Props, as always, to the forum regulars, for making the Roswell boards an almost religious experience for me. Really. I just surfed over to the MBTV dry goods department and bought myself a bumper sticker reading "I Moderate For Jesus." Now all I need is the car. Ba-dum.
Previously: L'il Hanks dies, Liz wants to know the truth, Glorified Delivery Boy gets caught in the cameo that went up a hill and just kept climbing, and Maria writes "I will not participate in woefully hackneyed opening classroom montages" five hundred times on the blackboard behind her. And she still doesn't seem to get the message.
Who wants close-ups? I do! I do! And for the love of Eastman-Kodak, I hope y'all feel the same way. An appropriately Mighty Big Glamour Shot of Alex "There's No Deadness Like Show Deadness" Whitman, looking pale and tragic and spindly and just generally post-living as it is, cuts to a table filled with dozens more photos. The camera then swoops up to show us "I'll Never Stop Saying" Maria DeLuca and Mr. "Lurch Learns To Dance" Whitman, staring down at the photos. Maria accidentally exposes the film canister marked "Subtle Narrative Exposition" to Liz's Shiny Happy Hair, making the results of those labors far too blurry to see, opting instead for the garish flash and grainy stock of Unsubtle Exposition, telling Lurch Whitman and us, "It's a two-page yearbook spread. A collage that captures, y'know, everything Alex was." Everything Alex was? That being, absent but for idle talk and living in a constant state of two-dimensions? Yup. That seems about right so far. Lurch Whitman employs The Somber Stutter that is part and parcel with the surrounded-by-death experience on TV, intoning quietly, "You guys are just, g-g-great friends to Alex. S-s-s-still." Chilly up there, Stilts McGillicuddy? He continues on, calling over to Liz "Perry Mason For Dummies" Parker, who is sitting at Ex-Alex's computer swapping shareware so her friends and family can play computer solitaire on her while she's sleeping, "Oh, and Liz, tell your folks thanks for the food they sent over." Upload's a bitch on a product-placed Mac, so Liz can barely muster the energy to distractedly respond, "Yeah, sure." She turns her head exactly one centimeter to the left and her eyes fall on a stack of cards. She picks one up and inquires, "What are these?" Never programmed to read analog. For shame. They'll have to keep that update in mind as a possible improvement for the new mainframe, L.I.Z. 2.0, for which the new server should be arriving soon. Lurch Whitman responds from deep space, "Condolence cards from the floral arrangements. You can take a look at them if you'd like." She flips the one conveniently in her hand: "The Olsens?" Awww. That was so sweet of Mary-Kate and Ashley to find the time between filming their new straight-to-video madcap ride Tweens, Scenes, and Training Bras: The Olsen Twins and their Disturbing, Ill-Timed Pubescence and their confessionals for The Bob Saget E! True Hollywood Story ("And, in 1984, he still sucked. And, in 1985, he still really sucked. But it was in 1986 that, no, still sucking") and their drawing up of the prenup for their eventual dual marriage to Aaron Carter to find time to send the very best to this nice, fictional stranger on the low-rated alien drama. Lurch Whitman seeks to set the record straight: "They were Alex's host family in Sweden." Wait, I didn't know the Olsen Twins live in Sweoh, never mind. Lurch Whitman laments the fact that "Gloria and I didn't even think about contacting them." Cheap bastards who don't know how to dial down the center. And Alex's mom's name is "Gloria"? Liz asks who could have contacted them, and Lurch Whitman notes it must have been someone from the school, seeing as the "entire trip was organized through the guidance office." Which is a reassuring statement, at least, considering the continuity it implies about The World's Most Comprehensive Guidance Office maintained since way back in the days of Renee and trust-building games and string-tie Kyle and supermodel Isabel and the writerly hubris of me, shamelessly referencing old recaps like that time I noted, "In my high school, our guidance counselors would call each student in, determine we were free of drugs and head lice, and we were off to college" way back in "Monsters." Lurch Whitman realizes that Maria and Liz are going to be loitering in the alleged police crime scene for some time, and takes his leave, saying, "I'll order a pizza." Maria tells him not to worry. Lurch Whitman holds up a hand, nearly burning it on the rays of the sun in doing so and states, "I-I-I-I-I-it's nothing," before folding himself in half on his trip through the normal-people door. Brrrrrr.
“ That's the sadness level of finding out that a suddenly-lost loved one was a charter member of the KKK, or had six wives all in different states, or was a computer dork with the password 'I Am Stud.' It's heaps like that last one, actually. ”
Alone now, Maria turns to Lizbot and chides, "You're being rude." Liz registers the old "403: You are forbidden from access to that emotional server" and instead continues the communing with her buddy Mac, who really understands her. She barks back without looking up, "Alex put every single thing about his entire life in this computer. There has gotta be something in here to help us figure out what really happened." Maria retorts that they're there just to look for photos for the yearbook spread, and that to pry in his personal belongings would be "immoral." Liz shoots back, "What's ee-moral is that someone murdered Alex." Wha? Immoral? Amoral? Paramoral? Pick one and stick with it, sister. The only letter you've uncovered so far on your Wheel of Fucked-Up Speech Patterns is the hard "k," so I'm afraid you can't afford to buy any vowels today. Immoral. Soft "i," not hard "e." Liz continues that the only clues they have are the binary food receipt and the chopped up Back to the Future shot of Swedish Svetlana and the non-head portions of Alex's body. After refusing to search through his desk drawers, Maria turns the topic a little awkwardly to ask if Max knows she's doing all this. Liz doesn't think Max is interested. Tell Max the line forms to the left. Maria throws herself down on a couch in a new corner of Alex's ever-biggening room, fretting, "It's like this chasm has formed between everybody since" She trails off and Liz picks up the slack, "Since I said aliens were responsible for Alex's death." Maria starts to explain that they shouldn't be doing this without the Alien Four knowing, trying to make Liz's hard metal frame feel anything at all when she continues, "As it is, Michael and I haven't even talked to each other in days." Liz doesn't give so much as a crap -- she has a sophisticated environmentally-friendly, hypo-allergenic waste-disposal system for that, which is really a recap for another time -- as she has just made the discovery that there is a locked file (helpfully labeled "Locked File") on Alex's hard drive. Liz turns to Maria and asks what Alex's security code is. Maria can't hide the truth. It's "I The Stud." That's so sad. That's the sadness level of finding out that a suddenly-lost loved one was a charter member of the KKK, or had six wives all in different states, or was a computer dork with the password "I Am Stud." It's heaps like that last one, actually. The computer whirs to Global Thermonuclear War life with just about the same high level of lowly level of DOS effects. The words "Leanna is not Leanna" print out on the screen over and over and over again as Maria and Liz look on. The V.I.L.E. Henchman has been located! You now have a warrant to arrest Leanna Olson! She is in Oslo! Where the chief export is textiles!
Opening credits: But he's still in the credits. This bodes spoiler-ish. Or it bodes show-too-cash-strapped-and-exhausted-to-recut this late in the season's run. And did I mention cash-strapped? Come come, sweet UPN!
Damn, she's bottom-feeding this week. First a stint hanging out with Maria, who's been hanging out with the zeroes who populate the office of the West Roswell High senior Queerbook (sorry, but that's actually what we called it. I'm okay with it, and so should you be), and now Liz is talking to a frizzy-haired member of the disenfranchised Freaks & Geeks Background Casting Brigade, his striped, short-sleeved, collared velour shirt obvious WB shorthand for "I am a fan of computers; administer wedgie now." Worry not, though, fans of hegemony; the Normal People on this show continue lovely and lily white. Liz grills both freak and geek on the sequence of numbers on the credit card receipt (he looks all helpless and "Well, zero is the amount of times I've not been a virgin"), but learns that binary code is used "to tell a computer how to operate." Liz goes madly 304 ("Not modified") because her own Programming Geppetto was obviously remiss in updating Lizbot's central mainframe, and now she can't understand the code of other beings like her, because in her memory chip, it's 1901. Poor thing. She asks him to be more specific. But the sequence of numbers, without an application, "means nothing." But just at this moment, Max "Captain" Evans and Tess "Tennille" Harding round a corner and Liz tells Virgin Mathlete, "I'll talk to you about this later." No, you won't. Opportunistic bitch.
Speaking of said personality composite, Max approaches as Tess takes off. "We Have Quite The History" glances are exchanged as Max launches in, "I just wanna talk this through. I don't want this to turn into a war between us, between everyone." Well, neither does Liz. Awwww. Is that the sound of old wounds healing? Or is there more of a "fester" thing going on in my straining wound metaphor? Let's go see! Max tells Liz that he understands she was upset at the wake, and that he's willing "to forget about it." Oh, Max, you're too, too kind. Try not to cure cancer (oops, did that one already) and reunite David Lee Roth with the other feuding members of Van Halen while you're so busy riding the front float of the Altruism Parade. Liz lets out a really angry, "Mmm-hmmm." 'Cause Liz, well, she's not ready to go Stepford into his way of thinkink, and she actually takes a stab at somethink resemblink rational and independent thought when she snipes back, "Maybe it wasn't right for me to say what I said just then. And maybe I could have said it a little bit calmer. But I don't regret it. And it's true." Word. Max tells Liz that the way she's going about her ad-hoc investigation isn't safe, claiming precedent: "Whenever we decide to do something, we always decide it as a group." He'd better reconsider taking that Commie pinko dirty hippie bullshit back to his triangulated homeland with him, because the decision-by-committee thing works fine on paper and in a college sociology textbook, but when it comes to human beings enacting actual change, rarely do the agents of said change cite the historical benefits of "lambs in large groups, not being led to slaughter" or "the manifold and continuing successes of socialism." Get off the breadline and let's see some American ingenuity in action, okay, Emile Jerkheim? Thanks. Sorry to defend Liz for a minute there. But shut up, Max. Shut up a lot. Liz asks Max, "Do you believe me?" Deathly pause, before he clarifies, "About Alex?" Oh. And here I thought she meant, "About the high price of porn." The hell? But no, Max does not believe her zany theories. "Well then we can't act as group right now, Max."
“ If only my grandmother were here to offer sage, grandmotherly wisdom which is both antiquated and completely appropriate, most certainly something of all that having nothing to do with 'the price of tea in China.' But she wouldn't be watching this. Her 'stories' are all on in the daytime. ”
From the Queerbook to the A/V Squad, Maria is determined to martyr herself to hopeless-loser status to avenge the death of her former hopeless loser best friend. Over in a room of the school we've never seen before, Maria is looking through a really complex camera sitting on a tripod. Liz barks germane facts about the "Leanna is not Leanna" existential puzzle, which she claims Alex created while he was in Sweden. She demands that a totally ambivalent Maria "think about it in alien terms: it could mean that she's a shapeshifter or a skin or some other type of alien that we don't even know about yet." I'm gonna hedge my vote and fill in the Scantron sheet and scratch my number two pencil on (c), seeing as there's no way the "writers" would see clear to actually, y'know, read old scripts before setting about writing new ones. Maria urges Liz to think about it "in human terms," thinking the solution might be a little more pedestrian. Whereas I'm sticking with the Liz camp at the moment, because Roswell's best stab at Occam's Razor clearly states that the most obvious solution is that which is long-winded, short-lived, and unbelievably convoluted. Oh, and boring. For instance: "I started playing around with the sequence of ones and zeroes that Alex wrote on the delivery food receipt the night he was murdered." This oughta be a convincing series of specious assumptions. For clinical schizophrenics who have seen Jesus in the supermarket and believe their radios hear them when they talk back. "There are twenty altogether. Then I counted the number of letters in the phrase 'Leanna is not Leanna.' Seventeen, not a match. Until I counted the number of spaces between the words. Seventeen letters plus three spaces equals twenty. What if there's a connection?" If only my grandmother were here to offer sage, grandmotherly wisdom which is both antiquated and completely appropriate, most certainly something of all that having nothing to do with "the price of tea in China." But she wouldn't be watching this. Her "stories" are all on in the daytime.
Michael "Don't Have A Tao, Man" Guerin ambles in and asks to talk to Maria. Liz leaves without a word (now that's Tao, Mikey G), and Michael asks Maria, "So what's Liz accusing us of now?" Maria tell him he's come to the wrong place for trash talkin', and Michael presses on, "You gotta tell her to get off this Alex thing." Maria wonders if maybe Liz is right after all, because Liz's twenty total digits left the room in twenty paces on a day that's exactly twenty months and twenty days before her twentieth birthday (well, not exactly, but if you add a leap year that doesn't exist and move her birthday three days earlier, to the 20th, which was her original due date by the way, you're only twenty days off. Coincidence? Yes, Liz. YES, IT IS), and Michael claims that's even more of a reason for them to just step away and leave it alone. Maria hates "this division" between everyone, which she shouldn't just dismiss out of hand, because if you divide the amount of thatoh, never mind. Michael retorts, "Well then, maybe Liz shouldn't have blamed us for killing Alex." Maria retorts that that's not what she said. In fact, she said, "You don't want to think that Alex was killed by an alien because that would mean you! Are! Responsible!" So, in fact, that is exactly what she said. Michael takes sudden note of what Maria is looking at on the other side of The World's First Camera (how did he even know she was there, hiding as she was underneath that giant cloth curtain thingy that protects the flash or whatever it does?) and asks her what she's doing. "It's a picture of all his instruments." She wonders if it's "lame." Michael thinks it is, "kind of," and then, much to her never-abating shock, offers to help out for the first time in this "healthy," "giving" relationship. Maria asks if he's serious and then tosses out a list of errands she needs to get done. Michael needs to stop by Tao-er and pick up some new Tao while they're out. 'Cause I just ain't feeling it, forumites. Sah-ry.