over her mouth to connote, I think, that her breath is still pukey. Max promises to take care of it. And then Liz, I think, farts. It's awesome. Max tries to stave off as much awkwardness as possible and asks when the last time she ate was, proposing, "How does frozen macaroni and cheese sound?" It sounds frozen. And bound, I fear, to cause more gas. How about some Beano and a Valium, instead? Good, then.
Michael walks through the beaded hippie curtains at the DeLucawitz residence and hands DeLucawitz a mug. She tells him, "No more tea, thank you, Michael." He tells her with a strange amount of joviality that it's not tea, "It's buttered rum." She tells him, "No more bizarro cocktails from the Gen'ral Store over at Ye Olde Williamsburg Preserve, Michael." She doesn't say that. But that's what it is. And it's what she should have said. Michael tells her that he learned how to mix drinks from his foster dad. But, interestingly, he never even touched a drop of it to his tongue, foretelling what might have happened to Max in "Blind Date" years in advance. "Writers"? Stop. Making. Shit. Up. You want a character to have a history? Create one. Don't remind us that all people who drink are bad and then put a drink in Mrs. DeLuca's hands. And you killed Tony Clifton like you killed Alex: quickly, but seemingly never for good. That was wrong of you. DeLucawitz reminds us that Tony Clifton was "a charming man." Crazy Italians with their ironic sarcasm. Can we talk about something else now? We can. DeLucawitz and Michael talk briefly about Maria finally having fallen asleep, and DeLucawitz notes to Michael, "Y'know, I think this is the most time you've ever spent in my house." It is weird. If Uncle Sam gave me free cable and a full refrigerator and a lifetime supply of architecturally-shifting rooms of varying sizes and purposes, I'd probably never leave it. But Michael and I are different. For instance, Michael has a mullet. Michael apologizes and says he can leave, but DeLucawitz clarifies, "What I'm trying to say is that you've really been great for my family. And it's a really great thing to see my daughter loved. And as far as I'm concerned, you'll always be welcome in my house." Awwwww. That was the cutest. Mama DeLucawitz weighs in with sensible words. She takes another swig of I-Like-Michael-Now Brand Liquor and tells him he'll be welcome in her house any time. "Welcome on the couch." Right. Because she's still a mom. But she and Michael have bonded. And now they like each other very, very much. Ah. The healing power of booze.
Meanwhile, Isabel dips into her growing haberdashery of Crazy Hats and is in the Crashdown with Alex again. Hey, L'il? How can we miss you if you won't go away? She asks, "You're not really here, are you?" He tells her that he hears the secrets that she keeps, 'cause she's talking in her sleep. She tells him how sorry she is that she "brought [him] into any of this." She thinks that being with her had something to do with him ending up killed. Alex takes her hands and tells her, "If I were really here, I would tell you you were full of crap, and you know that." Actually, he says, "If I was really here," but the present conditional singular necessitates the plural verb tense, and I'd much rather explain that to y'all than call it "[sic]" and move on, because no one ever seems to know what that means, and why read a recap this long if you can't at least say that you came away having learned something? ["Uh, www.mightybigtv.com/faq.asp." -- Sars] He tells her, "I'd better go. I'm not making things any better for you." She asks him not to go. "I'm already gone." Ooooh. The thinking man's Roswell episode. You don't need me for you to learn one damned thing. They kiss again, and Alex bids Isabel goodbye. Tears and more tears. She calls after him, "I love you, Alex!" That's so something we have in common, Isabel. I love glorifying the memory of the dead, too! Alex turns and deadpans, "I think we both know that I love you, too." Maybe he cut his head off in the picture with Svetlana to paste it onto a photo of someone noodling real close with Isabel to convince us all they had eyes for each other all along. Maybe he put his own face over the face of Isabel making out with one of her old boyfriends. Maybe he put his own face over the face of Isabel and Max. I'm just thinking out loud here.
More hijinks in Chez Evans, replete with the aforementioned dinner. Max says something about the prom, which reminds Liz: "I saw you kiss Tess. It's okay. You're moving on." Max tries to get a word in edgewise, but Liz thinks she's all kick-ass this week. She stops near the door and asks, "Just always be my friend. Will you do that, Max?" Max: I will. Liz: Pffffft.
Please, show! Take yourself more seriously! You've already killed off someone's dad and exhumed JFK. Why not a poorly-executed main plot about a dead teenager? And make it good. An a cappella rendering of Maria fighting through "Amazink Grace" pipes over a funeral montage that leaves not a dry eye in the middle of the desert. Crying. Slo-mo. Well-cut black suits. Quite unevenly, we cut right to Max chasing after Porno, generally yelling. Porno snipes something about having nothing to apologize for, and we cut to a closer shot of them. Max: "Alex Whitman did not kill himself, okay? It did not happen!" Porno hands him Alex's file and tells him, "This is everything we've discovered about Alex Whitman in the last few days. Read it, Max." That tiny picture of him is awful. Dissolve to God-you're-beautiful-when-you-read wide shot of Max violating eight different kinds of non-disclosure laws as we cut to, I think, the first commercial break in the recorded history of the televisual medium.
Stilted small talk reigns supreme back at the Whitman house, where a pan of Liz walking through the house finds Kyle telling Isabel that he thinks "Frisco's great" and Michael and Tess trying to find something for Maria to eat. This dialogue has Mike-Leigh-gone-wrong written all over it. There's a picture of Alex by the smorgasbord, and I feel not my first pang of sadness for people at home watching this who have actually suffered through the experience of losing someone as young as Alex. Because it can't be tackled, and it shouldn't be tried. I know I won't be the first to reference it, but if you're not Buffy's mom, you shouldn't be self-seriously dying on the WB. Ever. Again. Thanks. Liz makes her way out to the backyard, where the unbelievably tall Mr. Whitman tells Liz, "I hope you know how much Alex loved you and Maria. He just thought the world of you two." She asks if she can go to Alex's room, and Mr. Whitman responds that he hasn't even been there yet. And this was mentioned in forums, but through this whole sequence there is a fake squirrel sitting stationary on a tree right behind Mr. Whitman's left ear that blows any drama this scene might have possessed right on out of the park. Liz's presence could have caused that, too. A death so powerful it stops squirrels…in their tracks.
Liz one-ups Maria on the performing-music-on-this-show-may-be-hazardous-to-all-that's-holy issue, as she sits on Alex's bed mindlessly undoing sixty or so years of what the bass guitar has done for rock music. Hey, if Alex's death was a matter for police investigation, wouldn't these scenes of quiet musing have been interrupted by some yellow tape, a few dogs, and the actual investigation by the -- y'know -- police? I'm just sayin'. She speaks aloud, because the dead talk back, provided you're on TV: "I really need your help. I know somethink's wronk. I know what they're sayink about you isn't true. But I don't know where to go from here. I really wish you could give me some advice. Point me in a direction." But wait! Ambiguity-of-death-reversing superhero Captain Literal flies out of the sky and directs Liz's attention to Alex's copy of Frost poetry, sitting on his desk. She stands up and makes for it, picking the tome up and flipping to the most clichéd poem in high-school history, "Stoppink by Woods on a Snowy Evening." She pulls two Beth Orton concert tickets out from the middle of the book and reads the "miles to go poem AP cakes" and whispers "thank you." Wow. Imagine how upset they'd be now if Alex had actually been that cool or helpful back when he was alive.
Ex-Alex's room. The usual folks are assembled, and Liz holds court: "Valenti and Hanson are about to declare Alex's death a suicide." Gasp! Liz knows it's not true. Maria knows it's not true. Max: "Well, I'm not so sure." Liz turns on him and Max stays quiet and pouty, telling them, "The evidence is pretty convincing." Liz knows it's not. She holds up the concert tickets, venting, "Alex bought them on the day he died, probably for him and Isabel." Well, then, at least the still-living can treat themselves to a killer upgrade using the frequent-flier miles from that exhausted freakin' gold card. "The concert is tonight. Don't you get it? You don't buy concert tickets on the day you kill yourself. You don't make plans for the future when you are not planning on having a future." Wait. Why are the fifth and seventh stages of the grievink process exactly the same? Tess thinks it's "pretty slim evidence," and Maria rounds on her: "You don't know what the hell you're talking about." Michael correctly states that there's nothing to be gained from this argument, and that Alex "would never kill himself." Because only bad people do that. Michael claims it was an accident, and Liz claims it wasn't even that. "He was murdered." Huh? An almost unison "who?" makes this episode closer and closer to the third ending of the Clue movie than I ever thought it could be, and Liz switches into hasty-season-wrap-up mode with her non-sequitur assertion, "Maybe somebody with a grudge against him. Or…maybe an alien!" Isabel rails that this has nothing to do with them, and Kyle crosses onto Liz's side because divisions have to be drawn where, five seconds ago, no divisions existed. Liz screams out that Isabel could be involved, recapping most of the second season in one breathless sentence and bringing up Khivar all over again and please for the love of all things don't let them go back to New York please please please-y god please. Max tells Liz she knows nothing about his world, and Promo Pete shows up and showers us all with many, many promos as Liz screams in her mysteriously-appearing Jersey-girl way, "You don't want to think that Alex was killed by an alien because that would mean you! Are! Responsible!" Yikes, Ocean City Girl. Too much time in the booth with Bon Jovi, eh? The Alien Four take off. Liz barks something else about finding out the truth. Kyle regrets that "it's us versus them" just because every other idea had already been tested.
Montage-cakes. Photos of Alex. Uncomfortable shot of Alex dancing in "Surprise," because it's pretty much the only episode he's been in this season. It's raining out, and that's sad. A knock at the Crashdown door sends Liz running, and Scale Pay Delivery Boy runs in, testing my patience one last time. He's wet. That's sad, too. He's found something. "His credit-card receipt. The company kicked it back because of the way that he signed it." Liz takes a look. On the "X" line, it reads, "." Liz laughs hysterically, because she heard that joke in the factory a thousand times. The punch line is "gigabytes." Ha ha ha ha ha ha! Good one, bots around the world. Scale Pay Delivery Boy asks if it means anything to her. It does: "I have promises to keep. And miles to go before I sleep." Eighth stage of the grieving process: sound bites of poetry aren't automatically deep just because someone hung a sign on them marked "poetry." Those grievink folks. Well, I guess they forget that, sometimes.