A Tale of Two Parties

Strenuously adhering to its one New Year's resolution to not piss me off entirely and in a wholesale fashion at all possible moments during both my wakeful as well as my sleepful hours, The Roswell Show finally does something right in featuring the music of John Doe (whose set I so enjoyed when he opened for Aimee Mann at House of Blues a few Mondays back) tonight, rather than some crappily derivative over-before-they're-over band like Matchbox 30 or Bride Of Smashmouth or Majandra And The Kit Shickers or whatever. But then they at The Roswell Show go terribly, terribly wrong by airing a brand-new episode on New Year's Frapping Day, while I'm on a plane and on Valium. Which is a mistake larger than any John Doe could correct. Which is a mistake larger than any anything -- up to and including the Roswell production staff somehow arranging for the cast of Ocean's 11 to come to my house to perform the entire film, in my bedroom, completely in the nude -- could correct. Especially if they sent Elliott Gould. Ew. Hey, Elliott? Keep those pants on, friend.

Geoff "Slackjaw" Parker (I just learned that his name is actually spelled "Geoff." Actually, I pretty much just learned that his name was "Geoff") sits in the empty Crashdown, strumming a guitar and singing contemplatively about postcards and three little words and pictures and pathos and America and the nature of all things true, real, and right in the universe. While this song vamps into an instrumental bridge, we cut to a tight shot of a hand putting a key in a door, and a caption that reads in Microsoft Word Font Alien Bold, "New Year's Day 7:31 AM." I have never understood the need for that possessive apostrophe. Who is Mr. New Year and why is this his day? Really. And is Mr. Easter upset that no one remembers that it's his Sunday? Right. I thought not. Anyway, we learn that the key belongs to one Jesse "Should Auld He's Gay Not Be Forgot" Ramirez. He opens the door to discover his blushing bride, Isabel "Should Auld Acquaint Ourselves With Her Loser Plot" Evans sound asleep on the couch, snuggled in the lap of one Kyle "Should Short Acquaintance Wear Lifts In His Shoes A Lot" Valenti. Jesse stares and stares. He wonders if maybe an annulment to this whole sham is the gift his wife forgot to give him on Christmas's Day. For those of you who haven't been keeping up, that's the day that's owned by Mr. Christmas.

Over to another bed, we discover a sleepy (and I believe shirtless, which wouldn't be my first choice, necessarily, but it sure has this whole Elliott Gould thing squarely beaten, at least) Michael "Should Auld Acquaintance Be For Pot Belly" Guerin trying to wake up. Into the room walks Liz "S.H.O.U.L.D. A.U.L.D. A.C.Q.U.A.I.N.T.A.N.C.E. B.E. ROBOT" Parker, and we discover -- horrors! -- that Michael has been sleeping in Liz's bed. Swathed only in a bathrobe, she sits on the bed and wishes him a hearty but firm "Good mornink." In turn, he offers a detached "Hey." She asks him how he is feeling, backstorying for the good of an audience about to watch Michael have "quite a night" in heinously hackneyed flashback, "Quite a night you had." Michael notes that she had herself quite a night as well, quickly turning the conversation by asking, "What about Maria?" Liz responds that "she and Max spent the night together." But it's not what you think! Because you think it's good. And you're quite, quite wrong.

Max "Should Old And Gay Flex Pecs A Lot" Evans and Maria "Should Blah Blah Blah Snotcakes" DeLuca walk through a dusty field under the cover of darkness, as the words "Seven and a half hours earlier" captionate beneath them. That's 12:01 AM, for those of you playing at home. How effortlessly we vault through space and time! How fractured, the narrative! Before Max has a chance to rip off his shirt and tattoo the words "John G. raped and murdered the integrity of network television" on his chest, he asks Maria cryptically, "You ready?" Maria responds we're-not-talking-about-sex-here-ily, "I have been waiting for this my whole life. I am so ready." Max rallies them with a "Let's go." They walk up a hill. The end.

Not. Fuck.

Opening credits: More like "Di-don't."

It's "6:32 PM" on the eve owned and operated by Mr. New Year. At the Ramirez hiz-ouse (hey, there's finally a minority of some kind on this showcan't we be just a little street about it all?), Isabel wears a slinky red dress and sets a dinner table to Martha-Stewart-y perfection. She looks around the room to note that the candles have not been lit, so she waves an arm and they all blaze to life. Up to and including the one to the far left of your screen (well, my screen, because you're not watching this train wreck anymore, are you?), which ignites several seconds before she raises her arm in the first place. Now that's a power, right there. The power of crap effects editing. The phone rings just then, and Isabel picks it up to hear her hiz-usband on the other end of the line, pleading, "Don't be mad." As a tape of airport sound effects whooshes up, we cut to Jesse on an airport payphone (because what high-powered lawyer with a house and wife of his own has ever used a cell phone?), telling Isabel that he's in "Houston. And I just missed my connecting flight." Gay slang, of course. She sighs that it's "okay," but he realizes it isn't, and tells her, "Do me a favor -- don't just sit at home alone, okay? Go out, have a good time, enjoy the night for both of us." She's unconvinced, but he tells her that it's bad enough he'll be "stuck in an airport" (there's that slang again), and that she should go and paint the town a rosy shade of non-gay-husband for both of them. But what a nice and caring hiz-usband he is, no?

Crashdown. Liz is morose, leaning over the back of a chair like she's waiting for a Samantha Fox video to begin spontaneously choreographing itself around her, muttering, "This isn't fair." Maria affirms that whatever "it" is, is, in fact, unfair. But Maria doesn't care much, telling Liz, "In about three minutes, I'm out of here." Liz snaps back that Maria is never going to find "it," leading to a banter-y exchange between Slackjaw and Michael that yields the information that "it" is "Enigma," which Slackjaw describes as a "secret New Year's Eve party that's been going on since before I was your age." He wistfully reflects upon a time when he found the secret location of the party "once," and I wistfully reflect on how much cooler this scene would be if Slackjaw went all Johnny Dangerously on us and tacked an overly arcane second "once" to the end of that thought, for the benefit of those of us cool kids at the back of the bus. In 1987. But Lizbot is on the case, making sure no cool dialogue is to disrupt the usual river of muddy brown bad dialogue. Liz informs her father, "You don't really need me to be doing this." It. This. What are you people talking about? But Slackjaw is nostalgic, noting that tonight's party at the Crashdown is "a family tradition." Liz garbles something about geriatrics or jamborees or Jell-O Pudding Pops or something, and Slackjaw attempts to clarify the actual nature of tonight's event: "When you're finally a member of the Desert Inn Retirement Community, then you don't have to come here for New Year's Eve." But won't Mr. New Year be lonely?

Maria cheerily makes her way to the back to punch the clock, but on her way bumps into Michael, who is sneaking in through the back door. Michael already knows the backstory we were so unmercifully non-spared, asking, "So, Enigma, huh?" Tragically on the defensive, Maria lobs back, "Yep. And no, I don't think it's lame or stupid or any of the other fifteen insults you're about to spew out." Jay-sus. Someone feeling a little self-conscious about her plans to scope out the set of Go, or whatever passes for a secret party in a corrugated shack here in the new millennium. Maria asks what Michael will be doing tonight, and after she deduces he'll be by himself, she asks, "What about Max? Why don't you two go look for a party or something?" Michael sarcastically derides Max and his boring character construction as "the original party animal" (Spuds Mackenzie, meanwhile, is all, "Whatever"), and wishes Maria a "have fun" before faking out the door. Maria stops him and asks if he'd like to come with her, but Michael fears that might affect their non-dating status. "It's not a date," Maria backstories upriver, paddling as hard as she can. "It's not a date. It's a scavenger hunt, looking for party clues." Michael takes nine seconds of dead air to agree. Meanwhile, we're a full segment in here, and all I've got over at my place is Carl Reiner, and who I think is Bernie Mac pulling up in a cab. Get on it, Roswell. We're wasting valuable Pitt time here.

Den Of Porno. Kyle is on his knees in front of a large Buddha statue. He meditates in continued silence (Jesus, people. If there's not enough material to fill a whole hour, I'm sure Mr. New Year would be happy to give you the damn day off), until finally deigning to speak the line, "Now that my immortal soul has been cleansed" -- he takes two quick hits of Binaca and coughs slightly, which would be vaguely amusing were it not so darned odd -- "on to more terrestrial concerns. It's been a dry couple of years. I need a woman. I need her badly. I need her tonight." 'Cause he's not sleeping. There's something about her, girl, that makes him sweat. But the doorbell at the Den Of Porno would rather sound off noisily than hear me wail through another measure of INXS, and Kyle responds to the distraction by telling the statue, "If that's a Jehovah's Witness, I'm coming back here." Kyle walks to the door to find Isabel, smiling and informing Kyle that it's his "lucky night." She then holds up a VHS tape and announces as perkily as she's got it in her, "Rudolph's Shiny New Year!" But Kyle is going out "to that Enigma thing." Isabel would rather chill with Rudolph, and her repeated entreaties for Kyle to stick around are accompanied by a series of ghastly shiny Tom Cruise-esque smiles that only drive him further away. He tells her that his night is entirely concerned with "sex and death," and allows her to tag along.

Why don't these people actually have a conversation about what they're doing on New Year's Eve before New Year's Eve? Who goes out alone on New Year's Eve? What's Enigma, and wasn't this show once about aliens? I am the one with many, many questions. We're on Liz's roof, Liz apologizing to Max and Max sadly responding, "It's all right. I had a feeling he wasn't going to let you get off work." Well then, why not just go ahead and make some other plans, oroh, never mind. She asks what he's going to do instead, and he all haughtily responds, "Go back to Michael's and avoid New Year's Rockin' Eve." Okay, first of all, it's called Dick Clark's New Year's Rockin' Eve. Everything possessive. Everything in that title either owns or is owned by something else in that title. Just like the New Year itself. Second of all, that show is an institution, and making fun of it is both anti-American and anti-lunar-calendar. So cram it, Commie. Liz suggests that Max could just go out with Maria and Michael, and Max asks all quizzically, "To Enigma?" Jesus. Does that word have a deal with the network to be product-placed four billion times a scene until it outpaces its closest synonyms of "mystery" and "paradox"? But Max claims that he's not really a party guy. He's more of a "one-on-one" guy. He kisses her smackily, and she goads him into going out, telling him exactly what Jesse told Isabel about him not having a crappy New Year's on her account. Except she uses the word "crummy," so I guess the UPN acquired a Standards & Practices Department at some point in the last twelve minutes. Max says that he'll go, but "with one condition: midnight comes and we're together." But how? HOW? "We'll find a way. Somehow, some way, we'll make it happen." Liz agrees, which is good for more tongue-y tonguing. Max finally takes his leave, leaping off the roof and sadly using the ladder.

Random garage on the outskirts of town. Isabel watches Kyle take the protective sackcloth off what appears to be some kind of sports car. Where are we, and what's going on? Kyle tells Isabel that the car belongs to his boss, Toby. Toby? Who? Wha? Where do these people keep coming from? Is Toby also Jane Covendall's boss? Kyle is also in mysterious possession of the keys, and Isabel thoughtfully changes the color of the car from black to (gack) yellow to avoid detection in this "chick magnet." Kyle notes that "yellow wasn't my first choice, but that's cool." I hope she remembered to wave out those candles.

The Kit Shickers kit their shick (or would that be "shick their kit"?) all over the Crashdown dining room, as the octogenarian crowd grooves all, "This music is so good I could pee myself -- and now have." Mysterious Jane tells Liz that the band is awfully good, but that "you wish you were someplace else." Liz tries to assure her that that's not the case, but Mysterious Jane chides, "Don't shick a shicker." And then, quite intrusively, Mysterious Jane looks deeper, asking, "Boy trouble?" Liz confirms that her parents "don't really approve" of her boyfriend, and Mysterious Jane takes the same conversational approach Liz so often does, making it All About Her in responding, "I'm having the same problem." She points to a grizzled old couple sitting at a nearby table, and we learn that they are her parents, and that they still won't leave her and Frank be. Which one, Liz wants to know, is Frank. But we learn that he's not there. So who, then, is Frank, and why are we supposed to identify with him? He could be fourteen. Or a goat. Or a cardboard cutout of Greg Kinnear. So I don't really side with ol' Jane and Frank either, despite the fact that we're supposed to think that this is one classy broad who's gruff on the outside but teaches us a valuable lesson about loving old people who smell vaguely like cheese. Whatever. I refuse to be learned. And then, we line dance.

Fagabefe. We join Kyle hopefully not going 88 miles per hour and ending up in 1955, leaning against his midlife-crisis-mobile and explaining to two much-taller-than-him girls, "Easy clue. See, the hut-hut meant the Waffle Hut across the street," and then something about the 24 and the 7. From nowhere walks a slightly taller (like, five feet three, maybe) guy, and tells Kyle he's going to ask him "a question from the future: those your teeth lying on the ground?" This Archie Comics guide to courtship causes the girls to abandon poor Jughead when the bullying tactics of that bully Big Moose drive Betty and Veronica back into the arms of their rightful suitors. Or maybe that guy was Reggie. Stupid, stupid Reggie. Isabel blazes over with a speech about how Kyle lacks confidence, telling him, "Women want an alpha male." Kyle says that he was a "fun guy" before the "alien invasion," and Isabel drags him off with the promise of finding him a "new social life," which certainly won't be found in any capacity at