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 Swe…oh, 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.
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."
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 that…oh, 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.
Out in The Scoping Fjords of Sandy Land, The Alien Four walk toward the Alienmobile (Whee! Pre-established Nickname Palooza!). They walk in pairs, Max and Tess in front with Isabel and Michael behind them. Awwww. Height order. It worked in kindergarten and it works now. Max kicks things off that "she's obsessed." Isabel says that she's the last person who wants to consider this, but wonders if Liz may be onto something. Max: "No, she isn't right." Officious bastard. But wait, the master is not done! "Even if there were anything remotely alien about this, our cover is the best defense. Like it always has been." And he cut her off saying it, too. Bereft, she changes the subject to The Plot That Fell From The Sky, telling them that she was waitlisted at "San Francisco Fake College: Imaginary Campus." She goes on that she's "got everybody working in the guidance office to get [her] recommendations." Uh-oh. Better not work that guidance office too hard. Their power at full capacity cannot be fully comprehended. It would destroy us. Destroy us all. Isabel deadpans the excellent, "Some people would say congratulations." Max would not be one of those people, what with the fears of conspiracy and the death of a friend and the perpetual-asshole-being of him. Max barks, "We'll talk about this later," and walks off with Tess by his side. Isabel stands back in Sandy Land with Michael. She shakes her head, smiles incredulously, and looks off. I have no paragraph-punctuating snark about it, as it is probably the first authentic expression of human emotion on this show, like, ever. And y'all may not know this. But I've seen every episode. Thanks for your sympathy. I'm sad for me, too.
Visual cue for visual cue, pretty much everything is wrong with this scene. I've seen "What's Wrong With This Picture" back pages of Highlights for Children magazine where a mother with a pig snout serves a plate of steaming human feces to a baby wearing a Klan hood instead of a bib, and it's been less disturbing than this right here. In Max's room deep inside the fortress that is Chez Evans, Tess (things start off well, see) puts down a book and begins on cue, "The kiss at the prom. The infamous kiss." We pan back to find Max sitting on the floor to his frilly, frilly bedspread, giving Tess a fierce foot massage. Augh. Sorry. I have The Feet Thing, I guess. And the thought of Jason Behr coming within a mile (which, yuck, just made me think of 5,280 feet stampeding my way and I'm helpless and can't move and oh god) of my feet, well, maybe your method of massage differs from mine, but touchin' his lady's feet and stickin' your tongue in the holiest of holies, ain't the same ballpark, ain't the same league, ain't even the same fuckin' sport. Foot massages don't mean shit. Oops. Sorry. I am only able to keep my recent lunch lingering just below the oft-tested Vomit Line by spewing Tarantino dialogue about foot massages to dull the cornea burn of actually looking at Max have something to do with it. But Max, the foot fuckin' master, scratches his ear and goes back to the foot (okay, that's it, I quit) and listens to Tess speak of the kiss and ask him "where [they] are." Max hems. He haws. He licks his hand and contracts every known strain of foot-in-mouth-in-ear-in-mouth-in-foot-again disease known to this planet and any others you may know of. Finally, a response: "You and me together. It scares me." It scares us all, Emperor Inferior. "Right or wrong, I feel like if I follow that road, I can never go back." Tess believes that Max is "scared to go home." Oh, Max. We're all rooting for you from down here. Just GO. The Generic Dialogue Generator kicks into gear, spitting out clips from every Star Trek movie, a smattering of Fiddler on the Roof Diaspora, and the middle eight of that Ronstadt/Ingram classic "Somewhere Out There," managing to synthesize those many disparate sources and spit out only, "What is home? Is home really up there?" He wants to believe stories of his life on Mars, but it all feels like a dream he can't really comprehend. Earth just seems so much more…"real." Tess just stares. Poor, betrothed martyr with those poor piggies in his gross, scaly manhands. What else can she do?
"My So-Called" Sean DeLuca opens the front door of his aunt's house to reveal Liz. She follows him in as he returns to tinkering with the pipes underneath the sink and, if this is supposed to be some machismo exercise in wowing the ladies, well, then, I still prefer Jordan Catalano and I guess six intervening years changes nothing. Sorry, Frizz-bee. My So-Called Sean is apologetic about Alex's death, and Liz thanks him for the flowers. She sits down and unsubtly launches in: "You know, I was thinking about our trip to the bowling alley." He's piqued. "Yeah?" "I was wondering how we got in. I mean, did you use a Swiss Army knife or something?" He reminds her that he used a pick. The volley continues. She tells him she wants to break into the school, and we're reminded that, with his record, he's not even allowed to be near the school. Cut to Wacky Comic Juxtaposition, where Sean jimmies open the door marked "Guidance Counselor" (kept under strict lock and key because this most powerful bastion even knows who killed Kennedy…and they know it was them) and sends Liz in. She does the Michael Guerin and she turns herself around, and that's what it's all about. She snags Alex's file and flips it open. Photocopies of class schedules, birth certificates, and MMR inoculation are quickly made. Sean comes in and tells her it's time to go, and she crams the relevant info in her bag. Outside the office, she frets that she doesn't think she got it all, and Sean, seasoned veteran at petty, boring crimes as this, tutorializes, "One rule about breaking and entering. Never stay in the same place for more than five minutes." They walk into the hall and Sometimes Evil Deputy Hanson shines a flashlight on them and yells, "Hold it right there, you two." Maybe Sean should make it four.
And what it all comes down to. Is that everything's gonna be fine, fine, fine. 'Cause he's got one hand in his pocket and the other hand, well, in his pocket, but he must have kept at least a few spare digits around, else how would we explain the perpetually thumb-up-his-ass quality of every move he's made so far this week? It's Max. I'm talking about Max. And he's walking through the dark, empty, soundstage-y Roswell night when Michael whistles from just off-camera and falls in to Max. Max doesn't want Michael to do that. "Don't do that," he says. Michael broaches the Isabel/college invented subplot, and Max again tells it like it is with the being him and the sucking: "She can't go." Michael, apparently having found some governmental loophole that allows him to pay the rent on his house in that legal tender known as "good karma," again volunteers to be Mulleteen, the Roswell Manservant. He offers to talk to Isabel, and Max accepts. Max begins to walk away, but Michael calls out behind him and asks if everything's okay, "because you sort of snapped at Isabel before." Max retorts with the identical words he's been using to express his anger all day, but this time they're more somber and contemplative because that's how people talk at night, standing on utterly deserted street corners when the blue screen filled with snarled city traffic sitting just behind them generates not so much as a honking horn. time you're in that situation, you'll know your expected volume, then. Max turns the tables, asking Michael if he thinks aliens could be involved. Michael lip-purses in response, "I have no idea. I just wouldn't want our leader to be forming opinions based on what he wants to be true instead of what really is true." Word on that. Max laments that "he can't bear" the thought that Alex might have died just because they're here, and reminds Michael that he spent some time running off and breaking into conveniently open buildings searching for who he was. "Lately, I was thinking you might have been right all along." Well, it's just the introduction to the opposite sketches, because Michael counters, "Lately I was thinking I might have been wrong all along." Lately this. Lately that. What have you done for me lately? Ooh-ooh-ooh-yeah. This is wild. I swear it.
Continued nighttime at The World's Most Comprehensive Guidance Office, where Deputy Sometimes Evil Hanson manhandles My So-Called Sean away from a silent Lizbot and over to a row of lockers. Hanson stands with his arms crossed, an intimidating pose that might work to threaten My So-Called Sean if Hanson were about three feet taller. The third degree begins: "What are you doing, DeLuca?" Well, look at him, man. With the all-black ensemble and the ambiguous record, he's about one embroidered patch on that ominous knit black skullcap reading "I Heart Cat Burgling" away from being arrested in broad daylight sitting on a park bench. He's just made to look the bad guy, is all I'm saying. My So-Called Sean defends himself on the basis that he was just trying to "get in her pants" (ew) and that he broke into the school because "chicks dig an adrenaline rush. But not this one. She's a buzzkill." Sean = snark = Liz = boring = shout-out. The Mathematics of Liz. I took that class in high school, too. And I've been taking it for the last two years, and I still haven't graduated. Hanson responds, "You're a real zero, you know that, DeLuca." Zero? Thank you, last entry in The 1950s Guide to Authoritarian Insults. Now that "pig" (page 94) Hanson will tell everyone at the station that that "cad" (page 14) Sean was a real "turkey" (page 157) when he brought his "steady" (page 143) into the school for some "petting, heavy" (page 93). No "malt fizz" (page 84) down at the "Chok'lit Shop" (page 17) or listening to "The Shadow" (page 140) until you "hooligans" (page 55) learn you some manners, "consornit" (page 20)! Off to "Siberia" (page 141) with you, you "Red" (page 99). Hanson ambles over to Sean's fine filly (page…ah, screw it). He hopes she appreciates the seriousness of her actions. Lizbot on red alert! Lizbot on red alert! He continues that he's going to let her off with a "strong warning," on account of her being a good kid and her parents being "good folk." My So-Called Sean is led off by Michael Horse's equally ethnically diverse and equally silent unnamed replacement. "Good folk." Page 47.
Den of Porno. Max. Porno. Dull, earthy tones. Porno tells Max that the break-in, with the news of which Basil Exposition just dashed over, rolled up in a glass bottle and left in Porno's tree mail, "sounds a little out of character for Liz." Porno is glad to be left in the dark on certain issues, "but you guys are usually a lot more careful about it than this." About the skulking. And he would know. Max promises to take care of it. That's the scene. Thanks for the Valenti Family Tease. I'm guessing that scene was hacked by seven minutes or so.
Liz, a ringing phone, and every clichéd notion from the set design of Conspiracy Theory greet us in Liz's room. The darkened walls are adorned with maps and photos and ABBA discographies, and Liz listens as an answering machine picks up and barks at her in Swedish. Da? Beep. "Hello, Mr. Olsen?" She leaves a blitheringly long message in English, probably leaving the Olsens on the other end making the same ethnocentric jokes we're making about them, like, "Blah blah this is Liz Parker, and I love the Bruce Springbean music and the loud, active movies of Bill Smith. I am fat with hamburger, power-hungry American! What with her funny 'k' Englishing? Purple monkey dishwasher." Hey, Bjorn? You leave the America out of this and concentrate on getting Two of a Kind into syndication. It was a really good show. What? It was.
More bad news at The College of Hard Knocks. Michael approaches Isabel at an outdoor table at West Roswell, starting in straightaway, "So this is the college." Isabel leafs through a couple of papers and shows Michael the housing options and the dorm she wants to live in, and Michael looks to the skies for guidance, purses his lips, feigns a moment of interest, and deadpans, "But you can't go." Isabel's having some trouble comprehending, so Michael elaborates, "Isabel, you know the drill. You have to stay in Roswell. We stick together. It's a given." She tells him that her mind is made up, so he launches into a laundry list of logistics (stop me! I've gone alliteration crazy! Lee lee la logistics!) including, "What happens if we need you back here? What are you going to tell your roommates, your professors? 'I'm sorry, Doctor So-and-so, but I gotta miss Sociology because of a fresh Gandarium spray in the Roswell sewers.'" Isabel and I exchange glances through the TV and mutter a simultaneous though imperceptible, "Gan-wha-dium," wondering why Michael didn't instead opt for an even more arcane and unused referent like "What happens if River Dog needs you to sweat" or "What if Agnes decides one day she doesn't want to work" or "What the holy living hell is a 'Nasedo,' anyway?" Isabel starts to argue, but Michael channels the Max within in cutting her off and exhausting a natural resource more limited than this suddenly-regenerative Gandarium known as my last ounce of patience, continuing on, "Who's gonna pay for this cross-country travel?" Cross-country? In the sovereign nation known as "Pacific Time Zone," where radical secessionists seek to create a new nation independent from land obtained in the Louisiana Purchase? That nation? Isabel pays no heed, telling him, "I'll change dollar bills into hundreds." He asks, "You can do that?" seeking yet another benefactor for his imaginary rent. Isabel frets that she just needs a change, but Michael counters that running away won't make Alex come back. "This is final." Isabel says it's not Michael's decision to make. "No, I'm speaking for Max." Isabel grabs her bag, snipes that Max really ought to take the time to talk to her himself, and storms off.
The yearbook editor is a dorky yearbook obsessive, and her WB physical flaw is that she's Too Tall. The staff sits around a table in a classroom, Maria explaining that there's still a lot to get together before the collage is ready for publication. Too Tall tells Maria that they're already holding the presses, and "as much as I think we're all devastated about Alex" (said in a tone of voice implying "As much as we're all devastated about the ultimately unsatisfying taste of New Coke"), "I don't think that it's in the wishes of the student body to not have a yearbook until after graduation." Too Tall judges silently, wondering why the chess club could get their picture in on time (because the chess club and the yearbook are identically staffed) and the marching band could get their picture in on time (ditto), but one dead kid with a Polaroid is holding up Retrospectus Roswell 2001 indefinitely. This girl uses a lot of excess arm movement, and it's glaringly obvious, because her limbs are long, because she's only the yearbook editor and she's too tall. Poor normal-looking people. She suggests a compromise, asking if maybe there's something that can be removed from the collage. Maria promises that, given forty-eight hours, she and Liz will have it all ready to go. Too Tall uses her last moments on the WB to join the bandwagon of Liz-haters, getting all surly: "Where is Liz, anyway?" Sorry, Too Tall. You're close to being one of us, but not all the way there…see, we hate her when she is around.
See that? She conjured Liz. Shut up, Too Tall. She's on her cell phone in school, holding a photograph and bitching, "I've checked every tour book and I can't find anything that matches." The Swedish man on the other end, sitting in an office building and looking very official because of the clocks all on different times behind him, responds that it's impossible for him to spend the day tracking down a building. Liz offers to email it to him. Liz hangs up the phone and turns around to find Max right behind her, whining, "What the hell were you and Sean DeLuca doing here last night?" Liz walks away and tells him she's busy trying to find a scanner so she can send the photograph in her hand to the Swedish Embassy in Washington, DC (I've had people cancel dates with me for just exactly that same reason. Do you think they were lying?). Max follows her through the halls, offering to "consider the possibility that Alex was killed by an alien if you consider the possibility he killed himself." Liz knows he didn't. Max grabs her arm and spins her around, demanding, "You've got nothing to lose here and we've got everything to lose." She tells him to let go of her, and a pan down to the offending physical contact proves all the more that with Isabel leaving for Spin-Off Potential Land all the way across the country, Michael changing his mind about what the aliens are doing on Earth, and Liz defying his demands to stop seeking the truth of Alex's death, all this pent-up anger is forcing him, once more, to become his own right hand. Poor, frustrated king. He lets go of her and walks away. A sign in the background reading "Junior Class" is obscured by a background extra and now reads only, "Junior Ass," lending this entire scene an overwhelming, punctuating sense of dumb I suspect it probably would have had anyway.
Max makes with the silence and brooding and the brooding and silence on a park bench during Roswell's longest night. A "hey" from behind him indicates that the once-excellent Tess is taking another step towards becoming Max's spineless girlfriend, as she asks him if he's okay and then tells him, "I want to show you something." Cut to the brand-new, out-of-nowhere Roswell Observatory, which they don't have to worry about trespassing through in the middle of the night because imaginary buildings that have existed for less than five minutes don't fall under the jurisdiction of local law enforcement. But really, that equipment looks like it should be operated only by a trained professional. Inside the Brigadoon Observatory, Tess points out a bright light while Max looks through a telescope; she asks, "See that star? How it wobbles?" Max wonders if that's their planet. It's not. It's bright and it's moving, so unless y'all live on Planet Direct TV Satellite, you'd better point that thing a few light years further out. Don't mess with the cable, people. Tess explains that that star that they're looking at can be seen from their planet, too! Oh, zah. Tess continues that their planet is real and out there, and that "this, this is the dream." The folks on Planet Meaningful Glance lock hands and exchange a meaningful "awwww."
A knock on Liz's door reveals Maria, mad as hell and not gonna take it anymore: "Liz, you miss another yearbook meeting, the least you could do is call." Liz apologizes for dumping all that on her, but launches into her current findings that the building in the photograph she found of Alex and Svetlana doesn't exist in any of the cities he visited while he was in Sweden. "Maybe she took him to, I don't even know where, to another country, or another planet." Maria's had it. Let's line up behind Maria to agree. She freaks out: "Stop it and listen to me. All right, I need my best friend right now, because our other best friend just died." She begs Liz to "please stop focussing on this thing that isn't even there and be sad with the rest of us." Liz stares incredulously, asking, "You don't believe me, either?" Maria responds that she doesn't, continuing, "You're doing this for Alex, but you don't care whose life you screw up on the way." Liz says that's not true. Maria asks if she's thought once about Sean since he ruined his probation for her. The Lizbot is silent, and Maria does what she can with the parting shot "I don't even know you anymore" in a scene which, benefiting from the smackdown and Liz's consequent silence, was a pretty strong one overall.
Liz cares about Sean and she wants him to know. Over at the DeLuca house, My So-Called Sean is trying to unclog the kitchen sink with the back of a broom handle. Liz thanks him for "taking the heat" (page 154) with Hanson the other night. Apparently, DeLucawitz talked to Porno and Hanson, and they're keeping him out of jail. So, yay. Watch the garbage disposal that he's unable to fix. It goes off in the third. Liz tells My So-Called Sean that she has to go. My So-Called Sean volleys, "Armored truck heist?" Heh. She tells him she needs to be alone and that her errand isn't the most exciting, but Sean assures her, "I'm pretty easy to entertain." Case in point: this burgeoning relationship. But she responds that she needs to remain focussed. He tries once more: "I can't date you. I can't hang out with you. Is there anything I can do with you?" You can kill her. She apologizes and makes for the door, turning around all Passions and kissing him all nookily before heading out. Yuck.
Michael opens the door to The House That Government Subsidy Built and sees Maria. "The print shop. I totally forgot." She rants that she called him and that his line was disconnected and that she was worried blah, sitting down on his couch and freaking again: "I can't count on you." He tells her that he's right here, so she clarifies the nature of this, her latest existential crisis: "One day you're gonna leave me. You're gonna get on a spaceship and go away. And you being the perfect boyfriend right now is really not helping. I can't lose anyone else, Michael. My heart can't handle it." And she's up and gone. She's sad. She knocks on people's doors and cries.
Liz is on the phone again, and this time an angry Swedish voice answers on the other end. She tells "Mr. Olsen" who she is and what she's calling about, but Increasingly Confused Swede tells Liz, "No one by that name lives here." She asks to speak with him. She gives him the number she dialed and learns that it is the correct number, but that there's no such person as a Mr. Olsen. She reads him the phone number on the florist's card. Right number, wrong guy. Gee, it seems like, if the Alien Guidance Office or whoever is responsible for this really wanted to cover their bases, they would have made up some kind of Swedish equivalent for the "555" exchange so she never would have gotten anyone at all. Say, does the drama get any more Swedish than this? Cut to Liz badgering a florist (available for all of your floral needs at -- natch -- 505-555-0195), who tells her that international calls only take a credit-card number, which he, thankfully, refuses to give her. Why? "Because I'm trying to run a business, not a detective agency." Oh, man. He doesn't even pretend to have the time of day for her crap, and he's not even Swedish! Isabel in San Fran doesn't need her own spin-off. Sassy Gay Florist needs his own spin-off. Cut to a bank teller counting out the whole of Liz's savings, putting the last bill down all grandly like Liz just won the showcase showdown, asking, "Let me guess, first car?" Liz sets her straight: "Trip to Europe." Ah. Now things are going well. Have a great time! Don't forget to…ah, fuck it. Just go already.
Stop. Moving. The. Camera. It's centrifugal Roswell and I need a Dramamine. The camera swoops down from deep space to find Isabel at school, reading another brochure. Max walks in and tells her that he thought of a way to make this work, handing Isabel a gigantic book with the words "Santa Fe State" written on the front. She looks at him, generally annoyed, and reminds him that she didn't apply to Santa Fe State. He tells her that that's what the application is for. She hands the book back: "I don't want to go to Santa Fe State." Word on everything she says ever again. It's so nice to have the actual personality of Queen Bitch back in that shell. Max, ignorant of her obvious ascension, tells her, "You've been indulged in this too long." She laughs at him again, turning to a piece of paper and reading a clip of a recommendation letter written by Convenient Plot Exploration himself, in which the many themes of Roswell being too small for Isabel and her bright future and potential and blah are all addressed. She has dozens of other recommendation letters just like it, "because as far as the outside world is concerned, Max, I am a bright and talented and upstanding member of the community of Planet Earth. I play the role to perfection." Nice. Max begs not to be made the bad guy in all this, and Isabel assures him in no uncertain terms, "You are the bad guy in all this." She continues that sending Michael to come and talk to her was like "the alien Mafia." Starring Max as Bug Pussy, heh heh heh. She's going away and that's all. She stands up and starts walking away from him, and Max cuts her off and assures her that he'll do anything he can to keep her there: "I will tell our parents you have a drug problem. I will notify your teachers you have cheated on every test for the last three years. If you ever leave Roswell without my consent, I will physically drag you back." She takes a letter and crumples it up, burning it with her hand and whispering, "Fine. You want to be the leader? See how it works without any followers." Walking away from him, the thing that never happens in high school happens, when a guy in a letterman jacket stares poor Isabel down and yells, "Isabel Evans, you are so hot when you're pissed!" She holds out a hand and sends him sprawling into a locker well down the hell from where he'd previously been standing. Max helps him up and tells him he broke the bottle when he fell.
DeLuca house. The garbage disposal still sucks, and DeLucawitz is trying to fix it. Michael offers to fix it, and Garbage Disposal Analogies ensue concerning the garbage disposal's long-term relationship with the house because we get it. She demands a hammer from him and disappears underneath the sink. While she's down there, Michael waves a hand over the sink and the water goes down. She's thrilled. He's congratulatory. First person who can adequately explain the existence of that scene gets to recap this show in its painstaking entirety for the rest of time, through sickness and health, richer and poorer, WB budget cuts and Secret Diary of Desmond Pfeiffer crossover episodes. Anyone? Please?
Sitting on a white fence with three bags at her feet just in front of a road sign indicating the driver is entering Roswell, Liz sits staring. She's on the outskirts of town waiting for a cab, because when you're on your way to the airport, the cab driver will only take you there provided you can prove you've already walked half the distance for aesthetic reasons. From across a cement divider, the Alienmobile drives up and Max jumps out, asking, "Where are you going?" She tells him that she's going to Sweden. For the love of all things holy, Max, just let her go. He demands she get in the car. A red cab pulls up and asks if she's going to the airport, and Max barks, "No!" Liz tells the driver to load the car, and Max grabs one of her bags and throws it on the driver's seat, demanding she get in the car. She snipes back, "You can't pull that King crud on me. I'm not Isabel, you can't boss me around." I'm sorry, did she just say "King Crud"? Even when she's trying to pull out all the stops, she can never transcend the language of Porky's edited for television on the Superstation. He tells her what she's doing puts everyone at risk, and she insists again that she has a responsibility to Alex to find out the truth. Max thinks it's time for this episode's climax: "Liz, if you go, our friendship is over." She responds that that's the price she'll have to pay. The RED CAB pulls out, and the soundtrack from Planet Arium kicks up anew.
Maria walks in her front door to find Michael at the kitchen table. He tells her to "sit down," and offers a little speech about the kinds of rough stuff they've been through lately. He continues that it's true that he's going to leave one day. "But there is one thing that I can promise you. That I can give you now." Maria tears up and kisses his hand, and I think I believe the existence of this relationship for the first time.
And back to Brigadoon Observatory we go. Max is staring up at my satellite and Tess walks in, eyes glazed, the Stepford Queen observing all passively, "I thought I'd find you here." Max tells her that he's always wanted to be "this normal person," and that the alien side of him was "a bad thing. This thing that made me a freak. This monster." It's become clear to him, though, that he hasn't just been hiding from the government all this time. Don't say it don't say it don't say it oh god. "I've also been hiding from myself." Gah! He's lost everyone. Tess angles in and takes his hand, offering, "I'll be here for eternity." They kiss in unbelievable close-up. He whispers, "I'm ready to wake up now." Sarah McLachlan in Spaaaaace kicks up as Liz runs to the ticket counter and onto her plane, as shots of Tess and Max losing various items of well-placed clothing juxtapose. Armpit. Thanks. Hardly a pec in sight. Liz's cell phone rings as she running outside (?) to a two-propeller plane that looks like the first plane the Wright Brothers filmed in their too-fast black-and-white stock of a shoddy cardboard item with the pedals and the giant wheels. Go for it, Liz. I like to charter my own jet on Flintstones Airlines for my own three-thousand-mile trips across the Atlantic too, sometimes. Her cell phone rings, and Voiceover Swede #4023b informs her, "We found your building. There is just one curiosity. That structure was torn down in 1994." Liz speaks aloud, "He never went to Sweden," and strikes a hella pose in front of the plane. Nookie from a high height fades us to the five triangulated planets and then to black.