#really i think 'review' implies less summary of events and more 'analysis' and ive been doing a lot of the former sometimes

[july-19th-club]

Recap for Roswell: New Mexico S2E09: “The Diner”: flashback city 

4/5 ⭐s

“The Diner” is one of those episodes where Roswell decides it’s going to play around with form and be non-linear, so much of the episode is told in flashbacks within flashbacks: the ‘present’ is Liz at the diner with Kyle and his justifiably angry date; the most recent flashback is Michael and Izzy’s conversation with Walt; all the other flashbacks are either Walt’s stories about the Bronson-Nora-Louise family or Jesse’s stories about why he fucking hates aliens so goddamn much (except, like, not anymore, because he doesn’t feel like it, or so he’ll tell anyone who talks to him about aliens because he thinks people believe him when he’s lying). 

    We open on Liz, who’s closing the diner for her dad while he’s driving Rosa to treatment. Who should show up on this long sleepless night but Kyle and Steph, who are venturing beyond the confines of the operating theater to beg an old friend to cook them some burgers. Kyle and Liz wind up having a whispered argument in the kitchen about two things they both feel vaguely guilty about: Liz can’t let go of the idea of looking more into alien DNA applications, despite the siblings’ many very good reasons it’s just not worth it. And Kyle refuses to tell his girlfriend that he knows about her very serious condition, until - still frustrated from the kitchen bitchin’ - he blurts it out over dinner. She’s mad he snooped in her records, and was looking for a relationship where her health didn’t come into it, so she walks out. Isobel walks in.

    FLASHBACK: meanwhile, earlier in the night, Iz and Michael take his boss, the loveably crotchety Walt Sanders, out for drinks as an incentive for him to open up about his traumatic childhood. We know he was there for Michael when he needed a couch and a meal in high school, and we now learn that he is paying forward the parenthood Roy Bronson once extended to him. 

    FLASHBACK: we see the day they met. We flash forward a couple months to the day Nora and Louise arrived at their door. We learn they picked their names out of a book, but we don’t learn the names they left behind when they crash-landed. Flash forward again to the week of the county fair, the same week they were discovered. Roy feels it’s been long enough that they’re safe to do a public activity together, and that Nora, being white, has a better shot of winning big with her pumpkin launcher. She says some stuff about how someday the world will move past prejudice, and Roy’s like, “Nice, but we live here.” He also suspects she’s got more going on than a homemade gourd trebuchet, and he’s absolutely right. Like Michael after her, she’s thinking about spaceship construction. As far as she’s concerned, she can’t afford Louise’s optimism about earth, and she has to keep Louise safe to ensure the subsequent safety of some child. One gets the ominous sense that she’s not even talking about her own son here (Michael, of course, assumes she means Max, and is plunged into another episode of abandonment over it). 

Flash forward again: after the fair. Day before the raid. Throughout the story, Michael is skeptical that any of what Walt tells him is even real - after all, he’s a drunk old guy, Michael has trust issues, and he thinks it’s entirely possible he’s just coming up with what he thinks they want to hear. But this drunk old guy has been sitting on a bag of undisclosable trauma his whole life, and maybe he’s just glad to have a chance to finally tell it as fully as he’s able. Michael doesn’t want another recap of the massacre, but we go through it anyway, once more with little clarity. Walt, after all, was hidden in a crate against a wall by Nora just before the troops came in, and only knows flashes of what happened next. He’s covering his face for most of the shooting, and still some shrapnel from the crate, losing his eye. But he makes it out of the box, and the barn - Nora, always paranoid and thinking ahead, had opened up the wall in case one of them would ever have to hide in there. 

Walt stumbles away, seeing Louise’s body and those of several neighbors before he makes it to the field. Seventy years later he still feels survivor’s guilt. As the only person left who knows the location of the pods, he keeps an eye on them, until one day the siblings have woken up and gone. When Michael is a teenager, he even attempts to put himself down as a foster parent, though his applications get routinely denied; when he admits this, Michael breaks down in tears at the knowledge that the care he was always so starved of was not for lack of someone trying after all.

    FLASHBACK: this one from Jesse Manes, from whom Alex demands some transparency re: great-uncle Tripp, who he says was rarely mentioned at home. There’s not much to mention, at least as Jesse tells it - he was murdered some time after the raid by a vengeful surviving alien, and it’s one of the reasons behind one of Jesse’s many brands of bigotry. What little we see of him from Jesse’s perspective is of a fairly nice guy; he’s investing in Arturo’s bid to buy the Crashdown, though he also dispenses advice from the classic Manes catalog: everything you do is a kind of war, and you have to win it. Niceness doesn’t do much to dispel a legacy of violence. What’s interesting is the fact that this scene posits Jesse was once a...well, a less racist guy, before a gradual radicalization. For me, this bit of past humanization is too little, too late...and it’s also coming from Jesse himself, which means there’s every chance he’s bending and smoothing over parts of his personality (both then and now) because his audience is Alex, who’s still looking for any scrap of decency in the man. Also I was right about him being more recovered than he acts like.

    FLASHBACK: When Michael and Alex meet to compare notes, Alex agrees that our heroes’ reading of the story they’ve pieced together from mostly secondary sources could be wrong. He’s reminded of his father’s assumption that Michael was seducing him versus the reality of their organic bond, so he takes the concept a step further: under the supposition that Nora and Tripp were, if not lovers, at the very least allies, we get another take on the night of the raid. In this version, Tripp tries to warn the family but is thwarted by his brother, Roy still dies (shot by Harlan), but based on later evidence, Louise made it out, and Tripp let her go. He also seems to be the man to suggest Caulfield-like proceedings in the first place, so we’re still not looking at a bona fide hero, but possibly a more nuanced involvement with at least one alien. 

    Meanwhile, all in the present timeline, Max is picked up by his old boss Sheriff Valenti when he wakes up from last episode’s attack, disoriented and with Charlie Cameron nowhere to be found. Michelle has had it up to fucking here with his disseminating and his showing up in weird places, and she promptly arrests her ex-deputy and (rather compassionately) Poirots him. Unfortunately for her presentation, which is really very thorough, her correctness about the events of Noah’s death are still super wrong as concerns motive and aftermath, and the more she extrapolates, the more she sees Max everywhere, even places he can’t reasonably have been - like the scenes of all three kidnappings. If I was Max, I’d head off Michelle’s investigating with a good old half-truth: no, he’s never been to Mexico, he actually spent his missing months having a serious heart condition and getting treated for it, which would also nicely absolve him of the kinds of strenuous kidnapping and murdering activity he’s being accused of. But he’s Max, so he does not think to do this. Kyle bails him out with it instead. As a parting act of confidence, Max tells her a little bit about the Noah situation, though how much she’ll believe remains to be seen.

    The other Michelle lede is that she wants to talk about the siblings’ childhood, since she knows they were abandoned and therefore have traumatic pasts. Max denies any trauma responses in his recollection (thinking of growing up with his very caring upper-middle-class parents), but Michelle says when she used to visit the kids before they were adopted/fostered out, he was often incredibly upset. She also says he was the wall-drawer, not Michael, who was merely holding the wrong crayon at the wrong time when the Evanses showed up. Apart from reminding us that the Evanses, for all their care, are deeply oblivious people, we have another nod to the idea that Max’s pre-pod time was more ‘small room underneath Omelas’ than ‘happy family he just can’t remember’. 

CHIPS OFF THE OLD BLOCK

Young Arturo in his little bow tie and his eighties decor! I don't have anything else to really say, I just love him is all. 

With all of the ways in which Nora seems so similar to Michael, I’m just waiting for narrative confirmation that bursts his bubble completely about her. Even when he’s told things about her that reveal a more pragmatic, and perhaps even opportunist, side to her, he remains painfully hopeful that, if they’d ever known each other longer than three minutes, he’d have loved her and she’d have loved him and they’d have gotten along famously. But nobody’s parents are that uncomplicated. He’s gonna speedrun childhood disillusionment for the second time. 

At what point are we going to address the elephant in the Steph: the fact that I’m still pretty sure she’s, if not an alien, at the very least an alien descendant. Her having a serious and (it sounds like) terminal blood disorder’s gonna really put a pin in Liz’s ‘universal vaccine with alien antibodies’ theory.

Michael standing angstily by the bar doorway, posing with his hat and his foot up on the wall, just so that when Alex shows up he’ll see him looking Like That: also big part of the bi agenda. See the boys as they walk on by in-fucking-deed. 

(With shrinkingly vulnerable eyes): “You came.” (With the fondest smile a man could ever muster): “You asked me to.” Jesus fucking christ. Ohh we can date other people we can be normal about each other we’re being sooooo fucking normal regular guys behave this way around their old flames all the time. This is normal. Shut the fuck up.

Alex knowing which booth has secret shit stored behind it based on the knowledge that the men in his family are so allergic to aesthetic appreciation or sense of beauty that it couldn’t possibly be just the light hitting it nice. 

Line of the episode also goes to Lily Cowles’ delightfully blase Izzy kink convo: “It’s all about the headboard, okay, because decent restraints are gonna turn your cheap furniture into Swedish sawdust if your partner’s doing their job right.” Never change, babygirl. Would love to be tied up and showered in sawdust by you. 

#recaps #reviews #really i think 'review' implies less summary of events and more 'analysis' and ive been doing a lot of the former sometimes #so maybe i need to change what these are called #roswell nm #roswell: new mexico #q