Props to Liz. No. Not that Liz.
Morning time at The Interplanetary House Of Evanscakes. An exterior shot of the house is accompanied by a subtitle in Microsoft Word Font MS Alien Bold Sans "Sustaining Viewer Interest In This Show When At This Very Moment Just One Channel Away Tom Welling Probably Already Has His Shirt Off" Bold that reads, "3 days, 6 hours, 24 minutes until the wedding." We cut to inside the adobe manse, where a ringing alarm clock reads 5:45. The clock itself is the quirky shape and the shiny metallic design of the not-too-distant future, and its presence is meant to reassure the uneasy six of us that, though Isabel is about to leave singlehood and chastity behind, she's still enough of a hometown girl to have set up her wedding registry at the Crashdown gift shop. That's why I got her gum. Alien gum. But gum nonetheless.
Reaching over and turning the alarm off is Isabel "Where's Samantha! She-a at the church. The church? She get-a maddied. Maddied? Maddied! Jeez!" Evans, who is stirred suddenly wide awake, preventing us from having to stare all fetishistically into this weird Isabel's-armpit close-up for one more second. She sits bolt upright in bed, apparently roused to attention by the music supervisor's painful (and not at all clichéd) decision to use "The Wedding March" on the soundtrack to connote, of all things, the approach of a wedding. I guess said music supervisor couldn't procure the rights to the even more blatantly illustrative WE GET IT ditty "Isabel Evans Is Getting Married (Do You Need Me To Draw You A Goddamn Picture)" on account of that song doesn't exist at the moment. Incidentally, I can't wait until the end of this episode, when the self-serious monotone of Jason Behr voices over the closing credits with, "Tonight's episode of Roswell featured music by Fuel, 3 Doors Down…and Felix Mendelssohn." And the album cover is a picture of Mendelssohn in a big ol' powdered wig, celebrating his sudden, Tony Bennett-esque career resurgence all, "Look at me! I'm famous on the Roswell show!"
Cut to the Crashdown by light of poorly-lit dawn. Isabel stands outside the closed restaurant, reaching the height of impatience, employing that Stella Adler-esque "I am impatient!" constant shifting of her weight. She falls slightly short of her emotional goal and ends up communicating more of an "oh man oh man I really have to pee oh man" thing. I feel you, Isabel. My bladder always tends to weaken before all of my own sham sweeps-dictated weddings. From inside the Crashdown, Maria "Find Me A Find, Catch Me A Catch" DeLuca turns the "Closed" sign around to signify that the Crashdown is now open for business. She then fiddles a bit with the lock (my God, man, can't you see how badly Isabel needs to pee? Move it along!), opens the door, and wishes Isabel a "good morning." Isabel slams past her with a curt, "Don't you guys open at 6:30? It's 6:42." She barks a breakfast order at Maria, and Liz "Always The Bridesmaid, Never The So Much As Vaguely Believable Actress" Parker hops to attention. Isabel sits at a table and flips open a notebook, dialing her first number and bizzotching into the phone that her invitations company in Dallas (who, considering time zone concerns and the likelihood of a printing company being open before eight o'clock on a weekend morning, must be located in Dallas, England) has failed to overnight her the invitations she'd been expecting. Which, as conventional wisdom dictates for a wedding Nazi such as herself, would have gone out, like, six weeks ago. And not 3 days, 6 hours, 24 minutes, and it-will-still-be-two-weeks-'til-we-say-we're-sorry ago.
Time lapse, and the Crashdown goes from closed to open to closed once more. It's dark outside now, and Maria and Liz sit at the counter while a beleaguered Isabel continues to maintain some small level of believability with that pretending-you're-on-the-phone-listening-to-someone-else-talk thing, like, "What? What's that you say you'll do? You say you want me to shut up? Well, listen, buster! What? What's that? You say I won't have my flowers in time? But what about…? What?" Isabel finishes up another round of general meanness, slamming down her cell phone as much as one can slam down a cell phone, and turning her anger on Liz when The Waitress Bot fails to take into account the emotional needs of her customer and kicks back to her default setting of just offering her some pie. Isabel snaps that, no, she does not want some pie, but she quickly collects herself and apologizes for, as the UPN so allows, "being such a bitch today." Liz tells her not to worry, saying that she can't imagine the stress Isabel is under, plot-developing not at all awkwardly, "Are you nervous at all? Not about the wedding, but about getting married. I mean, it's for the rest of your life." IT IS? Man, everything I ever needed to know I learned from watching Roswell. Isabel claims she's not nervous at all, that she knows he's the right guy and so on, and Liz and Maria crow on about their own romantic interests until Isabel slips right into a coma (I so feel you! I'm over here! Feeling you!) right there at the Crashdown table. She's asleep in the booth. And then…oh, my, what have we here? Isabel slips into a dream state, whereby she is standing alone in a room with dozens of French doors, open to allow wind to gust in from an indeterminate off-screen locale and blow many billowy curtains around. Oh, my God. Isabel has fallen asleep in the Crashdown and dreamwalked Celine Dion right though the storyboarding process of the video for "It's All Coming Back To Me." All she needs now is the giant mirror and the two-thousand-year-old husband. Then a beefcake-y dude walks into the billowy wind room. He doesn't look two thousand at all.
They dance their dance of lies. He kisses her in a smacky fashion until Isabel is suddenly snapped back to attention in the diner. Maria asks a concerned, "Are you okay?" Isabel claims that she's fine. But when he kiss her like this. When he touch her like that. It was so long ago. But it's all coming back to her. Now.
Opening credits. Dido is my anti-drug.
For those of you playing at home, it is now 2 days, 3 hours, 54 minutes until the wedding. Thanks, Wedding Font! Kyle "The Best Man" Valenti wears his mechanic's onesie and works under a large chartered bus while a cool guy in a denim jacket and the same sunglasses as the guy on The Simpsons who announces, "Hello, human fly here" barks behind him, "Well? Well? C'mon, I need an answer here." Kyle snaps that he's "still looking," but an inspired bit of cell phone hijinks learns us that Human Fly isn't talking to Kyle at all. But then he gets off the phone and asks Kyle, "So what's the deal?" But see, we don't know he's off the phone yet, so there's nothing filler-ish about this moment at all. Kyle stands and explains to Human Fly that he has no idea what's wrong with the tour bus, suggesting, "Why don't you and the band go get a cup of coffee and come back in an hour or two?" Human Fly bemoans that he's "stuck for two hours in some rat hole called Roston, New Mexico." Oh, come on with that. Who hasn't at least heard of damn Roswell already? There even used to be a television show named after it. On an actual kind-of network and everything! But no matter; I hear it was cancelled some time since. And a great time of mercy it was. Until it wasn't cancelled anymore.
Isabel saunters up behind Kyle, the radio-play remix of "Don't Want No Short, Short Man" pulsing its censored beats imperceptibly way in the background and highlighting what a little, little man Kyle really is. He's pocket-sized fun, he is. We cut to the two of them over in The Deep Conversation Nook Of Monster Joe's Truck And Tow (and what self-respecting auto body shop doesn't have a Deep Conversation Nook? I can't begin to recount the times I've wept openly about the state of world affairs with my very own tiny mechanic while my tires were being rotated mere feet away), Isabel explaining to Kyle, "It was the strangest dream. It's like it's me but it wasn't me." Yeah. Never heard anyone describe a dream like that before. She continues her galvanizing description of this mystical so-called "dream" state only the more evolved species experience, elucidating, "Like, I was saying and doing things I had no control over, like it wasn't me. But it was me." In her underpants. In front of a classroom. On the first day of school. In a play. Falling. Flying. Being chased by tigers. Thanks a heap for the description, young Fantine, but I too have dreamed a dream before. Kyle unhelpfully spins this scene's wheels (seems like someone of his vocation would know just how bad that is for the tires), tossing out a needless, "You know, they say you should write down your dreams as soon as you wake up." Then he taps his pocket-sized noggin and fails to be taken seriously by girls. Isabel's cell phone rings, and Kyle hates cell phones.
Back in town (for Monster Joe's Truck And Tow can only be on the outskirts), Isabel is marching down the street, barking into her cell phone, and running out of wedding-oriented organizations to be mad at on the phone ("And if that wedding band doesn't play 'The Chicken Dance' correctly, I'm going to melt all of their brains!"). She vamps herself into a corner, bellowing into a cell phone prop with no batteries or written dialogue, "How do you run a business this way?" But she's stopped in her tracks when, right in front of a makeshift Main Street store brilliantly named "Jewelers" (do they sell "Jewel" CDs and merchandise, 'haps?), she runs into Bangs and Dad. Awkward pleasantries are barely exchanged, but just as Isabel begins to walk away, Bangs keeps her around with this speech: "I know that you're hurt and you're angry, and we understand, but…" Monopoly Nazi cuts his wife off because he does everything better than anyone who has ever done anything, continuing on that they love her and all, but "we can't support this." Isabel ignores them, storming off and screaming into the phone, "You listen to me. This is my wedding and no one will screw it up. No one!" See. But it's like she's really talking to her parents. The levels of meaning! The Evans parents stand there for a moment, disconsolate, before collecting themselves and buying some jewels at "Jewelers" before stopping in for a bite to eat at "Eat" and then getting gas at "Gas" to prepare for the long ride home. Such is life on the Sesame Street E-Z reader set. Set guy? Get some real sets.
Isabel sits alone at a picnic table, her first moment of cell-phone-free time since the advent of the cellular chip. She is soon to be interrupted by the arrival of Max "Here Comes The…Zzzzzzzz" Evans. Isabel doesn't bother looking up, asking, "How was Los Angeles?" Woo hoo! Shout-out! Max retorts, "Not quite what I expected." Woo hoo! Shout out part deux! Just kidding. I actually dig L.A. Not that you asked. Which you could have, y'know. Max asks how Isabel is, and she offers that she's "under a lot of pressure. Two days and counting, you know." Whatever, sister. Tell it to the Font. Isabel tells Max that she doesn't need to hear it from him, too, and that she knows that he doesn't want her to marry Jesse. Max responds that everyone is just "concerned. It's not that we don't like Jesse." Isabel tirades that she's tired of hearing that "it's that you don't know Jesse, it's how sudden this is, it's that you don't want me to make a mistake I'll regret for the rest of my life. I know. I've heard it all." Max moves to her on the bench and parks himself well inside the radius of appropriate sisterly contact, asking her if maybe she's been hearing the same speech from so many people because the speech ain't so bullshitty after all. "Or maybe," Isabel responds all somberly, "you could trust me." She bemoans the fact that her parents aren't coming, and gets little weepy that she can say it but can't quite make herself believe it. Awwwww. But she rallies: "All that matters is that I know Jesse is the one." Cue Jesse. And there he is, bedecked in a finely-tailored suit, approaching through the healthy verdant park like the ambiguous sixth member of a United Colors of Benetton ad. Max questions, "What's this?" Isabel ambiguously responds, "This is a set-up," and even though I think I know what that means in this context, I'm not entirely sure what that means in this context. Jesse pecks Isabel hello, but seems a lot more intent on focusing a bit of attention on Max (a turn of events, I suspect, which is really just fine with Max). Touching music is touching. Jesse: "I know we don't know each other too well yet, but since we're going to be family, I thought that -- actually, Isabel and I thought that -- we could start things off on the right foot by asking you if you'd consider being my best man." Before you respond, Max, just remember that it doesn't mean what you probably think it means. Despite that disappointment, Max accepts. Isabel is happy. Jesse is…AN ALIEN! Just kidding. Or am I? Anyone here? Is this thing on?
House That Government Subsidy Built. Max paces and devises a strategy of the latest devious ruse afoot: "First, we need a sample of his blood. Make sure he's not an alien." Oh, dude, Max, you so don't get to be my best man. It's at this point in the planning process that you're supposed to be pacing and muttering, "Strippers? Or hookers? And what really is the difference between them, anyway? And that giant cake they jump out of…is it actually MADE OF CAKE, or what?" He's talking to Michael "Here Comes The Snide" Guerin, who is sitting on The Couch That Government Subsidy Upholstered, responding, "Max, you're not into this." I think he means the wedding. Max knows that, but now that he's "stupidly agreed to be best man," he can't let Isabel know how little they really trust Jesse and his maybe-an-alien ways. At least "not until we have something solid on Jesse." Ew. You keep your "something solid" as far away from your sister's fiancé as all time and space will allow, m'kay? Once again, Max -- I don't think "best man" means what you think it means.
Back outside, Isabel and Jesse walk together, Jesse saying something about confirming the place for the reception. Once again, isn't that just the thing that would have been taken care of well in advance of the invitations and the flowers? I know it's a quickie wedding and all, but I am having some trouble grasping the time frame of all this. ["I'm having trouble understanding who's paying for all this crap." -- Sars] Perhaps another helpful visit from Wedding Font would help clear that up. Come, come, fickle font! Isabel asks Jesse if he isn't getting cold feet, and he is quick to intuit that something is wrong with her. She insists nothing is wrong, it's just "last-minute wedding stuff, that's all." He advises her not to "stay up all night worrying about it," which places third or fourth on the list of nice things he could have said, well after the first place answer of actually, oh, I don't know, offering to help her. Cut to Isabel not staying up, falling immediately into her Celine Dream, where the beefcake and Isabel banter about the wedding, him warning her, "You will always be mine." If you touch me like this / And if I kiss you like that / It was gone with the wind / But it's all coming back to me / It's all coming back, it's all coming back to me now.
Commercials: Do you guys think Special Unit 2 is a UPN marketing tool just to have a show that finishes lower in the Nielsens than Roswell? And if so, why do we still have The Parkers? Aw, crap. I can name three UPN shows. Burn me alive.
Morning at the Crashdown. Maria does her newfound Vanna-esque flip of the open/closed sign, opening the front door to find herself experiencing a blissfully Isabel-free morning. It's 1 day, 5 hours, 42 minutes until the wedding. This moment actually makes me a bit nostalgic for those past seasons of this show where huge fights would have broken out all over the whole damn Internet, all arguing the significance of the number "42" and why it's been used twice already in this episode. But then all of the people arguing turned fourteen and got boyfriends or joined their school's marching band or watched some other show, didn't they? And now it's just me and you. Sigh. Not that there's anything wrong with you, of course. Cut to Chez Evans, Isabel sitting on her bed and staring at diagrams with spacey ephemera scratched all over them. Written on the paper is also, "You'll always be mine," underlined two hundred and fifty thousand times. Maria taps on the window behind the bed on which Isabel sits, entering and telling Isabel she and Liz got worried when the bride-to-be didn't show up for her morning power breakfast of eggs and cell-induced brain cancer. Well, let's hear how Maria says it: "I thought when I got a break, I would pop over and see how the wedding was going." And I guess "wedding" was Pee Wee's magic word of the day or whatever, because not only does its utterance inspire Isabel to jump up and start tearing around the room, it also sets The Soundtrack Of The Eighteenth Century back in motion, as Handel's "Water Music" starts pumping unironically in the background. Tonight's all-new episode of Roswell featured music by Ivy, Fountains of Wayne, and George Frideric Handel. Sorry. Abusing my rule of threes today, aren't I? Anyway, Isabel freaks out. She leaps up and suddenly remembers there are flowers to grow and bridesmaids' dresses to sew and so forth, and Maria sits Isabel down and promises to help her. Isabel is thankful. Now she can crawl back into bed and dream about cutting herself another big slice of beefcake.
Who's working at the damn diner, then? Cut to Isabel's room a bit later, Liz and Maria sitting on her floor sifting through the mess of wedding crap Isabel dropped when she ran. Maria proposes, "Here's what I'm thinking: we should just jump into this with both feet and take control of the situation." Either that or, as Liz posits, "sit back and watch it all fall apart." There's a wacky visual joke about the bridesmaids' dresses, but I think you'll concur that nobody got it.
Oooh. New set. Let's call it Monster Joe's Tux And Tow. We're at a suit-type men's shop, Jesse standing to Max and telling the proprietor of the store that he would like to "try the double-breasted." Which I think is another subtle hint to his so-called "best" so-called "man." The hint being, "Step off it, Max. I'm a double-breasted man only." Max looks like he's in a coma. Michael enters and shakes Jesse's hand, telling him that he's getting "a great girl." Ugh. I hate that dowry-talk shit. Michael kicks off with some light small talk: "So, twenty-five hours and counting." Hey, look who just got back from the craft services table after a long lunchtime talk with Font! Michael and Font are best, best friends. But wait! I smell a wacky ruse afoot. Michael and Max make some eye contact, and Michael launches in, "So, you're a local boy?" Born and raised. "And then you went to Harvard?" Grad school. But undergrad was at Cornell. Max: "That's in upstate New York, right?" Shout-out! I went to college in upstate New York. But not near the damn frozen tundra wasteland of Ithaca. Much more to the south. By twelve or so whole miles. Not that you asked. But really, it would have been nice if you had. They grill Jesse on why he would have wanted to get out of Roswell, and they all commiserate on a restless feeling that makes you want to get out of Roswell. Word. But they keep pulling you back in. Cut to later, the three sitting around a table in the suit store, Jesse explaining, "Anyway, I didn't make the law review, so I knew I wouldn't be clerking for anyone on the Supreme Court." But then Max takes it a step too far with the questioning, and Jesse asks not-at-all-ironically, "What are you guys, interrogating me or something?" And then, this episode's fatal error repeats itself, allowing the characters to improv, all, "Of course not! No! Don't be silly! No!" Michael stands up and takes Jesse's suit jacket, sticking a pin in the sleeve and telling Jesse to try it on. Ow! He's bleeding. Max dabs the blood and they're off with it in a hurry. Jesse is dubious. Time lapse again. Endless quantities of time were indicated to have passed during that scene. Alien Bold Font pops up on the screen and is all, "The wedding was three weeks ago!" Pipe down, Font.
Makeshift Science Lab That Government Subsidy Made In A Makeshift Fashion. Michael inspects the blood cells under a microscope and reports to Max over the phone, "We got bad news, Maxwell. Jesse Ramirez is, ta-da, human." And he says the "ta-da" with such casual venom that you can actually hear him hating this show through his dialogue. Man. This season really is going well. A frenzied knock on Michael's door gets him off the phone with Max, and he opens said door to find Isabel in a bit of a breathy panic, telling him, "Michael, I'm in trouble. We may all be in trouble. There's an alien out there and he's after me." It's not Jesse, though. He's a human. Ta. Da.
Michael -- like America -- wants to know what the big damn deal is: "You know, it might just be a dream, Isabel. You're under a lot of pressure, a lot of anxiety. And what's so strange about dreaming about an alien?" Isabel responds that this is an alien "who knows me. Who's intimate with me." She continues on, "What if it's…what if it's…" Michael sincerely asks, "Who?" And thus, Isabel is forced to break the silence on He Who Must Not Be Named, or in this case, He Whose Name No One Seems To Remember For Ten Or Twenty Consecutive Episodes On End. She whispers all spitefully, "Khivar! What if it's Khivar?" Michael says that it's still nothing more than a dream, telling her that she feels guilty about what she did "back then." All Isabel knows is that she betrayed Michael and Max for this Khivar, asking, "Who does something like that make me? What if I betray Jesse the way I betrayed both of you?" But what if Jesse is the…oh, never mind. Isabel then notices the microscope and quickly moves into shrieky bitch mode, yelling, "Is this Jesse's blood? Are you testing his blood now?" And for some extremely odd reason, "Hava Negilah" kicks up hardcore on the soundtrack as Maria bursts in and tells Isabel that her dress has turned up…in Florida. No shout-out there. Not much of a Florida fan, I. Michael doesn't mind the soundtrack music this week. Because with the hair now, he's looking more than his fair share of Eighteenth Century composer, now isn't he?
Chez Evans. Max carries a pair of black shoes into the kitchen, walks to the table, and goes right for…the fruit. Does he just have to go ahead and make it so damn easy sometimes? The Evans parents, constantly together, constantly seeming to actually enjoy each other's company until confronted by one of their bratty, self-centered, and self-righteous kids, stop dead when they see Max at the door. Bangs delivers a line in a line-delivering fashion: "What are you doing here Max?" They must have rehearsed the phrasing of that line for hours. "What are you doing here, Max?" "What are you doing here, Max?" "What are you doing here, Max?" "Grubby hands off the damn fruit bowl, you monster!" And so on. Bangs pries for info, asking Max if Isabel is getting all nervous and shit. Monopoly Nazi guesses that she's got everything under control, but Max informs them that she's "been having kind of a tough time. The dressmaker lost her wedding dress." Mom and Pop Evans tell Max that they're still not going, and Max warns them, "If you don't, you'll lose her." Pause. "You and I. We're having problems, and I don't know what to do about that right now. But I hope that eventually we'll work it out. But you miss your own daughter's wedding, and I don't think you'll ever work that out." Ooooh. A smarmily Dawson-esque approach to parenting the parents, wasn't that? Just like the way real kids talk to their parents. All the time.
Speaking of which. Over at the Crashdown, Slackjaw enters the kitchen all gruffly and stalks up to Liz: "What the hell is going on? I just got a call from the bakery about a wedding cake?" Liz calmly informs him that she's catering Isabel's weddink. Snappy Girl Friday dialogue ensues: "I'm not laughing." "I'm not jokink." Slackjaw tells her that he's not running a charity, and Liz tells him that the cake is, in fact, paid for. Second of all, he goes on, "I'm not stupid." Oh, I so beg to differ, Papa Parker, else why would your name so long sustain as "Slackjaw"? In fact, you are stupid. Very, very much so. Am I right? Of course I'm right. Slackjaw tut-tuts the whole affair, telling Liz that she can't help out at the wedding because of the whole Max blah thing. Liz retorts, "I'm helping out a friend. See, my parents, they taught me that friends help each other. So unless you plan on having me put away in handcuffs, I'm gonna be the person I was raised to be." Snappy tie, Slackjaw. The tie of a smart man. Perhaps of a genius.
And, over at the counter, Porno pushes a copy of his CD (when the hell did they do a CD?) across the counter and demands that he and his band be allowed to play at the wedding. Maria insists that they will not be having a country-western band, and she books them instead for the bachelor party. Kyle enters just then, and Porno calls out, "Kyle, tell her how good we are!" Kyle snarls back, "I'm not your publicist." Oooh, good line. And kind of a shout-out. But I kind of can't tell you why. Anyway, Isabel marches over to Porno just then, asking if he'll give her away. Her parents aren't going. She thinks of him as a father figure. She does? He says yes. Human Fly sits in Kyle's booth and begs him to fix the bus, and Maria comes over just in time to get out of him that he manages the band Ivy. By whom I actually have a CD. Not that you asked. But you could always make up for it by getting me the new one.
Bachelor party, just like in that movie, Bachelor Party. There's a stripper thing happening here, isn't there? Well, good for them. Except that the stripper is forty. More age-old weirdness on the soundtrack (this time in the form of "Get Me To The Church On Time" from My Fair Lady…must have been a Max suggestion) segues into the bluesy opening number of Porno's set. God. Remember when Porno was this show's one actual formidable villain? His character's slippery slope downward has been so gradual. I don't even think I noticed that he had gone from Roswell's resident Officer Bad-Ass to being relegated to "the Vonda Shepard of the UPN" in the space of just a few seasons. Roswell. Why does it hate us so? The Jets (Roswell's natives) and the Snarks (the Haaaah-vard boys) mix at a bar and chat and play pool, Max having cornered some poor Harvard schlep and asking him questions about Jesse's past. He's polite for exactly four seconds before holding up his fourth finger and announcing, "I'd love to sit here and answer your questions all night, but I'm married, this is a bachelor party, and time's a-wasting." Ew. I wasn't aware that fidelity actually took the night off for such an occasion. Michael even tells Max to "let it go," just as Kyle tells Max that there's someone he should meet…
…and we cut for a moment to Isabel's dream state, where Isabel tells dreamy Khivar that she gets married tomorrow and leaves him behind forever, just as…
…we find Max torturing other not-drunk-enough guests at the party, Max's new conquest revealing quietly, "We talk on the phone all the time. Except when he was doing that FBI thing." The guy continues that it was "classified" and "national security. That kind of thing." Jesse comes over and gets mad at Max for interrogating his friends, just as Michael sinks a few balls and a big brawl breaks out in the bar. The line "these red-neck jerk-offs are trying to hustle us!" is delivered in dead seriousness, which is only a good thing because it means that the line "I'm a statistician!" doesn't function as the dramatic high point of the scene.
It's four hours and thirty-six minutes until the wedding. We're wherever Max and Isabel are, Isabel screaming, "You broke his nose?" She's mad, saying that he doesn't trust her, asking, "Do you really think I would marry someone I don't even know? Someone who might secretly be working for the FBI or maybe even an alien? Don't you think I walked through his dreams a few times, and that maybe I checked on his alien status a long time ago?" His, um, alien status? She becomes sad that she trusted Max to stand up at her wedding, and that he wasn't there for her. She storms out in a hurry, leaving Max standing forlornly to a foosball table that takes up the entire portion of the frame not occupied by Max's nine-pound body. Tears. Tears at the arcade.
Tonight on your local UPN news: Airport insecurity! Your airport may not be safe! Thanks for the update, U-R-Many-Steps-Off-The-Pace Network. Also tonight, this shocking report: light blue and dark blue are both shades of blue.
It's 22 minutes until the wedding. Font nears its inevitable demise. Inside a room near the outdoorsy place where the wedding ceremony (21 minutes!) is to take place, Maria and Liz show Isabel a hideous -- and, I think, huge -- dress they found for Isabel. But just as Isabel proclaims it "fine" for the nine hundredth time, Bangs comes to the rescue, entering with another off-the-rack number and announcing, "This was my wedding dress, girls, and my mother wore it before I did." Isabel hugs her mom and grabs the dress, as Bangs frets, "I don't know if we could possibly get it altered in time." In twenty minutes? But how? How, indeed! Isabel responds that she'll take care of it, and I take as little time as possible to wonder why she couldn't just turn the ugly dress into a pretty dress, considering that's what she's going to have to do to her mom's decorative wedding doily. I think the point of that scene was to let us know that her mom was there. For some reason, I decided that I was going to make it all about textiles.
The very Italian neighbor on Who's the Boss knocks on the door to Jesse's dressing room, letting Max in and asking, "Can I leave you two alone or do I have to referee?" Okay, it's not really her. Hold your emails. But she's just as sassy. In an exotic, foreign way. You know how it is. Max holds up a piece of raw meat (obviously, I'd be forced to once again ask where the hell he was going with this if, sadly, I didn't know just exactly where he was going with this) announces, "I picked up a steak on the way over." And some wine and candles, Jesse, if you don't have anything else going on tonight. Max apologizes for being a terrible, terrible "person," and Jesse explains to Max that his father died when he was ten, and that it was four years before her mother saw another man. And yet I could never understand why nothing ever came of her relationship with that delightful Tony. So he understands, he continues, that "no one is ever going to be good enough for Isabel." Jesse continues that, though they may never be friends, they will be family, so they'll have to deal. And then, the delightful raw meat subplot wraps its own self up, as Jesse asks, "So, you gonna eat that steak, or what?" Max shifts awkwardly. Max holds the steak up against Jesse's face, and heals it in the process. Jesse looks confused; why did I let the man who is to become my brother-in-law in sixteen minutes hold raw meat against my face on network television, his glance seems to say.
It is not 22 minutes from the beginning of this sequence. Wedding! Wedding! Wedding! Liz and Maria saunter in, wearing their non-matching bridesmaids' dresses (nice planning, ladies), and Monopoly Nazi makes an eleventh-hour plea for fatherhood, escorting Isabel down the aisle and displacing Porno and all the good work he could have done. Boo, Monopoly Nazi. Booooo. And then, they're married. I do. Well, whatever, 'cause I do too! "In plenty and in want"? I've never heard that one before. Finally. Time for the drinking.
Fade to fun party times, the looks of a wedding years in the making. Max makes a best man speech, beginning, "Isabel and I…well, I'm sure you know the story." Don't we, though. It is quite simply the most boring best man speech I've ever had the misfortune to encounter, and mentions the man to whom he is best a grand total of zero times. His conclusion in all this? "What I've realized is that she doesn't need me to protect her. She's too strong for that." Is Michael even there? "To Isabel: I love you, I trust you, and I wish you all the happiness in the world." Hip hip hooray. Lackadaisical applause ensues. Is this place a cash bar, or what? Then Ivy sells their soul to the UPN to get the rest of the two fans they couldn't hit when they just "happened" to be playing at a bar scene on Special Unit 2. Isabel dances with her mother, her father, her priest, the caterer; Liz tells her father she'll be dancing with Max because, goshdarnit, nobody puts baby in a corner. Oh. There's Michael. And there's…Khivar! Suddenly, Isabel opens her eyes on the dance floor to the sound of beefcake-in-a-scarlet-collar whispering in her ear, "Stay calm and keep smiling, Isabel." She tells him he's not really here. He tells her he has come for her, grabs a glass of champagne, and wishes her "many more happy days still to come." He's gone. Kyle crawls up (oh, wait, he's standing. And short) to Isabel and asks if he can dance with her. She asks if he saw the dude that she was dancing with, and Kyle confirms that, indeed, he had. Who is it, he wants to know. Isabel is perplexed: "Someone who shouldn't be here." That goes for all of us, Isabel.