Oh, Liz, What Were You Thinkink?
Updated 1999-11-02 16:00:00
Fade in on Liz "Im Too Sexy For This Town" Parker walking home by herself at an advanced hour of the evening. Decked out in a designer leather jacket, boot-cut jeans, and what Im guessing are Prada shoes retailing for around $400, Liz glances suspiciously around at the dark and empty street as if to say, "If they can see me, they can dress like me. Why, oh why, must they all dress like me?" She alters her pace and thinks she hears footsteps behind her, but cleverly decides to drown them out with the defensive tactic of thinking really loudly. Apparently this endless, nebulous diatribe is yet another entry into the journal of Liz Parker. The voice-over communicates a new paranoia replacing the security shes felt in her little town that shes always taken for granted: "Maybe its not the world thats changed. Maybe its just you. And then, suddenly, you begin to wonder all over again." The folks over in the Roswell Writers Break Room need to keep pace with the "one highly undramatic and easily-resolved plot development per episode" ratio they have painstakingly maintained thus far, and Ill bet its got something to do with that journal. So Liz arrives home, safely off the mean streets, digs through a bottom drawer in her bureau teeming with unwearable scarves and accessories crumbled up in a ball because theyre, like, SO Fashion Week 97. But I think theres something shes looking for in that drawer, and I think it just aint there.
Cut to Liz showing up at Marias door and informing her that "my journal is missing." Maria shakes her head quizzically and so do I, hoping that she will repeat the last word of her previous sentence, which she very clearly pronounces with a hard "K" sound: "missink." She tells a now-panicky Maria that she "wrote things about Max." Everything, Maria asks? Yes, Maria, everythink. Maria: "Like where hes from, what he is, I mean, what he isnt?" Liz: "I mean everythink." Is this an affectation? A speech impediment that remains latent until moments of high drama such as this? Whatever it is, shed better consider dropping it and fast; with no journal to keep her quietly pensive, Liz is going to have quite a bit of out-loud talking to do in this episode. And if shes having some trouble gaining a grasp on the tricky "gerund" form of the English language, well, we can only imagine what other problems Liz will soon begin havink.
Fade in on Michael, sound asleep in his fake wood-paneled bedroom of The House That Drives. He awakens with a start ("I dreamt I was horribly poor! No, no, thats real. Oh.") and jumps out of bed, searching madly around. He grabs a notebook and then looks frantically around for a writing implement. He seizes upon a pencil, finding it, much like this entire sequence, to have no point. I watch transfixed as easily twenty minutes pass, Michael staring pensively at the unsharpened pencil. I know hes going to sharpen it with his hand. He knows hes going to sharpen it with his hand. Cloistered monks sequestered on snowy mountaintops for generations who still believe that our moods are determined by "bodily humors" and who are unacquainted with any advent in modern technology since the invention of, say, fire know hes going to sharpen it with his hand. So WHY do we pass an eon of time staring at Michael staring at the unsharpened pencil in his hand? Finally, Michael gives himself over to predictability and sharpens the damn pencil with his hand (thats so COOL! I didnt know he could do that) and begins sketching madly.