“ Max looks down at the table and asks back, 'Couldn't you come a little farthernorth?' Ooooh. It's like they're talking about sex, but what they're really talking about is sex. God, I love subtext. ”
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 YearsAnd 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 farthernorth?" 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."
“ Earthlings die in plane crashes. Interstellar ships emit mood crashes. But the CGI still sucks on any planet. ”
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 helmetwhich 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 "swimmingin 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.
“ 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. ”
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.