Previously on Roswell: Isabel wears curtains and marries a gay man in an even gayer lavender boutonniere.
Ack! Pores! We open on a Wayne-and-Garth-esque Extreme Close-Up of the eyes of Max "Ack! Pores!" Evans. A high-drama cut to The Blackboard Of Fatherly Conspiracy cuts quickly to a close-up of the mouth of Liz "Ack! Bores!" Parker, as she asks, "You okay?" A close-up shot of Max's mouth -- framed as it is by his prepubescent bar mitzvah boy facial growth -- responds, "I can't believe this." Cut back to the eyes, and whatever it is Max can't believe goes permanently unanswered as his staggeringly girly eyelashes brush against my television's picture tube and the screen goes blank forever and ever and ever. Oh, just kidding. You all know as well as I do that nothing will kill this show. Instead, the rest of his sentence tells us, "My whole life is up here." And even though the three-by-five cards clearly spell out, "What is Max hiding?" the Lizbot's central mainframe blinks a furious "Annoy! Annoy! Annoy!" and she one-ups the title character of The What Is Max Hiding Show in concurring, "Yeah, so is mine." Cards! Cards! Cards! Max mourns in a dull (duh) monotone (duh super-sized with fries and a coke), "My own father." He looks at a card that reads, "Tess," and tests his reading comprehension by hazarding, "Tess." Pee Wee's secret word of the season having been uttered, we are treated to a best of Tess package of Tess-o-licious clips from last season. Max and Tess naked in the planetarium. Tess engulfed in Ed Wood-ian CGI as the granilith chamber achieves liftoff. The rest of the cast standing on the scoping fjords of Sandy Land and averting their eyes from such profanely Ed Wood-ian CGI. Back in Monopoly Nazi's office, Liz mistakenly believes that there are new viewers of this show who might need to know more: "He's got cards up here for everythink. Los Angeles. Utah." Utah? More "previously" clips. The Alienmobile bursts into flames and goes flying over a cliff. Why did he do that to the Jeep, anyway? Liz fields that one: "You thought you'd never need it again." So be it, but isn't that a little overzealous? I mean, I don't have any further need for long division, but you don't see me setting my fifth-grade math teacher on fire and tossing her into a dark ravine, do you? I mean, DO YOU?
Liz takes Max's hand and pulls him away from The Backstory Board. She suggests, "Maybe you should tell your father." Max looks somber and notes, "These are my parents. I can't put them in this kind of danger." Liz, however, can be put at the business end of a long-range FBI rifle for fortysomething episodes and no one opposes it for a moment, save for those of us jaded enough with her world-constantly-in-peril constitution to ask, "Yeah, well, then why in the world isn't she dead yet?" Max seals the dramatic action of this episode by noting, "They can't ever know the truth." Liz asks what he intends to do, then, and Max knows instinctively. He quietly intones, "The necklace I gave you when I thought I was leaving?" Yeah? What about it? "I need it back." Liz pulls the Zapf symbol out from in between her Aquabra and forks it back over. Somber music ambiguously plays. My fifth-grade math teacher knows her days are numbered. Shut up, Mrs. Verini. The school bell tolls for thee.
Crashdown. Liz stage-directs some cleanliness onto a milkshake machine. I really hope the regular patrons of that diner like themselves some soap-and-dishrag-flavored shakes, because that's the only thing Liz is ever cleaning when she's allegedly doing any work in there. Maria "I'm Gonna Wash That Man Right Outta My Hair" DeLuca assures Liz that everything will be "okay," and their vamp is soon interrupted by Michael "I'm Gonna Never Do Anything Remotely Resembling Washing My Hair, Thanks" Guerin, who rings the short-order bell as an introduction to plot-developing, "So when does Billy get here?" Liz interjects an ill-timed pause so drearily long that the remaining six of us exchange a brief hopeful glance and one of us even mouths the words, "Did they just cancel this show in the middle of an episode?" before finally -- FINALLY -- getting around to responding, "Billy who?" Billy Darden is how the closed-captioning spells it, and Liz elucidates that "First-Kiss Billy" is coming to Roswell. From the stool over, a suddenly-appearing Kyle -- fresh from piling enough copies of the New Mexico yellow pages onto his chair so that he could see above the counter and sneak unsuspecting into the frame, notes, "Your ex-boyfriend is coming to visit? That's not legal." Chatter chatter about how he wasn't her boyfriend, that they kissed once when they were thirteen, and we discern that First-Kiss Billy (or, as the deep, artistic philosopher would probably prefer to be called, "FK Billy") will be staying at Maria's house while her mother is out of town. Kyle finds this arrangement unacceptable, climbing down from his stool and walking over to the counter, explaining, "Michael, Michael…" Did anyone else tack on a totally dumb and Rocky Horror-esque "Motorcycle!" at this point in Kyle's speech? You're so not alone. Kyle explains, "Here on planet Earth we have this thing called jealousy." Michael responds that he has nothing to be jealous about, and that "they were thirteen-year-old geeks at band camp." Awwww. Making fun of band camp. How quaintly 1999 and pre-war of you "writers." Maria hilariously carries Kyle back to his stool by the collar like a mother cat carries her tiny, tiny young (the cats don't have the unenviable task of completing this activity while their young pretend to be five inches taller in orthopedic shoes, which is probably what renders this gag here so "ih"). And then, there's Billy. And he's totally not a band camp geek anymore, because he carries a guitar case rather than a tuba or lute case, and Maria doesn't even recognize him all these years hence. He looks Maria right in the eyes and announces, "It's me," leaving off the additional, "Wacky cameo actor Jack Black," because the six of us who still watch this show obviously lack any kind of crap filter and we're probably the exact same six who ponied up the cash to see Shallow Hal, now aren't we? I know, it's not really Jack Black. But he's the damn "Land-of-Confusion"-video cloth-and-buttons spitting image, now isn't he? He hugs Maria and Michael looks away, a dozens eggs spontaneously bursting in their carton for as-yet-unknown reasons. Maria suggests to Hal, "Let's go this way." This way is out. They want to be alone. Meanwhile, Kyle Gass sits forlornly in the parking lot, all, "I'm way too Garfunkel to go solo now."
Opening credits: Does this Dido chick remind anybody else of a young Majandra?
Hal really does have quite a bit of scruff for a seventeen-year-old, doesn't he? Outside the Crashdown, Maria is on one of those ex-boyfriend perma-breaks that are part and parcel of federal labor laws (I take those all the time at work), listening as Hal woos her with pick-up lines from The Humbert Humbert Guide To Dating: "Last time I saw you, you were thirteen going on thirty." She retorts accordingly, "And you were, like, ninety-eight pounds going on this." Translation: "You're fat! Perhaps you noticed inside that I have no problem with that. Here. Have another space cruller." Flirty flirty flirty. That Hal. So shallow. Maria turns the topic to how long Hal will be shallowing up her airspace, and he notes that it will be "just a couple of days." On his way to New York. From where, Roswell Heights? I've done the transcontinental thing many more times than I care to think about by plane and train and automobile, and I have never once gone through Roswell, New Mexico on my way there or back. Hal asks if it's "cool" with Maria's mom that he stay at the house, and Maria levels with him that "she's actually gonna be out of town." Hal's eyes widen and other parts of Hal do other things that I prefer never to reflect upon, and the awkwardly hormonal moment is diffused when Hal changes topics again, asking, "Well, I can't wait to hear what you've been working on." Maria is quizzical. Working on? You know, music and so forth. Hal remembers, "I can still remember some of the lyrics you wrote back in band camp." When she was thirteen. And her song "I Like Puppies And Joey Lawrence" left not a dry eye at the band camp talent show. Come to think of it, that sounds a lot like a song I wrote when I was thirteen, doesn't it? Except for the puppies part.
Max skulks skulkily into the Crashdown kitchen, eliciting a "what are you doing in here?" from a preoccupied Michael. Max tells Michael that "something came up" and to cancel his plans with Maria and Hal. Michael steps outside and introduces himself to Hal as "the boyfriend," and then makes up a convoluted excuse filled with "Steves" and "Cheryls" for why he can't come out with them. Hal dispenses his slacker wisdom: "You gotta do what you gotta do." Michael kisses Maria and goes back inside. Hal notes, "He seems nice," and Maria sardonically retorts, "Yeah, he's a peach." They laugh I-don't-get-the-joke-ily.
A new set! Somewhere on this boldly bland 7 1/2 x 11 expanse of soundstage, there's a note reading, "Dear Roswell: Merry Christmas. Ask for this present ever again and you'll be cancelled before you can say 'encore performance of Special Unit 2, this and every Tuesday at 9.' Peace on Earth, your friends at Paramount." Jesse "Attorney at Yawn" Ramirez carries numerous boxes through the door, labeled "linens" and "shower gifts" and what have you, and Isabel bosses him around the place, barking destinations for said boxes. Finally, he lets go of the boxes and drops them to the ground (this whole sequence would have been rendered far less romantic had he been carrying the other assortment of boxes labeled "Ming vases" and "Hitler's brain preserved in a jar of formaldehyde"), picking up his booty of Isabel and twirling her around the place. He tells her, "It's tradition." Breaking all the shower gifts the day you move in is "tradition"? Can I have my blender back? They smooch and smooch until a ringing telephone interrupts them and she picks it up to hear Max ask, "Did you find your healing stone?" Isabel tells Max he's "way overreacting," Max tells her that their father is "on the warpath," Isabel tells Max that their father is "not the enemy," and turns around to find the smiling maw of Philip Evans staring back at her at uncomfortably close range. Run! It's the Monopoly Nazi! And he's on the warpath! And he's got a frond! Monopoly Nazi tells her he just came by to see the new place, which he calls "cozy." Isabel tells Monopoly Nazi that he should have waited until the place was a little more settled, but he's all, "Don't be silly, I can hang an awkward conversational segue on even the barest of walls," continuing on, "You in your new house, Max with his new car." Yeah, and by the way: "I didn't even know Max was getting a new car. Do you even know when he got rid of the Jeep?" Convincing cross-examination, like Clarence Darrow in his prime.
The candles are burning low. The sex dinner has been consumed. The highly comedic canoe ride where Hal's oar doesn't reach the water and he just doesn't understand why because he's seeing her inner beauty, dammit has been taken. And now Maria and Hal sit at the kitchen table, Hal breaking out a photo album and humiliating Maria with photographs of the two of them back in their band camp days. Hal announces, "There she is! Right there!" Cut to screencaps of Maria in the pilot, with Hal's scrawny frame Photoshopped in, standing behind her playing a guitar. She demands, "Look at my hair!" I have. And shall again, when the first episode of this series is rerun week. All of which is to say, thirteen my ass. A dizzying close-up on the hair ensues as Hal tells us to "see what I see. Dreams. This girl has beautiful dreams. And she makes beautiful music." Awwww. Maybe Hal isn't so shallow after all. Hal asks, "So what happened to her?" Maria tells him, "Nothing. She just grew up." Almost patronizingly, Hal is all, "Right." Yeah, um, could you buy a razor and a clue with some pennies from that trust fund, pal? Some of us have jobs here. I take it back, Hal. You are shallow. And I hate you.
Michael is digging a hole. He asks Max, who is in the trunk of his non-Jeep, if it's deep enough. It is deep enough. What's going on? Michael lets us know: "Maxwell, we've been up all night collecting every conceivable alien artifact that ever crashed on this godforsaken planet, including all of Tess's stuff. I'm tired." Tension stirs as Michael's healing stone fails to materialize, but a ringing phone once more substitutes for the rational development of a scene, and Isabel whines at Max, "Jesse is asking all kinds of questions about you, Max. You're right, Dad is out of control, we have to do something." Michael barks in Max's other ear that he has to do something. And then someone is taking pictures of them from afar.
Our Two Stars, One Slot Battle Of The Puffy Well-Meaning Deep Thinkers continues, as Michael shows up at Maria's house and knocks on the door to reveal a shirtless Hal. He'd been sleeping, apparently dozing in that dreamy otherworld where rampant amounts of obvious armpit hair don't squick out the primetime viewing public when Hal puts his elbow up on the door frame as if to say, "Step into my pit hair." Dude. If Maria was thirteen going on thirty, he's seventeen going on pit hair. Michael notes pursed-lips-ily, "You haven't left yet." Hal confirms that this is so -- for what hologram could successfully transmit such unrelenting quantities of pit hair -- and politely asks Michael, "How's Steve's wife?" Who? "Who?" See, that's what happens when you front-load your lies with all those Steves and Cheryls. It leads to only trouble. Michael asks if Maria is home, charging in past Pitsy Carmichael with the excuse, "I'm here to pick something up." In Maria's room, Michael goes diving under her bed while Hal "finds" just what he came for -- a shirt -- which mercifully finds its way through the thatch of underarm forestry and onto his body. This episode can now end, seeing as the central conflict (icky hair go bye-bye) has now been adequately resolved. As Michael tears through Maria's unmentionables, Hal turns the topic, asking Michael, "When did Maria stop writing music?" Michael responds that she "messes around with it every once in a while," and Hal picks up an acoustic guitar and starts strumming away, asking, "I was just wondering if she'd given up on writing and singing altogether. I mean, she's really good." Michael promises to "keep that in mind," making a break for it to avoid spending any time hunting wild healing stones in Billy's underarm forest. Put down the damn guitar and shut up, Brad Pitt Hair.
Michael approaches Liz at the empty Crashdown. She's taking a break from cleaning the milkshake machine, in favor of a nice respite of refilling the sugar containers while thinking about cleaning the milkshake machine. Michael launches right in, asking Liz, "Do I need to be worried about this Billy guy?" Liz assures him that he doesn't, but Michael quizzes on, "Do you really think he missed his bus?" Liz believes that he did, asking Michael if he's ever missed a bus before. Michael starts to get mad: "No, because I don't take the bus. And I don't write songs. And I don't cook with freaking half-and-half!" The sugar containers explode. Sugar. Boyish temper. Everywhere. Liz freaks, "My dad is gonna freak," and Michael apologizes, "My powers are outta control!" In a very Regis kind of way. Michael keeps on to Liz, "She cooked him Italian food last night," and storms out as Liz begs, "Please don't do anything stupid! Or alien! Or both!" Hear that, Mr. Parker? ALIENS!
Strum, strum, strum, and Maria finally comes out of her room and tells Hal to "go to an F Major seven." He hopes that means sex. He then starts playing a little ditty, demanding, "Now let's see if you remember this one." Strim stram strum. Maria looks wistfully remembersome. She apologizes for her behavior earlier, and plays the impermeable Dead Kid Card, telling Hal that she freaked because "that guitar belonged to a friend of mine. His name was Alex. He died last year." Hal stops playing -- death is sad! -- and apologizes, asking if she and Alex ever wrote songs together. Maria explains, "We tried once, but I just don't partner well. You’re the only person I ever trusted in that way." Hal deduces that Maria was singing until Alex's funeral, but never since. He strums, calling this "a special night," and Maria begins to sing. Here are the words:
I wish I could-a read your mind
Words don't mean a thing
I've given you all my time
All you do is leave
If you were standing here in front of me
I know you would say
There's nothing oh, so precious as something that's gone away
And if there is a reason I just don't want to know
Why you feel the need to love me so
Only when you go
Only when you go
Michael skulks skulkily, looking into the house to see this display, and walks away from her house, car windows and fire hydrants bursting behind him, a bit more "Bittersweet Symphony" than whatever in the world this song is turning out to be. "Could-a"?
Back at Maria's, Hal won't put down the damn guitar, and it makes him such a sensitive poet, doesn't it? She comes in and tells him he has to go, right now, and he asks, "Is this about Michael? Am I in the middle of something?" Maria assures Hal that it has nothing to do with him, and Hal retorts, "That's too bad." He admits that he missed his bus on purpose, having taken some old advice of "decide what you want in life and live it." Maria deems this advice "terrible," and Hal snips, "You gave it to me!" When she was thirteen. And he's used it as his driving ideology in life. I guess he didn't take Piece Of Advice #2 -- "I really like the Care Bears" -- to heart as well. Or else this would be a very different kind of episode. The "fun" kind, for example. Hal tells Maria he thinks that Michael is "stopping her from life." And from "this." And then he kisses her. And I'll bet she's missing that Michael "stopper" she's been taking for granted right about now.
Max, Michael, and Isabel watch as the Alienmobile from so long ago is dredged up out the flaming pit of obsolete plotlines, Isabel noting, "This is bad." Michael asks what Max plans on telling his father, and Max responds, "I'm not going to tell him anything. He doesn't trust me anyway." Michael asks just who Mr. Evans does trust, and Max launches a sloooow forty-five-degree turn of the head to look squarely at Isabel. And I'm sorry to belabor an obvious point here, but if my brother ever looked at my sister that way, you'd better believe I would have followed through with my plan to drive my car into a ditch and move to another planet as quickly as non-humanly possible.
Maria and Liz lie in Liz's bed together, mid-convo, Liz askink, "And then you kissed him?" Indeed she did. Liz clarifies that it was "just a kiss," but Maria thinks "maybe not." There was "passion," that kind of "woke [her] up." Liz: "Like Sleeping Beauty." Or poppers. But at least with the Disney reference, somebody else has been thinking like a thirteen-year-old. Maria thinks that sometimes she "pays a huge price for knowing Michael and knowing these aliens. It's like, I didn't think I'd end up here, dealing with this crap every day. I mean, I love Michael and I do sort of love this ridiculous soap opera, but I can't take it anymore. I feel like I'm trapped and I'm never gonna get out. I mean, I didn't sign up for this." Liz: "Yes, you did. We all did." Maria: "I know." The amount of times I have had that verbatim conversation, with me playing the role of Maria and Sars playing the role of Liz (sorry, Sars) is just plain staggering. Read it again. It's really, really spooky. ["That's okay…but who's Michael in our version? UPN?" -- Sars]
Hal is all packed. Maria walks into her kitchen with an "insane idea," telling Hal that she wants to do as she planned and go to New York with him. So she's coming. Right after she graduates. Maybe. Hal says that she doesn't owe him an explanation, and tells her that they're "fine." He apologizes for doing anything to make her uncomfortable, and drawls, "I just wish you hadn't hidden yourself away with that guitar." Those are his parting words? At the door, he asks, "You gonna come and see me in the Village?" She promises to get her "front-row seats." At the Village? I love that place.
The Ramirez house has a nook! Does sex in every room extend to the nook, or is that allowed to apply to the kitchen? After all, Jesse does have quite a lot of flossing to do. He has quite a lot of teeth. While Mom and Pop Evans eat dinner in the nook and share pleasantries with Jesse, Isabel replays a conversation in her head that we weren't there for the first time, in which Max tells Isabel that she has to cover for him because they trust him, Isabel demands that they tell them the truth, so on, so on. Isabel demands, "I want to tell them." She opens her mouth at the table: "I want to tell you the truth about what's been going on with Max. It's about Tess. Max got Tess pregnant. But she left before the baby was born, so Max may have a child out there somewhere. The night that she left, he was so angry that he just drove all night and pushed his Jeep off a cliff because he was so crazy." Monopoly Nazi seems sated, and apologizes for asking those questions and putting Jesse in the middle. Cut to a phone conversation in which Isabel tells Max that they bought everything, and "maybe now we can get back to normal." But no! Because The Backstory Board has a new face on it under "conspirators," and it's Isabel in her even-magic-alien-powers-couldn't-make-it-pretty old granny wedding gown.
Park bench by night. Maria wanted to talk to Michael, so he bought some flowers along to stave off the anger. Michael asks if Hal has gone yet, and Maria confirms that he has. But then she launches in, telling him, "I want out because I love you so much. I love you more than you can possibly know." But she hasn't been honest with him. Michael mystifyingly tosses out the line, "If you're trying to tell me you're a bisexual or something, I'm cool with that." Huh? Wait. I don't think that's it. "Things change." Michael asks if she'll come back to him. But she just walks away. Because she's got a concert to do! Michael sits alone on the park bench, and Maria returns home and takes her guitar out of hiding. Isabel stares straight ahead. Monopoly Nazi downs scotch and thinks about blackboards. Michael remembers happier times. He really did look better with short hair. Maria brays on cross-promotionally.