Shut up. I have the flu.
Ack! Feet! Whose idea was this, for crying out loud? We open on an establishing shot of the soon-to-be-recycled-in-the-tinder-for-The Yule Log set of the Crashdown, and cut to an under-the-table shot of a dirty, unclad, free-roaming foot working its way up the inseam of the person across from it. Clearly, Roswell has been cancelled two full weeks ahead of schedule and been unceremoniously replaced with the far more relevant reality series When Humans Eat Out. Surely, there's a sign on the wall in that restaurant indicating that this deviant, piggy-showing behavior will yield the final result of "no service." Let's just pray they've got the "shirt" part taken care of. We cut north to find that the piggies in question belong to Liz "Bot In Hell" Parker, and the pants and assumed arousal belong to Max "Old Only In Alien Years…And In Human Years As Well" Evans. Liz saucily informs Max, "Did you know there's a full college scholarship being offered to potential podiatry practitioners?" Kyle "Little Man Tate" Valenti shares the table with Max and Liz, looking nearly as disinterested in this podiatry-oriented exchange as the viewers whose remotes broke during Buffy and are now glued to the couch with a quizzical "Are you sure this wasn't cancelled?" look painted across their faces. Y'know. That kind of disinterested. But back to podiatry -- Liz flirts with all the elegance of a cloistered monk, monotoning, "I'd have to keep my business off of the equator, though." Max looks down at the table and asks back, "Couldn't you come a little farther…north?" Ooooh. It's like they're talking about sex, but what they're really talking about is sex. God, I love subtext. Liz's foot slides up Max's jeans (though with his rapidly advancing age, I'm sure he'd tell the story that Liz's foot slid up his "trousers" or perhaps "dungarees") and Max is forced to think about baseball or the queen or Liz to stop himself from experiencing some premature, uh, podiatry and excusing himself from the table. Because all that would do is ruin a perfectly good pair of "slacks."
Michael "Pillsbury Dough Alien" Guerin enters through the front door of the Crashdown just then, carrying with him many large cardboard boxes. He locks eyes with an angered Maria "Schlock Star" DeLuca, and the two indulge in a brief, witty repartee that includes each of them saying the word "what" seventeen times until Michael deal breaks with a "whatever" and carries his ambiguous boxes through to the kitchen. They weren't filled with backstory, that's for sure, because last week's episode spills out all over Liz's table as she informs Max, "Still no apologies from Michael." Kyle deigns to mention "that king thing tattoo on Michael's chest," and Liz cuts him off with the preemptive "That's gone. Max is king now." So haughty she is all, "I'm not giving up my foot virginity to just any member of the royal court of the five triangulated planets." And haven't we all felt that way at one time or another, really? But never you mind, because Kyle has other plans for Michael's temporary tattoo of universal domination: "Maybe Michael could get 'I'm eternally sorry' tattooed there instead and flash it every half-hour regardless." No one is amused. Liz fake laughs, because the script dictates "Liz laughs genuinely." Maria, for one, knows why she ain't laughing: "He threatened my life and then shoved me out of a moving vehicle and just left me in the middle of nowhere in the middle of the night."
Michael, his boxes of prop boxes safely delivered to the kitchen, comes storming back out into the dining room, bellowing about how the car was stopped and that he didn't try to kill her. Maria retorts that Michael suggested that "it would be better off if I was dead and Jesse and everyone else who knows your little secret." The why-shet-ma-mouth silent pause lasts juuuuust long enough for us to enjoy a quick clip of Marshall Crenshaw's splendid 1982 single "Someday, Someway" fighting to be heard about the ruckus of inferior dialogue. Seriously, it's a good song. Download it tonight and go home happy. When Operation Drown Out The Only Redeemable Sensory Information resumes, Michael still isn't sorry, and storms out of the Crashdown in a huff, slamming the door behind him. The window in the door smashes into a billion little pieces, and everyone looks at it in shock because it's harder to recycle wood into Yule logs if it's filled with flecks of glass. Because this little piggy got cancelled.
It's nighttime on The Scoping Fjords of Sandy Land, and Michael rides around the desert on his motorcycle because that, America, is what bad boys do. That is, until his bike begins to malfunction, and he looks above him to see neither a bird, a plane, Superman, a creative plot-developing tool of any kind, or even yo mama. Instead, he spots two intersecting flying objects, which smash into each other and begin simultaneously plunging to earth. One hits the ground first with a crash and a small glow of blue light, and the other one comes plunging down in a hail of fiery brimstone, erupting into flames when it hits the ground. Earthlings die in plane crashes. Interstellar ships emit mood crashes. But the CGI still sucks on any planet.
Michael Michael Motorcycle steams his Big Boy Bike over to the wreckage, arriving to find a parachute and a helmet…which contains within it a human head! Actually, no, it totally doesn't. Psych! I'm totally in seventh grade. He picks up the helmet and reads the word "Griffin" off the side, screaming, "Griffin, you okay? Hey? Anybody?" Maybe Griffin is the name of the helmet. Good God, Michael and that helmet have really gotten close recently. Too bad everyone with big Jeeps who works for the government wants to keep them apart so badly, as just at that moment some big trucks drive up and the scary music begins to play. Michael rides off into the distance, helmet in tow. Sigh. The many-splendored wonders of a boy and his helmet. If only there had been an accompanying love story, that would have been the final shot of the most beautiful love story ever told.
Opening credits: Shut up, bitch.
Who's this guy? When we come back from commercial, we find ourselves watching Fake News Channel 14. You give them twenty-two minutes, they'll give you fake news. The Fake Newscaster in standing in front of a fountain at Fake City Hall, fake reporting, "Here we go again. That's the attitude of most local residents that another UFO has supposedly crashed outside of Roswell. While local merchants are hoping that this latest close encounter will stimulate Roswell's dwindling tourist business, local officials are downplaying the entire incident." And now back to the Fake Studio with Fake Bob and Fake Tina, for Fake Sports and the Fake Lottery, which this week is worth Fake $30 Million! Cut to aforementioned local merchant, where we find Geoff "Slackjaw" Parker all in a tizzy at the Crashdown. Liz is watching the news report on the Crashdown's TV (this show is so meta I think it just blew my mind), but she soon stops watching it when she realizes all the news is, in fact, fake. Slackjaw, carrying boxes of alien-themed ephemera, asks Liz, "Anything yet?" Liz notes that they're "downplaying it," which Slackjaw thinks is good for business, seeing as it's even better if "they make it look like a cover-up." Max trails behind, toting some boxes of his own, and Slackjaw asks him, "Would you mind remarking those prices?" Slackjaw tells him to "double everything," and tells Liz and Maria to remain on guard so they can "handle the rush." Maria, sitting at the front counter, inexplicably has the skirt of her Crashdown uniform hitched up to her neck. She is sitting very much not like a lady. And yet, she still listens to authority, shooting back a disbelieving, "The rush?" Slackjaw explains slack-jawingly, "You're too young to remember. Back in 1986, there was another unexplained incident outside of town. This place went wild." Ah, 1986. Mets in the World Series, Depeche Mode on top of the charts, Geoff Parker in the money. Good times, good times. Slackjaw asks Max to fetch some "alien neckties" from the back, and Liz offers to give him some podiatry, taking her leave as well. And though a mere six or seven episodes ago, Slackjaw sent his daughter off to a private school 90,000 miles away so she'd never see Max again, off they frolic together without Slackjaw batting an eye. He's rather go back to watching the fake broadcast, and he explains to Maria that if the military so much as drops the word "unexplained," they'll be "swimming…in cash!" Wow. What a showboater. He must have learned all sorts of catchphrases from watching the Fake Game Shows on that channel he won't turn off.
Over in Subplot C, we have found the alien neckties. Liz asks Max if he's okay, and he affirms that he is. Yes, yes. Why wouldn't he be? "A ship from outer space crashes in the desert and you don't have a problem with it?" Max claims that it's "probably nothing," which it really probably is. She drags out of him that he's at least "curious," but Max explains that he has "more important concerns." Liz smiles coyly as if she's got anything to do with it. But she's called back to Daddy's side just then, and she insists that she's "comink," quickly taking her leave. Michael slides in through a door I don't even think was there at the beginning of the scene, and Max asks, "Where have you been?" Cognizant that last week's brilliant "my name was the only one on the access card at the bank" might not have been the most appropriate line for a dour musical cue, Michael ups the drama potential slightly with his not-at-all-hyperbolic response, "Investigating a potential threat to our existence." Oh, aren't you always. Max insists that Michael "leave it alone," but Michael piques his interest: "I saw it. It killed the engine on my bike, it went right over my head." Max wants to know what it looked like, and Michael's got his answer at the ready: "Like a really great sci-fi special effect, only real." While you're claiming exception, why not take on an "except" for the "great" part as well. And the "really great." And the "special." Ah, screw it. Why not just throw the whole sentence into parentheses and tack one of those squiggly mathematical "not" symbols in front of it. Other than that, keep it exactly the same. Max tells him again to stay out of it, claiming the usual round of "being too exposed right now. Especially with Jesse. Right now the last thing we need is some bona fide alien from another world who's looking for trouble." Heh. He said "exposed." And he also said "bona." Michael taunts him, "You afraid I'm going to find something?" Max responds, "I'm terrified they'll find you." Michael assures him that he'll "handle it" before slamming back out the sometimes-existing door.
Slackjaw has slipped into total, overwhelming, poke-him-with-sticks-and-look-at-him-in-his-small-padded-room-through-the-tiny-window state of dementia, staring at the Fake News and brokenly repeating, "Unexplained. Unexplained, baby. Unexplained. Say it. Say it!" We cut to Isabel "The Cook, The Thief, The Wife, And Her Gay Lover" Evans, dialing a phone and watching the same news report. She breathes a sigh of relief as Fake Guy Smiley reports that the press conference will probably reveal that "the UFO seen last night was an Air Force jet on a cross-country test flight." Isabel reaches Jesse's cell phone, but it rings several times first, so he's screening because it didn't go straight to voicemail. But really, do things with that couple ever go straight at all? She hangs up the phone in frustration, and a knock on the door causes her to yell a quick "hello?" into the phone before realizing that she was just, in fact, a big doofus. Nice touch, that touch. She answers the door to find her mother standing there. Bangs enters with a suitcase full of explication, launching right in: "Since the men we live with are in Delaware on business, I thought we should spend some money on clothes." Isabel is doubtful; is that really the kind of plan she should be leaving Jesse out of when it's so clear he'd enjoy it so much? But no matter, for Bangs just then looks around the room and asks, "What happened to all the furniture?" And indeed, all of the floor furniture is gone, and I don't think we know why, do we? It was all there last week, when Jesse returned home and sat on the couch, waiting for the Naked Chef to actually become naked. But now, gone. Isabel claims that she just wanted "a change," and it's dropped right there. And hence, I shall drop it as well. Bangs says that she spoke with Monopoly Nazi earlier and Jesse wasn't being himself, and she asks, "Did you two have a fight?" Isabel says everything is fine, perhaps overexplaining, "If there were [a problem], it would be about sex or money, one of which is great. And the other is the budget I'm about to ignore. Let's go buy me some shoes." Pardon me now for a moment while I go and never, ever talk about sex with my mother, ever.
Press conference in front of Fake City Hall. Slackjaw watches as an authoritative military man explains that a military jet crashed over Roswell and killed a pilot named "Theodore Griffin," and that "contrary to some reports, this was not -- I repeat, not -- a UFO or unexplained incident." Slackjaw mopes that it's "time for a 'going out of business' sale." Michael meanwhile, strides up to actual press conference, outside of real Fake City Hall, and looks upon "Connie Griffin, Colonel Griffin's daughter," who speaks of her father the hero and not her father the guy whose plane crashed into a UFO spacecraft. Michael interrupts a bereaved daughter's eulogy for her recently deceased father by yelling out, "Are you saying he didn't eject?" Connie affirms that he didn't have time, and strides off the podium. A mysterious man in a London Fog jacket looks upon Michael as if to say, "Why would we not all wear London Fog?"
Sure, London Fog is seedy and all, but do you have anything just a little more "outskirts of town"? You do? You do! Thanks, Roswell Fairy! No, not you, Jesse. A different Ros…oh, never mind. Cut to a seedy roadside motel on the outskirts of town -- the same seedy roadside motel, in fact, where Michael chased down an old geezer for a class project in "Summer of '47." Ooooh, look at the Roswell geek, with all his facts and the like. Anyway, this place, this so-called "Pineview Lodge," finds the aforementioned so-called Connie so-called Griffin alone in her room, pouring herself a stiff J&B. Something the geezer must have left behind. She's despondent. She's tear-streaked. She's…a boy? And to think I thought she was an incognito Tess the first time I saw her on that podium. Who knew her looks would turn out to be so Y-chromosomal? So BoyTess cries and knocks back a sip of the old devil's poison.
But she is soon to be interrupted by the opening of the door, which yields an uninvited Michael offering the uninvited advice, "You might want to keep your head clear." Her indignant reaction of "Who the hell are you?" ensures that I didn't actually change this to a reversed-gender military porno (in which her response would be "How 'bout you pour me a something a little more…stiff?"). Michael yanks Papa Griffin's helmet out of his sleeve, a mere "tada!" and two rings away from being both Barnum and Bailey, reporting, "I think your father is alive." BoyTess is slow to believe, however, turning on Michael soon after and sniping, "What kind of sick bastard are you, huh?" Michael gives a look of confusion that tries to answer, "The, uh, puffy kind?" before realizing that the question is rhetorical and he is, in fact, every kind of sick bastard. BoyTess thinks he's a faker of some kind, but Michael directs her attention to the lining of the helmet, which contains a photograph of a little blonde girl flying toward the camera as an older gentleman holds her legs. That sounds gross. It's not. Nevertheless, BoyTess gazes upon it nostalgically -- she remembers when she used to be a girl -- and turns it over to find it reads, "Daddy's Angel" in My Left Foot-esque writing in blue crayon. She sobs and sobs. Michael approaches, brimming with "there there" intent, which BoyTess rewards by elbowing him in the stomach and punching him right in the face. The stomach one only makes him yell "hee hee" and cook some crescent rolls, but the face one's gotta hurt. She's pissed: "Who are you?" Michael just wants to know why she lied, and she tells him that they're only lying "to protect national security." She tosses him from her motel room and picks up the helmet. No one is ever going to finish that J&B.
Cut to what appears to be a showroom for knock-off Mission-style furniture with the Thomasville price tags still dangling from the bottom. Jesse "Attorney At Yawn" Ramirez sits in a plush Ernest Hemingway chatting with Monopoly Nazi, who is smoking a cigar and offering up every phallic reference this scene needed before we had a chance to do it for him. Monopoly Nazi lights Jesse's cigar (not going to go there, so don't bother looking) and asks, "You missing home?" Jesse offers a distracted grunt that means "uh, no" before The Boss And Father has a chance to rephrase the question: "Isabel?" Jesse responds with a dispassionate "Yeah, sure." What a meditative think piece that scene was. The empty plush leather chair must be for Godot.
"Goshdarnit," you can hear the "writers" moan before this scene, "We forgot to write the scene. We must have been far too busy learning how to read first!" And so Bangs and Isabel are completely on their own this time, as they walk back into Isabel's mysteriously furniture-less living room and plop down on the couch. Isabel's tight pink turtleneck clashes with the wall behind her so badly it makes my teeth hurt. And yet it still isn't the most jarring part of the scene. Bangs: "Have you ever seen discounts like that? You'd think the whole town was having a fire sale!" Isabel: "Yeah." Bangs: "How's Max, Isabel?" For those of you keeping score, it's now people who care about Max: 1, elegantly constructed dialogue: 0.
And we're back at The International House Of Hemingway Collection, where Monopoly Nazi demands of Jesse, "Forget I'm your father-in-law for a second." Jesse offers, "Yes, Dad." Failure in life, thirsty for Naya.
Bangs looks at a wedding picture of herself, her husband, Isabel, Jesse, and…who the hell is that last one? Bangs goads, "Nothing worse than being in a house without the one you love, is there?" I have a keen sense that this scene is once again coming to an end. Looks like some clever "writer" or another figured out the intercutting tab on his Final Draft. Well done, "writer!"
Monopoly Nazi just wants to know that everything is okay.
Isabel notes that Jesse "won't be gone forever." But Bangs hates being alone in the house when her husband is away, because girls can't do anything including math and eek, a mouse! Jeez, woman. Be a woman.
Jesse is glad that Monopoly Nazi is concerned. Monopoly Nazi wants Jesse to talk about Isabel with him. But not if he's not going to let the scene contin…
Bangs tells Isabel to come stay at home with her. She'll even make "double fudge brownies." Isabel thinks that "sounds great." Now STOP CUTTING. Good God, man. thing you know it will be a split screen and Harvey Johnson asking Mrs. Henkel if he can speak to Penelope Sue.
Dusty Outpost Location Containing Cars. BoyTess meets a "sir" in full military regalia and confronts him with the Griffin helmet. He asks, "Where'd you get this?" She offers merely, "Through a friendly, sir." Is that what she says? What's a "friendly"? That's an adjective, not a noun. Someone needs to brush up on her Mad Libs or she's going to end up chair. If you know what I mean. But the ambiguous "sir" in question turns things around, asking of BoyTess, "Has your father been depressed lately?" BoyTess asks incredulously if she thinks her father killed himself, and he snarks, "We can't find him. We have reason to believe he might have gone over with information pertaining to the raptor." The what? What's going on? Is this JAG? BoyTess assures "Sir" that her father is not a traitor, getting back in her Government-Issue Bland Gray Car and driving off in a huff. The radio in that car only plays Paul Anka. Pause. Pause. Pause. Out from between two trailers walks London Fog, who informs Sir, "That was quite a yarn." Sir demands that London Fog "find the friendly that gave her the helmet. I'll meet with you later." London Fog unctuously replies, "Sure. Maybe we can split a malt or something." A malt? Even London Fog doesn't think it's the '50s. He thinks it's 1984. At the height of the London Fog empire.
BoyTess drives alone. She checks her rearview mirror to note that a small truck has pulled up behind her. She readjusts her mirror and does justice to the stage direction, "As if to say, 'Wha --? A truck?'" The truck pulls up close enough to hit her from behind, then pulls up to her and smashes her on the driver's side. The truck flips her off the highway and leaves her upside-down in her car, screaming for help. A guy who I think is London Fog (or he's not, but he's wearing the coat) looks at BoyTess suspended upside-down in her car and counsels, "Hey, it's a beautiful night. Just try to relax and enjoy the desert air." At least he didn't say anything about "just hanging around." He unearths a ticking clock that's counting backward from one minute, and places it to her head. Oh, dude. That is totally original. She screams for help, and hark! Up drives Michael Michael Motorcycle and throws the door off the car with his hands, pulling BoyTess out of the car as the clock counts down to zero and then several seconds past. BoyTess tries lip with Michael about him following her, but then watches the car explode and realizes that her lips would have been all on fire with the rest of her had Michael not worked his voodoo magic shit at just exactly that moment. He's a superhero: "Any more questions?" Ooh, nice catchphrase. It's an "hasta la vista" for the new millennium, except one that no one cares about.
Max and Liz study and flirt at The House That Government Subsidy Built, because when you're cramming for mysterious exams we've heard nothing else about, it's important to do so in a space in which neither of you actually lives, where you won't be interrupted by trifling décor like overhead lighting or a lack of roaches. But no matter. Michael Michael Motorcycle enters in a huff and introduces "Connie. Her father is the pilot of that crashed jet. Air Force said her father was a traitor on the run, but she doesn't buy it. Neither do I. They tried to kill her." Well, thanks for the "last half-hour on Roswell" brush-up. I guess I could just as well have tuned in now when the rest of you were…ah crap, there's still no one here, is there? BoyTess says Michael heard that Max could help. And so it's private confab time. Max and Michael step outside, Max asking, "What's going on?" Michael tells him to "trust your second-in-command to know what's right." Max employs that therapist's staple of conversational acumen by taking the last two words the other person said and turning that into a new question: "What's right? What's , JFK was killed by aliens?" Oh, enough JFK already. Everybody knows he was killed by the Mafia. It was McKinley who was killed by aliens. Duh. Max and Michael resort to the comfortable patter of Script Fighting By Rote, with the serve-and-volley tension ("What's happening to you?" "Me? What's happening to you?") escalating to the point where one of them threatens to ask what is happening to the other yet another time. What I'm really interested in is the conversation that's gone unfilmed in the room. "So, I hear you're a robot." "Yup. So, I hear you're a boy." "Yup."
Crashdown. Military Man and London Fog share a table, drinking chocolate shakes and defying the audience's ability to tell who they are or why. Maria approaches the table and asks to take their order, and London Fog orders up "a penne pasta with chicken and sun-dried tomatoes in a marinara sauce." Maria tells them that all they have is spaghetti. Doesn't she mean "Space Spaghetti"? London Fog creepily informs her, "That's not what I want," and Maria meets with the rejoinder, "What you want is the Olive Garden." When he's there, he's family. Lots of London Fog at the Olive Garden, I suspect. Military Man tells Maria to just get London Fog a fucking hamburger and be done with it already (or some "fuck"-free permutation of the aforementioned), getting on to the matter at hand once Maria ups and scoots: "Did you do it? Did you find anything in her hotel room? What about the helmet? Who gave it to her?" So many questions. London Fog drops Michael's name for the first time, and Military Man asks if she's sure Michael's their man. London Fog, small though he may be, exhibits significant brawn with the promise, "I will be. After I break a few of his fingers." Shut up, London Fog.
Maria, meanwhile, stands in the back, stewing: "Sun-dried tomatoes." Suddenly, Michael slams though the kitchen door and drags Maria into the back room, growling, "We need to talk." She responds to this manhandling with the weirdly synthetic "You should be slapped," and turns around in the back room to note Max, Liz, and BoyTess staring at this exchange. She's introduced to BoyTess, and we're treated again to the entire story of this episode thus far. Liz notes through the window that Military Man and London Fog are leaving. Maybe that's because someone ordered a hamburger in a restaurant without a chef. I'm just sayin'. Max and Michael enjoy yet another private confab walking back into the dining room, in which Max asks, "Do you really think there's a ship mixed up in all of this?" Michael throws out, "I'm not sure, but I'm not sure it's important." "That what is?" "Doing the right thing." Thank you, one-man walking Justice League. Nice concession to the action of "we'll resolve the plot, just as soon as one happens to wander across our path." Max frets that, if they get too involved, they "may have to kill him," though I don't have the vaguest clue as to who the "him" is. Michael notes some novelty alien masks sitting on the counter in the Crashdown and notes, "I got a better idea." Than death? And yet I'm still relatively sure that that's not true.
Inside a military base of some kind, Military Man enters a room to find a man with a potato sack over his head. He removes the potato sack, and "Pete" and "Ted" greet each other as Pete and Ted. One of them is Military Man, and the other appears to be Connie's father. They speak of "protocol" and "media," Military Man informing Connie's father that they've alerted the media that he's already dead. He puts the potato sack back on and takes his leave. Poor Pete. Or, uh, Ted.
Change the hot pink turtleneck already, Isabel. You look like a pack of tropical Starburst. We're back at Chez Evans, Bangs grilling Isabel on the little things about being married: "What does Jesse hate? You know, your father hates health food and French movies. What does Jesse hate?" Girly parts. But secretly, who doesn't? And where does Monopoly Nazi get off making a universal judgement call on the overall state of French cinema? Was he not captivated by the charming and visually stunning Amelie? And on a more classic scale, I'm pretty sure that if Truffaut were alive today, he'd concur that this show Blows in 400 different ways. But I seriously freakin' digress. Isabel asks her mom why the third degree, and Bangs innocently says that she just misses talking to Isabel "about things that matter." Like girly parts and Truffaut, or whatever it is they're really talking about right now. Instead, Isabel thanks her mother. For what? "For letting me be who I am. For accepting Jesse and me." Bangs returns the thanks and asks Isabel how she feels about staying the night. Isabel breaks down and accepts. But this episode so isn't about her.
It's about people we've never seen before and their highly ambiguous motives. London Fog stumbles around in the dark with a flashlight and a gun and a soundtrack with trombones.
Okay, now it's about Isabel again. Bangs and Monopoly Nazi share a "hi, Margie," "hi, Alice" thing. Monopoly Nazi says that he's tried to draw Jesse out, but "he's hiding something. He's not the same man who married our daughter. And what changed him was knowledge." Monopoly Nazi is turning into the bad guy, asking, "Did you do what I told you?" Bangs pauses, winces, and responds, "Yes." Monopoly Nazi ensures, "They left us with no choice. They forced us to do this." Bangs: "I know." Do you suppose every phone conversation ever between Delaware and New Mexico is this boring? I do.
London Fog, sans his power base of London Fog, sits glued to a chair in what I guess is The House That Government Subsidy Built. Through a lime-green shield, he sees two fake aliens wrapped in tin foil, one of whom asks in a high-pitched, non-scary voice, "Where is Colonel Griffin? Where is our ship?" London Fog pretends to know nothing, so Max (I guess) makes a motion to Michael (I guess) and notes, "Prepare the probe." He makes a weird hand motion that indicates that probe is going someplace that will probably elicit some answers.
Must end must end must end. Back in the Crashdown, Max and Michael enter the scene in full military regalia, informing BoyTess, "They're gonna kill him. He saw something he shouldn't have and they're going to get rid of him." BoyTess asks where they got the clothes, and Michael cryptically responds, "I've got a plan." They do that Batman transition line where she asks, "Who are you people?" and Michael good-guys, "We're the good guys." Max and Michael prepare to leave, Max asking Liz on the way out, "You know where to meet us?" She's on it: "Two hours." Since when was "two hours" a "where"? "You know where to meet us?" "Hammer." Exactly. Liz tells Max to "be careful," telling him not to get on a spaceship if there is one. Speaking of redemption, Michael apologizes to Maria for ever wanting her dead.
Recently-Occurring AFB. Max and Michael use their fake IDs to get onto the base, Max in a fetching beret and convincing suit. He approaches the door behind which Colonel Griffin sits in potato sack, telling the guards in front of the door, "I'm here for him." They ask who he is, he shouts his way into the room, yelling, "None of your damn business, soldier! Eyes front! Don't look at me!" No eye contact, either? He really is exactly like Tom Cruise. London Fog, meanwhile, slides his access card and enters an off-limits room, walking down a flight of metal stairs and through a room with biohazard-clad scientists doing mysterious things. He happens upon a black cone of some kind, which he picks up and pockets, continuing on his way. Is that really London Fog? I don't think it is. No! It's Michael in the London Fog jacket and face. He tells Michael that "there's a ship," and they walk past Military Man, who is at that moment informed that there's a Code Eight in effect. The black cone is missing! Seriously, what the hell is going on? Military Man notes "a breach," and we cut to London Fog in a van on The Scoping Fjords of Sandy Land, turning back into Michael. Military Man, meanwhile, unearths a gun and walks back into Colonel Griffin's room, shooting him in the face without bothering to remove the potato sack. But uh-oh! He's really shot London Fog, a victim of fashion and a victim of death.
Back in the desert, Max drives the van off the base. Griffin is in the back of the van, and Michael tells him that they're on their way to meet BoyTess. Griffin asks who they are, and Michael merely offers, "The cavalry." Griffin sums up that they'll be "running," and they pull up to Max's car for the big reunion. Max changes the color of the van and tells them to be on their way, and they've barely kicked the ignition into gear when Liz starts the wrap-up: "Well, that was different. Saving someone else's bacon for a change." Ew. Don't say "bacon" anymore.
And finally this week, Bangs calls from the kitchen that "breakfast is almost ready," and we cut to Isabel in her room talking to Jesse on her cell phone. Jesse promises that he didn't tell her father anything, but that "they're onto her." Isabel says that Bangs is also giving "the third degree," and Jesse does nothing to make her feel better, grimly repeating, "It's just a matter of time" over and over again. Isabel, alone in her room, finally erupts in fury, working herself into such a state the wind starts whipping, the windows fly open, and everything in her room starts flying around her in a telekinetic haze. Bangs calls upstairs to make sure everything is okay, and all of the spinning objects fall back into their proper places. But before we cut from the room, we notice a surveillance camera sitting in the corner of the room, which Isabel didn't notice because it's only the size of a small pony. Later that night, Bangs sits on the couch in shock, holding the TV remote limply in her hand and watching horror. Monopoly Nazi enters and walks over to the couch. They watch in silence as Isabel sits in her room on the TV screen, watching the unidentified flying bedroom ephemera. We know, you guys. We can't believe they actually got one good CGI shot either.