Crazy props to the brilliant Pamie, whose iBook password dies with me. And to Stee. And to Ray. And to my roommate, wherever she may presently be.
Dear Diary. It's October 9, 2001. My name is Liz Parker. And three years ago, this show died.
Fade in on a dusty expanse of neglected, maligned, general forgotten-i-tude known the world over as "UPN not during Moesha." The Smackdown music supervisor is all, "You should check this tune out, Roswell music supervisor, what with us sharing an office and all," and we are greeted by a rather pounding electric guitar befitting The Rock at his most bastardized. The camera pans from a storefront sign reading "Sam's Quick Stop," panning down, down, down (psssst…cameraman. Wake up! Poor cameraman. For he is already so sleepy) past neon signs advertising dusty outpost convenience store truisms like "Open 24 hours" and "Coffee" and "My show went all the way to Sam's Convenience Store and All I Got Was This Stupid Recap" and what have you. Panning, panning, panning. And finally to our end-of-panning destination, where the camera comes to rest on Liz "Unplugged Performs Not" Parker and Max "Ungainly Pencil Necked" Evans. The Bot is oiled and lubed well past a rusty machine's natural abilities to just sing "If I Only Had a Heart" and go about its normative metallic capabilities, for she straddles Max in the front seat of a convertible, tonguing his face as if this motion will remove even one layer of Max's three-months-accumulated, did-I-say-bad-boy-oh-I'm-sorry-I-must-have-meant-Bar-Mitzvah-boy facial hair. A caption appears below them in MS Word font Alien Bold Sans Djb Sleeping Late On Saturday reading, "Salina, Utah 2:04 am." Long after good taste and the power of the Mach 3 have slumbered. And you totally know the caption guy was recruited from the set of Blind Date just to toss that one caption up there, and you know he fought the good fight to at least jazz this sequence up with a pop-up caption reading, "Nookie in Utah! Utah says 'Mormon' but this couple says, 'More, man!'" Because he's the Blind Date caption guy. And the Blind Date caption guy is the best in the business, is why.
Max, clad in the black leather cat suit of someone who forgot that summer is now over and with it his stint at Freddie Mercury Fantasy Camp, breathes all heavy, "You ready?" We're supposed to think they're talking about sex. But we know they never are. He tells her, "You don't have to do this," but she pledges her allegiance: "No, Max, we are in this together. That's what we said." Max offers a final glance of concern that all but screams out, "Fine, but time I get to be Bonnie. You ALWAYS get to be Bonnie," kisses her stage directionally (why will they not heed the convenience store's simple directive and just "quick, stop"?), and they both pull black ski masks over their too-pretty-for-TV faces. They must not be recognized. A well-executed, much-practiced response after a summer's worth of strangers approaching them on the street and asking point-blank, "Isn't that the network where they, like, sell fake pearl necklaces and stuff? You do know they're not real pearls, right? Right?"
"Who needs the Quik-E-Mart," Max and Liz seem to ask, busting through the front door of the joint. Liz enters first, gun blazing and yelling, "Down! Down! Down!" like a crazed square-dance caller with "Rock Lobster" the only song in her arsenal. Max molecularly manipulates the surveillance camera while Liz brandishes the gun at the store's overnight proprietor (is that Sam? Would he be working the night shift in his own store?). Max, moving toward the back of the store, warns Maybe Sam, "Better do what she says. She's crazy." Sam hits the bricks as Liz vamps about staying on the floor, staying down, down staying, and staying down with downness. Max heads right past the Chupa Chups and the Mint Milanos, muttering something about "a moment on the lips, a lifetime on the hips" in his stoic alien way, toward the back of the store. He reaches the back, throwing a rack containing various bread products angrily to the side (take that, Dr. Atkins, his remaining strength seems to say). He holds his left hand in front of a bare wall, creating a red beam that looks like those laser pointers kids started bringing to school in eighth grade until you weren't allowed to bring them to school anymore because people who had those in other towns meant it was because they were in gangs. One can only hope Sam isn't at home, watching helplessly while his night guy is all getting shot up. Oh, wait. What am I talking about? Ain't nobody watching this at home.
Back outside, a mysterious car sits in front of Sam's House Of Sudden Endless Relevance. Inside of said car, an older man in a fedora speaks with an Italian-esque patois into a cell phone, "Yeah, I, uh, wanna repawt an awmed robbery in prawgress. At Sam's Quick Stawp on Highway 65. Yeah, hurry." Thank you for your contribution to the Glorified Extra Fund, Mr. Sin-NOT-tra.
Moving away the wall panel he red-laser-beamed so effortlessly (damn gangs, tearing this city apart), Max reveals a metal wall safe, which he opens easily. Another door opens, revealing a singular light and a staircase leading down. What's going on with the complex hall of mazes? Did I sit on my remote and accidentally switch over to Zork: The TV Show? For the love of all things, Max, switch your lantern on down there or you'll be eaten whole by a lurking grue! Sigh. They never listen. And thing you know, lurking grue. Anyway, banter continues upstairs, as Liz keeps Sam's Henchman on the floor and the two perform the wholly original "I have a family!" passion play. Down the flight of stairs now, Max enters a huge room containing what looks like a giant spacecraft of some kind. He takes off the ski mask and gazes upon it. He then reaches into his pocket and pulls out a crystal, which immediately begins to glow. He holds it up, and against the side of the Good Ship Tin-Foil-Pop appears a symbol, a sign, an insignia of some kind. Awwww. Mysteriously glowing orbs and the language of Zapf Dingbats. You'd better believe it's the same show, all right. As police sirens blare upstairs, lights blaze from the ship. Liz runs downstairs to fetch Max (referring to him by the secret armed-robbery name of, well, "Max") and the two leap into the car and take off. A police car rages behind them. Liz barks, "The gun," and Max takes the weapon, drops it onto the floor in front of him, waves a hand over it, and…turns it into mustard! Okay, no he doesn't, but conventional show wisdom dictates that he could if he wanted to. Sorry for the egregiously first-season reference there, folks, but on my honor, I had to stretch back that far because I couldn't remember one damn thing that happened on this show for the entirety of last season. And I think the "writers" would agree that that's probably all for the best, wouldn't you agree?
The chase is on! Up and down Dark Alley Boulevard, under The Covered Bridge That Time Forgot, through The Pre-Fab Corrugated Metal Warehouse District. Who knew that Utah was so seedy and asbestos-filled? From the commercials, you'd think the whole place was a paradise of fair-faced blond children playing happily on rocks with their nine teenage mothers. Well. Live and learn. Max holds up the mysteriously glowing orb, and Liz backstories a warning: "Max, they can't find out about the diamond!" Can we, you think? Max chucks the diamond out of the car, and it rolls back towards a dumpster containing the real script for this episode, as well as the notion of continuity that dictates Max could have, like, temporarily turned the diamond into a chicken and then changed it back later, or some such thing. More police cars come out of nowhere, and the convertible comes to a stop, surrounded. A cop leaps out of one car screaming the usual blah blah about hands where they can see them and whatnot. They violently muscle the couple out of the car, Liz cracking, "You got any powers for this?" Ooooh. A jokester! The sound of what I briefly think is my own laughter turns out to be the VCR in my bedroom, giggling at Gilmore Girls, then sighing contentedly, commenting just loudly enough for me to hear, "What on earth are you doing in there," and humming along to Carole King.
Opening credits: I guess the look is different enough, but the sound of the theme song is drowned out by the damn dueling St. Clares bellowing from the bookshelf, "Wait, isn't this the one with Eminem?" Get with the times, ladies.
And now, mystifyingly, are the previouslys. I half expect them to show the opening sequence again and be all, "What do you want? That was ." Hey, crack Roswell editing team? Find a stick. Then get on it.
Cut to interior Gritty Utah Police Station, night. Max and Liz are shepherded past other Wrongdoers Of The Heartland, past those caught with the controlled substances of caffeine and monogamous matrimony and dragged to the Mormon jail. You police are animals! This hell is no place for children! As the fingerprinting and the mug shooting get underway, we're clued into the flashbacky nature of this episode, as Max's voice-over kicks in: "So I was wondering if you wanted to, y'know, see me." Liz VO responds, "You mean, on a date?" Spacey VO Max: "Just somewhere we could talk. I really want to start over, Liz." Is this a song cue? It sounds like he's about to congratulate her on the skillful way she beats the other girls to the bride's bouquet.
And speaking of doing the time warp again, the Blind Date Captioner For Hire lets us know that it's suddenly "Three Months Earlier," and we cut to Max walking up to the front door of the Crashdown and handing Liz a bouquet of white roses. She's decked out in a pink twin set. He thinks she looks "amazing." I think she looks like the bastard child of Mary Kay and a pack of tropical Starburst. What a stark difference of opinion we're having. Liz smiles moistly and asks Max -- moistly -- "So, where are we goink?" Max whispers, "It's a surprise." Liz does not take the prevailing advice of millions and respond, "Surprise me by being uncreepy enough to at least tell me where the hell we're going," instead following blindly and taking us along for the ride.
The big "surprise" is that he takes her to an empty, pitch-black boating dock on the edge of town in the middle of the night. Why, this certainly is a so-called surprise. And thus comes the moral of our story: only date guys with a lot of money. Liz shrugs, I guess rating this date on a sliding scale against the-night-we-burrowed-for-grubs and the-one-with-the-hand-shadow-animals-on-the-wall-of-your-living-room, and smiling meekly. And she only has one white rose left, because I guess they let him keep the deposit on the rented roses. Get a job, future boy. Liz looks around fearfully and notes, "It's kinda dark." With a wave of the hand, Max molecularly manipulates Christmas lights into the trees, inciting in Liz a very "opening credits of Full House" reaction, where she realizes something wacky has been done, realizes the camera is there to preserve the moment forever, and smiles knowingly in resignation. You're wacky, Uncle Jesse! Liz turns back to Max, who begins back up on the dock, solemnly intoning, "Liz, I just want to put everything that happened behind us." Liz recaps the entirety of last season's developments, retorting, "I would too if I had impregnated an alien who killed one of my best friends and then left the planet with my unborn child." Whoa! Take my contract! Please! Max asks if she's still not "over that," and Liz responds that Max hurt her, and she doesn't know what to do blah. They walk and talk; Max tells her, "I'm here. I'm not going anywhere. Isabel, Michael, and I. We've lost our only way home. There's no way back." Blah blah. "I want to be with you." Liz asks about the son and the pregnant and the Tess and the nagging, nattering matters that yielded twenty-one cumulative hours of television, sixteen virtually interchangeable blondes, and something called "the Skins," and Max boils it all down to the truth we'd all suspected: "[My son] is going to be born into a world I have nothing to do with. I've accepted it." He turns to her: "Liz, you've paid a lot to know me." He pauses, as if suddenly remembering that the checks for the "Give Liz Some Damn Friends Fund" are actually cut by her parents, and changes the subject straightaway. Har har. Instead, he tries this approach: "You've been hurt. You've been put in danger. Now I want to make all that up to you. I want to make your dreams come true. Will you let me do that?" Blue Fairy?
We chung-chung to present day, inside the You-Once-Were-Nice-To-A-Minority County Jail (Utah has some really strict laws, people), where Max's parents walk toward his cell looking extremely concerned. Philip "Monopoly Nazi" Evans and his beleaguered wife, Bangs, enter the cell. Max flashes the pearly yellows and quips, "In the neighborhood?" Why, look who's taking really well to jail, eh? Mr. Evans, who smiles inappropriately way too much throughout this episode, smiles (see that?) and gives Max a hug. During the juuuuust-a-moment-too-long embrace, Merry Mason (because he's a powerful lawyer…and he smiles a lot, see?) whispers in Max's ear, "If you want to get out of here while you're still a young man, don't say anything to anyone unless I'm present." Translation: "If you want to get out of here while you're still a young man, time try and get arrested in 1987." He continues on, "I'm not your father right now; I'm your lawyer." Bangs follows with a hug, asking, "What is going on? Who are you?" He's "2! 4! 6! 0! Ooooooooooooooone!" Pipe down, Max.
And in the girlie cell, the far more amusing parental power couple of Slackjaw and Julianne Less sit at a table with Liz, Slackjaw ranting, "Why are you under arrest for armed robbery? What are you doing in Utah?" Julianne Less tries to defray the tension while wearing that concerned forgot-to-add-the-fabric-softener mask that overlays her every emotion, asking Slackjaw to "just stay calm." Calm, Slackjaw asks? CALM? "How long can I stay calm?" Julianne Less suggests that someone put her up to all this, and while Slackjaw rants around in the background, Liz quietly monotones, "I'm not gonna speak to anyone until they let me talk to Max." Slackjaw falls silent. Julianne Less gives her a look so stricken you'd guess someone had poured Downy into her eyes.
Goddammit, Kenny, that's really enough in the way of Max and Liz, no? But we flash back to two months, thirty days, twenty-three hours-cakes, and we're later in the evening, back on Christmas Dock with Max and Liz. They're lying to each other, holding hands, Liz on top again (this is so just exactly the kind of detail about their relationship we just don't need, really), Liz saying, "So I've broken, like, twelve of my mom's rules, already." Max laughs, almost sinister in his response, "Rules? She has rules?" Yes, Max. Sometimes mothers of teenage girls actually try to impose a code of ethics on their daughters before the mother goes off to Planet Arium all by her loneliness, setting Max on the trail of tracking her down in an unfamiliar land without even wearing the appropriate head covering. For shame! Liz extrapolates on some of these wacky, out-there "rules." "She thinks we should just take things slow." Also, she prohibits proper use of adverbs, clearly. No "-ly" suffix on her watch, no sirree. What else? "No makin' out." Or heavy petting of any kind. A good rule. A great, great rule. Max hates the rule, standing up to express his distaste for it: "So I suppose skinny-dipping might be against the rules, too." Naked you = against the rules. Against every rule of nature, in fact. But it's too late. He smiles again, at first removing his rather gay powder-blue buttondown, gay-porn-style (or so I've heard from the dwellers of Utah's prison system). Six packs slink away in disgrace, cheese lines up to be grated, and Suzanne Somers wakes up in the middle of the night in a Pasadena apartment, sits up in bed, and yells, "My invention finally worked!" without even entirely knowing why. Liz tells Max that he's made his point (he has) and that it's not that funny (it's not), and he jumps into the water wearing his boxers (so that would be less "skinny dipping" and more…what's the expression? Oh, yes, "not skinny dipping") and a pair of black socks. On a very special "Swimming Naked With Steve Urkel." Dork. DORK. She does the Full House Face Drop again, and Max tries to convince her with the utterly unconvincing, "C'mon Liz, this is something we can tell our grandchildren about." Liz opts out of the involuntary reaction of being sickened by thinking of our own withered grandparents beginning a story, "This reminds me of a time back in aught-five when Birdie and I had some quality naked sex time together," skipping ahead to the tired response of, "Grandchildren! What are they gonna be, six feet tall and green?" She stands up, mad. Fine! "But I am not taking my underwear off." We'll just pause a moment while that last promise inks itself into the OED under the entry for "favors, small." Aaaand moving on, and you've seen a summer's worth of these previews, so you don't need me for what happens . But just as the twin set starts to be shed and the striptease begins, something sickly takes Max over and he gets all Dead Man's Floaty. Best way to avoid having to see Liz naked: fake death. Dramatic? Yes. But I can't say I'm not just a little impressed. Liz notices just in time to follow through on her promise of not-at-all skinny-dipping. She steps back on the dock and does a little ballet-dive into the crap water beyond. Cut to Michael "Understandably Pissy Naysayer" Guerin and Isabel "Underused Person Nality" Evans, finally making their first appearances of the season, attending to the physical and emotional needs of Max and Liz. Ugh! They huzzah about what the hell happened to him as he's rushed into The House That Government Subsidy Built, and as Max is wrapped in blankets and stabilized on the couch, he looks up and fills us all in: "Something's happening. I had this vision it was my son. He was reaching out to me. He's in trouble." A planet away from this. Dude. What could possibly be wrong with him?
West Roswell High. Present Day. The temporal structure! So fluid! Guy Pearce is looking for a mystery man named Mikey G. And here he is! Inside the hallways of said school, Michael harasses a teacher we've seen on this or another WB show before, though not the one who sent Michael on the wild geezer chase in "Summer of '47" that still finds him trying to get the old-man smell out of his clothes lo these many months later. Michael is begging Stock Fussy Bespectacled WB Teacher to let him into his "Bio 101 class," claiming that he used to not take biology seriously because he used to think he was moving out of Roswell. Fussy WB Teacher sets 'em up ("And how far away did you plan to move that you didn't think your records would have been sent to your new high school?") and Michael knocks 'em down ("Actually, pretty far.") and only the teacher's insistence that the line "What are you, some kind of alien or something?" be cut from the script saves this whole sequence from the utter heights and depths of gayness. Because that hair ain't helping either. Michael reasons that if WB Prof helps him graduate this year, he'll be out of there soon and the teacher will never have to see him again. What kind of public school is this, anyway? Who talks to their teachers like that? In my school, if I'd failed a class and marched up to the teacher and demanded to be let in, they'd be all, "Actually, it is a federal requirement that you pass biology, so I'm sure you'll get into the class immediately." Then they'd probably pause and stare at me for a minute before their eyes flickered ever so imperceptibly and they added, "Hey, wait a sec. You're that smart kid's little brother, aren't you?" Right. This happened to a friend of mine.
But there's Isabel, looking for the hair extensions she clearly left on Michael's head one fateful night, marching up to the teacher and his pupil, telling Michael she needs to talk to him. Fussy Bio compliments Isabel on her hair and walks off. Isabel fills Michael in with a sentence about Max and Liz and Utah. Michael notes, "So much for ever getting out of this school" and walks out of the school.
Seedy Utah Underbelly is ready for its close-up. We're back at the police station, seemingly ten minutes later, Isabel and Michael rushing in. Roswell, New Mexico to Salina, Utah: six million miles. Travel time: nine seconds. Merry Mason, smiling away, introduces Isabel to a lawyer named "Jesse Ramirez." His position in the office is "from my office." I think his job tasks include a) carrying his boss's briefcase and b) wearing a nicely tailored suit so his boss doesn't have to and c) sleeping with the boss's daughter. Oops! We're not supposed to know that yet. The Evans parents, the Parkers, Michael, Isabel, and Jesse stand around in a circle, filling us in: Max and Liz are first-time offenders, there was no gun, and the only witness was "the nutcase behind the counter who claims to have seen an otherworldly yellow light." God. Please leave poor, suffering Sam alone. He's toiled so long to make the place his own. Isabel makes sure to focus the action appropriately: "So, as long as there's no evidence, Max and Liz will be okay, right?"
Cut to inside of Max's cell, with Max launching in: "There's an underground government storage facility underneath the convenience store." Deadpanning duties? Isabel's on it: "Well, that's a surprise." Max continues that their spaceship is there and that it's been "reassembled." Isabel thought they made an agreement to "let go of the other world and live here." But it's all about Max. Max, Max, Max, and he says that that deal was off after his son tried to contact him. Isabel reminds Max that the spaceship "sucks. It's a lemon. It crashed to begin with. That's why we're stuck here." Not to mention the obvious fashion crisis of spending the better part of fifty-five years AWOL from your ruled minions, only to reassert power by pulling up in the interplanetary version of an Edsel. An out-of-date auto just doesn't garner the most respect among your people, is all. Just try it out for size: "Hey, look! It's the President of the United States! And he's leading the motorcade! In a cherry red Corvette with a spoiler and a blaring Styx eight-track!" Max tell them he needs help finding the diamond. Isabel says she's not helping. She must really hate Styx.
I don't know what period of the past we're in now. Everyone's all pissed off and depressed on every plane now and I can't tell them apart and I think I'm dumber than Roswell now and that makes me very, very sad. I think we're in the Valenti house, because we cut to Max alone in a room, staring at a piece of paper containing a pencil drawing of a diamond. Liz enters of her own volition (I'm sorry, was there a "Valenti House Key" promotional day at the Roswell Ice Bats game I missed out on? Get the hell out, people) and tells Max she's been looking for him. And the home of your ex-boyfriend, his lawman father, and your current boyfriend's impregnated interplanetary wife is exactly where you'd go to check first. Liz expresses some concern that Max is going through Tess's papers, but he cuts her off and reads from the paper, telling her that "it's a letter that Nasedo wrote before he died." What does it say, Max? What does it say? It says, "I am your one and only protector. I will protect you until the end. And if I ever die, this is the only way to communicate with your home." The only way? What about the granilith chamber? What about the spaceship that actually worked? What about the journal, the Skins, the husks, the harvest, New York City, and some freaky church in another weird state a lot of people have talked about but no one's actually ever been to -- what about those things? Or, as many of the viewers who decided to "just give that show after Buffy one chance before I turn off the TV and read a book or something" are currently asking, "What the hell is a 'Nasedo'?" Liz is sad: "And…" Max confirms that he has to contact his son. Liz asks, "I guess this part of your life isn't over after all?" No, Liz. It will never, ever, ever be over.
And who the hell chats it up with their public high school teachers on their cell phones? Nobody I'm not ever allowed to refer to by their first name is just handing me their digits to chit-chat while they're driving home from work. Apparently, Michael is being chewed out by Professor WB while wandering around the dumpster field from before the opening credits. But alas! He comes across the diamond orb and quickly terminates the call. But just at this moment, he turns around to see Frank Sin-NOT-tra standing behind him, packing some heat in Michael's direction. Sin-NOT-tra asks, "Who was that?" Michael explains that he's trying to graduate from high school. Inexplicable banter about getting a GED ensues, accomplishing nothing more than proving how many different dialects and accents and tones of voices are available for saying the letters "GED." Sin-NOT-tra finally gets on with it: "I gotta message faw y'friend, Max. Stop lookin'. The person I work for will do whatever is necessary t'stop him. Whatever. Is. Necessary." Michael tosses off the "yeah, whatever" of non-committal brash-dom, and Sin-NOT-tra fires off a round, which is, I guess, supposed to shock us. Even though he was holding a gun. He warns Michael not to be a smart-ass and takes off, turning over his shoulder to toss off his tagline, "Don't make me come back to Utah." Obviously, this disgruntled tourist hasn't taken in the Fair-Haired Frolicking Children Museum yet. Few can resist its subtle charms. You know. From the commercials.
Back at Once I Had A Bite Of A Latke State Correctional Facility, the red Jetta pulls into an empty spot and Maria "Unapologetically Present Navel" steps out. And the no-longer-subtle process of Mariah-Carey-ization continues almost unabated. Even her skin is getting all waxy and shiny and ambiguously pigmented. She steps out of the car muttering the tired ol' saw about Utah I've been draining the remaining mileage from for the better part of forty minutes, steps into Liz's cell, happily demands some "sugar" from Liz (Liz just looks confused; the only way to elicit such a condiment from her would be to insert the correct change or a crisp dollar bill), and passes her some contraband pie she's smuggled in the place. Liz pointlessly offers, "If you were a boy," only so Maria can warn her to not "go there, girlfriend." "Don't go there, girlfriend"? What's the 411 on that exhausted expression? It's not mint anymore, at all. Liz awkwardly digs into the pie while Maria fills Liz in that the important people in town are trying to lynch Liz and Max because there haven't been any arrests made for violent crime in their county since the last time a witch was burned or something. Maria ill-advisedly hides a flashback inside the damn pie, and Liz eats it up whole.
It's nookie o'clock in the year of the Bad Touch when we land some time before. Liz, on top of Max on top of a chair, asks Max, "Do you love me?" She hands Max a piece of paper with a photo and description of the exact diamond that they're looking for to turn on the spaceship (I can't believe I'm actually writing these words). Where's the diamond, Liz? "It's on permanent loan at the Tate Museum in London. But it's gonna be the main event in the traveling exhibit. It'll be in Santa Fe in two weeks." I don't think I need to point out what a darned coincidence this is, do I? Eeexcellent then, thanks.
And speaking of the nookie, we cut to Sideshow Jesse's hotel room, where Isabel enters in an extremely professional fashion and says, "Thank you for this meeting, Mr. Ramirez." No problem, he says. And there really is no problem, for the door closes and then, between them, there is love. Carrying the boss's briefcase. Good career move. Boning the boss's daughter. GREAT career move. Smacky "mmmemrreegghghh" noises ensue for a blissfully non-recapped many minutes. She extricates herself from Sideshow Jesse's lips (they're her favorite part. You can just tell) for long enough to ask what he and her father are not telling everyone else. And so he comes clean: "Last year there was a robbery in the county. A kid died. No one was ever charged and the local prosecutor has taken a lot of heat for it. They picked a bad place to play Bonnie and Clyde." You can practically hear Max bellow from his far-off cell, "It's Thelma and Louise, you idiots! And I'm Thelma. SHE ALWAYS GETS TO BE THELMA!" The phone rings, and Merry Mason tells Jesse that "they found evidence." He makes off in a hurry, and the UPN execs high-five and whisper among themselves, "We even got him into the opening credits and everything. Take that, lily-white WB. If we keep this diversity thing up, we can air this train wreck on any night of the week and we won't even have to explicitly mention that he's, y'know, like, foreign and stuff." Good for the UPN, I say. Really. Good for them.
I haven't seen a diamond heist this dramatic and realistic since The Great Muppet Caper. And at least those damn socks with googly eyes knew how to sing! So, over to the Mallory Gallery we go, where a regal cocktail party goes on around several QVC diamonds and Max is a tuxedoed bartender (it's brilliant!) and Liz a cocktail waitress (it's briiiiiilliant!). It's so nice to see them finally recognizing their limits. Not that being a professional cocktail waitress is such a bad lot in life. The Grande Dame of Santa Fe diamonds, the Delores Browning, kicks up a conversation with not-old-enough-to-legally-serve-alcohol Max that lasts long enough for not-old-enough-to-legally-serve-alcohol Liz to catch on and move over to Create The Diversion. The diversion? Acting like she's acting, and doing so unbelievably badly. "What the hell are you doing?" What's that? "What? The hell? Are? You Doing?" She yells at Max for flirting with a woman "twice his age" (she's a sprightly ninety, that Browning is), and ups the stakes when she calls the owner of the exhibit a "bimbo." Browning fumes, "Young lady, I don't think you have any idea who you're speaking to!" And there you go. Liz tosses a glass of bubbly in Browning's face, and while all of the guests and security guards focus their energy on the crazy girl, Max pushes a hapless guest in a tacky suit into the diamond display case which contains the most expensive diamond and slowest slo-mo in the history of the desert southwest. The. Diamond. Flies. Back. And. The. Slow. Continues. Max does a diving roll while the diamond is in the air and comes up with it in his hand. He carries it back to Browning and offers, "I believe this is yours." But he switched the diamonds! And they're out in the car, diamond in hand, driving off. That scene, man. And then, more nookie, which is back-storily interrupted by Slackjaw, who catches them at the bottom of the steps in Liz's house. "Liz! It's two in the morning. Where have you been?" Slackjaw is angry. He glares at Max, I'll-hate-you-in-the-future-ily.
We're back in Utah, and I have a question. I taped this episode on a really crappy VCR and I'm playing it back on a much better VCR, but it appears to my eye that every time we're in Utah, the film stock is a lot more stark and bleached. And I would just find it really amusing if the worldview of the people involved in this show were, in fact, so narrow that Utah was being used as The Foreign Land in the same way Mexico was in Traffic. It would make me really happy, is all. And with Ramirez, they've even got themselves a rank and file Other and everything! Oh, crap. I forgot that we weren't going to talk about that. Rant? Over. Recap? Indefinite.
At some point, Slackjaw went back to Roswell to pick up a tie. Because it's hearing day, and the Parkers are standing outside of the courthouse (I made that up), listening to a dapper man spin some news in their direction. Merry Mason approaches, and Slackjaw and Julianne Less tell him, "Mr. McGregor here was just giving us the inside scoop on the Salina court system." Merry Mason is skeptical. Happy, but skeptical. Julianne Less tells us that this so-called McGregor told them to "plead guilty," but Merry Mason reminds us that McGregor is the prosecutor in the case and WHO CARES? Julianne Less totally faces Merry Mason and is all, "You're a corporate lawyer and this is not your area of expertise!" Merry Mason tells us that "we're all in this together." And to the courthouse, where we're no longer in this together. Max is released to the custody of his parents and can't come back to Utah, and the world wonders which part of that is the punishment and which part of that is the reward. Liz, however, was the one holding the gun. She's going to criminal court. Well. That didn't work out particularly well. Max seems sad. Criminals get killer weight rooms. Not to mention the…oh, never mind. Let's just say they get other things, too.
Liz, Slackjaw, Julianne Less, and another humorless prig lawyer with a clipboard and a dream to never let me go outside again, even though this is Southern California and the weather is perfect and I have a porch with chairs and a table -- which of us, Liz or I, is the one truly in the prison, I ask you? Blah blah, and interchangeable lawyer tells Liz to try and "make a deal." Does that mean he'll give her a crisp fifty if she can pull a black comb out of her purse, or…maybe I should just keep watching. Sorry. He continues, "Maybe you fell in with a bad crowd. Met a guy with a problem. Maybe Max dragged you into this." Liz shrewdly deduces that they want her to "sell Max out," and Slackjaw hardlines that "He sold you out when he made you walk in there holding that gun." Liz repeats that they're in this love together like berries on the vine getting sweeter all the time and so forth. The lawyer asks how they got the gun to begin with, which seems like the perfect "Rose, get the cheesecake" moment for a flashback that doesn't explain -- or even touch upon -- how they got the gun. Sometimes they just make it so damn easy.
Some Time In The Past Or Maybe Not. Sometimes they just make it so damn hard. Liz stands somewhere on the scoping fjords of Sandy Land, brandishing a firearm and listening to Max explain that he "did some research at the UFO Center. There are five government storage facilities large enough to hold the ship. It's gotta be in one of them." What? WHAT? Does that make a fucking lick of sense to any of you? First of all, what? I know I don't even bother trying to wrangle down the continuity mess of this show and leave it to the smarter among you to take care of it for me on the forums, but…wait, WHAT? Okay. Okay, first of all, WHAT? I'm trying to sort this out. I've been learning to multitask again lately, so I have to break this down. And the first task I feel needs some aggressive tackling is as follows: WHAT?
Let's say I have a spaceship. Let's say I have a spaceship, and in 1947 I lose control of my spaceship and it careens into Earth. There's a huge government investigation, followed by an even huger government cover-up. Step one: lose the fucking spaceship. Don't be all, "Let's move it sixty miles and bury it under Donny and Marie's flower garden, and ain't no one will ever come looking again." What's to say the whole thing wasn't recreated in a lab in Washington DC? What's to say it wasn't flown back to one of the other mystery planets the government also knows about but won't tell us? What's to say that the spacecraft wasn't methodically disassembled and used throughout the '70s to provide replacement parts on the collective run of the Ford Pinto? What's to say, after all? Oh, and finally -- WHAT? Rant? End. I'm out of smartness suddenly.
And what the hell is that convertible, anyway? Did I forget where it came from, or did they just invent it so they could be snazzy grifters this week? See how little I really do know? Anyway, Thel-max and Lou-Liz pull up in front of a convenience store, Max holding a piece of paper with computer-printed names of four locations crossed out and one (ambiguously named "GR2-18") remaining. They scout out the store in advance, and cut from there to Max telling Liz that the gun won't be loaded. But if it is, Liz says, Max will take off for Planet Arium and never, ever come back. And then…wait, WHAT?
Oh, wait, this is kind of the best part. We're back in Liz's cell, a uniformed guard walking toward her. He tips his cap up. It's Max! Hee. I adore that. If he wanted to break her, he could have melted the bars from the parking lot, rather than going through all the trouble of conking a similarly ripped guard on the head with a candlestick in the conservatory, taking the uniform to a tailor to allow for the doubtless inches of extra upper body, and wearing it into the station house from which he had just been sprung and told never to come back to Utah. Love it. Fucking love it. Anyway, Liz doesn't want to run from the law for the rest of her life. Liz tells him to go away and save his son. They kiss passionately. As long as he's uniformed, he can pretty much behave with the jailed suspects in any way he darn well pleases.
Hotel. This arrest has been quite a boon for the Salina tourist trade, I'm saying. Michael hears a knock on the door in Maria's room. Max enters and find Maria sleeping and Michael guilting: "She's been crying about Liz the whole night. Other than that, things are great." Max reminds Michael that his son is in trouble and just wants the diamond, and Michael responds, "You tell Isabel you came in here and found it yourself," handing him the diamond. Maria wakes up, snarls, "How could you make her hold the gun?" at Max, and looks away. Max encounters Isabel coming out of a room that's not hers on his way out, and Isabel defends, "I was just in there with Maria." Maria? Maria. You said Maria? That's what I said! Booby traps!
Sweet tap-dancing Jesus, another mad guy in a suit! Max goes back out to the convertible, where said suited man introduces himself as "Agent Burns of the FBI." And I was so taken aback to have the FBI back into things that for a minute I thought that Burns was the exact same name of the FBI henchman from season one (Pierce). BurnsPierce asks Max why he chose Sam's place. Sing it, BurnsPierce! I too am getting a little tired of everyone picking on Sam. Max volleys that his case was dismissed, and BurnsPierce sternly warns, "By the Sheriff's Office, maybe. I'm gonna give you the benefit of the doubt and assume you're just an incompetent criminal. But if you were in that store for any other reason, be warned. If you don't stop, you will not be happy juvenile delinquents." I love how everyone just keeps telling them to "stop." What does that even mean?
But no. Max does not stop. He returns to the convenience store, the voices of this episode flashing back in his head again because flashbacks of flashbacks within flashbacks and it's all so meta and ouch my head just exploded. He returns in silence to the basement of the Quik-E-Mart, finding no spaceship downstairs, but instead a patch of white powder. Merry Mason follows him in, smirks, and delivers his single longest speech in show history: "I followed you here, because I can no longer trust you to tell me the truth. I thought you were involved in drugs, but this is clearly something else. What were you looking for down here, Max? What is this place?" Is it one of the five government storerooms large enough to house a spacecraft, the size of which you never seemed to know before now? Is that it? Is that what it is? IS IT? WHAT? And then, the twist ending. Merry Mason goes to pick up the powder, but Max tells him it "could be toxic." Merry Mason asks why there would be a toxic chemical in the basement of a convenience store (that isn't rat poison, or a surplus of those circus peanuts, or a renegade pack of Necco wafers, of course), suddenly adopting that "hey, waaaaait" face and spinning, "If this is what you think it is, we might be able to help Liz." What? Does he suddenly not care anymore why Max was in jail for armed robbery to begin with? WHAT?
Okay, we're outside. Merry Mason and Max do some underhanded dealing. BurnsPierce pulls up and gets out of a white car, telling Merry Mason, "We tested the so-called toxic chemical you submitted to the Sheriff and it turned out to be laundry detergent." Max shoots back, "We did our own test, and it turned out to be Tetrol." If I'm the public or the press or the courts, I'd be all, "Thanks, I'll go with the FBI's findings over the kid with the chemistry set on Take Your Dad To Work Day, thanks." Max adds, "We're sure there are any number of people in the media who would be extremely interested to find out why such a dangerous chemical was found underneath a convenience store." Merry Mason piles on, "And even more interested to find out that the location was on federal property." I don't know what kind of pussies they're training at the FBI these days, but were I BurnsPierce, it would be my professional responsibility to shoot back, "Because you planted it there, guy who is trying to blackmail me into getting his girlfriend/client spring from the clink. Idiots." But the lawman folds, and we cut to Liz being released due to what Julianne Less has learned is "improper conduct with the arresting officer." Liz is happy, but only until Slackjaw tells her that Liz is prohibited from seeing Max ever, ever again. Poor, poor dear. Outside, meanwhile, Merry Mason tells Max he needs to know why Max needed to get into that room to begin with. But Max won't tell. "Silence," Merry Mason responds, "is unacceptable. Not under my roof." Ooh! He tossed Max from the house. The lightweight Van Morrison on the soundtrack is sadder than anyone else to hear that. Max and Liz pass each other on the way to their respective cars. In a final shot, Max falls asleep in his. Tetrol? WHAT?