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july-19th-club · 2 years

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Recap for Roswell: New Mexico S2E12: “Crash Into Me”: con drama

Buckle up: we are officially in the home fucking stretch. The compounding lies in the Max/Liz relationship (each constructed out of a misguided attempt to ‘protect’ the other, each digging deeper and wider holes that will eventually connect, like the holes in the movie Holes, into a small canyon of deceit)are getting bigger. Liz groks the excessive antidote use; Max is bursting lightbulbs in the desert (is this his ‘light cardio’? it’s like he’s asking to have another heart attack). Meanwhile they only halfway resolve their fight about her continued interest in using alien DNA to solve every health issue in the world. They’re able to avoid these couples’ trust issues because they have much bigger problems, but stressful times are no cure for unresolved arguments. We’re building toward an impasse here, folks.

Meanwhile, we get some rapid-fire exposition via Isobel, who mind-reads her niece Mimi and learns that, whatever else is going on with Helena, she has known Rosa’s been alive all season. It’s revenge that drives her. But time-untethered Mimi feels absolutely certain that Helena wouldn’t do anything to hurt the missing members of our party (or, she says later, “our girls” - so sans Charlie, maybe she’s not talking about them). When Helena says she’s going to war, does she mean at Jesse’s side or...secretly against him? We’ve all seen how well it goes when one of our heroes tries to break stuff from the inside, but maybe she’s devious enough to succeed where the much less seasoned Alex failed? It’s interesting to have her here, and she’s becoming a much more faceted character than originally supposed, but I also can’t help but feel that her connections to the overall plot are rather rushed for the sake of a late-season reveal. It’ll even out if we get more of her later, but for now I feel like I’m scrambling to catch up.

It’s clear from the outset that Michael’s incentive to work on the biobomb - seeing Alex - is never going to come to fruition, at least if their captors get what they want. What they want is for Michael and Charlie to complete a weapon for finely-tuned ethnic cleansing, a weapon whose initial component Charlie invented for what she naively thought would be “good, in the right hands.” But it’s like she said earlier in the season; she has learned too late that any invention, no matter how benevolently thought up, can be put to a destructive use. And even her initial reasons weren’t entirely benevolent - she told Liz she was thinking about its medical applications, but she tells Michael now she was also thinking about its wartime uses. And it’s the military: they’re gonna go for the ethnic cleansing. It doesn’t take two geniuses trapped in a room with unassembled bomb parts to figure the ideal test target is likely to be the aliens, nor to realize it wouldn’t stop there. Now they are become death - if they do what they’re told.

Max and Cam are back together, buddy copping their way through the last of the Valenti connections - it was Jim who helped get Rosa to the pod, who probably hoped, before his death, that Noah would help him revive her. Helena has kept a ton of his stuff, and from the looks of it was mourning him for years. He also comes clean to Cam about his antidote usage after she hounds him a bit about his sweaty, clammy looks. He keeps hoping it will give him a clue to his pre-crash identity, pushing at the boundaries of his health in the chance that he’ll remember something important. Maybe he’ll listen to a warning from Cam that he won’t listen to from Liz...but I wouldn’t count on it.

Meanwhile, back at the kidnapping, Michael points out the obvious: his work on the bomb is complete, and he’s still alive. This points to bigger goals than ‘just kill a couple of aliens,’ and because he is Michael and never met an authority figure he couldn’t mouth off to, he tries to...well, negotiate would be a strong word. But he pleads with Helena to reconsider - her daughters will never forgive her - though she says that ship has sailed. And for that matter, she’s probably right. But she does concede that her goals don’t align completely with the Manes’, and offers a third version of the disaster adage those guys are always spouting off. Is she a mole?

If I were kidnapping someone, and he happened to carry around with him at all times a blunt object that he could use either to hit me and possibly overpower me or to merely run away from me, I too would steal it from him and hide it where he couldn’t get it. As a sibling, however, if my brother had a tool he required in order to walk, I probably wouldn’t steal it from him and hide it where he couldn’t get it, unless I was being a real dick. It is in this situation that we at last find Alex, who probably never assumed that he’d have to worry about leg thieves on top of everything else he’s been through. And, characteristically, leg theft is far from his biggest worry in today’s lineup of events. There’s also murderous sibling, murderous parent, love of his life in danger of both regular death and death by hypertargeted ethnic cleansing...the list goes on. What a fuckin’ year, huh?

Their reunion is brief but tender, and no sooner has Michael fallen not entirely platonically into his arms than he’s added another problem to the list: Helena’s version of fighting from the inside is to swap components in the building process. Her target is Maneses; Jesse specifically, as Jim’s murderer, but she’ll be happy to take Flint down with him. Presumably, those of his sons outside the blast zone will be spared. Michael, for Alex’s sake, still intends to try and do something about the attack - but also for Alex’s sake, refuses to rescue him just yet. Ah, a classic lover’s quarrel.

In the lull before the big CrashCon showdown, we have time for another, rather worse, one. Max says Jesse Manes is a murderer (and was planning on adding to his body count) and deserves what’s coming to him, even if Helena’s methods are extreme (true). Liz says any crime committed by a member of a marginalized group gets fixated on, and creates backlash against, that group, and she has a right to be terrified and upset about the idea of her mother getting caught (true). Liz says that anyone who is a member of the acceptable class or can pass within it cannot possibly ‘get’ the experience of someone who can’t or doesn’t (true). Max says Liz’s attempts to gain recognition through her scientific work smack of glory-chasing and that she can’t exceptional-minority-myth her way to world-saving happiness (...true). They’re getting further away from the task by the minute, and closer to the crux of the problem between them. Liz’s perfectionism and sense of achievement have always been about both fear and obsession, but she’s not the only one with a chip on her shoulder about saviorism. I mean, it’s Max. The impasse is creeping - no, hurtling - into sight.

And then we’re in the home stretch’s home stretch. In the course of their argument, Liz talks her way into one of the biggest flaws in her mother’s revenge plan - it can’t be turned into a quiet affair. Jesse’s a noted glory hound himself, and he would receive no recognition from the deaths of a few small-town citizens of seemingly arbitrary causes, especially since this first group of targets can pass for majority. He would want his work, and his reasons, noted and agreed with. He would want funding and approval, would want to ensure that he could keep using his weapon, for whatever purposes he deemed fit. He would need the genuine article if he wanted to convince his public that the threat he’s ‘defeating’ is real. And he has one: the rebuilt remains of Nora’s last project, now in the hands of that annoying museum curator and on full display in the middle of the fairground. Max reckons he knows what it is (remote for a ship; Michael gives him the most incredulous ‘what’ which seems more to do with the fact that he’s being shown up on alien mechanics by Max of all people) - but what it is seems far less important at this juncture than what it does, which is, historically, to explode very easily. It’s being stored in the most fire-hazardous way possible, the better to discreetly set it off. The blast will create the right environment for Jesse to launch his DNA bomb, and the paper trail he’s laid out will lead straight to his victims. One has to assume that Helena did not know the full extent of this plan; for all her impulsiveness, lack of foresight, and personal weaknesses she is not the kind of person who would allow a collateral damage as large as we’re looking at just to ensure the death of one man.

Speaking of, let’s talk about villain motives. Last year’s villain was one man, who used his relative anonymity to manipulate, abuse, and kill individuals who were equally as overlooked as he was. His death and the aftermath of what he’d done could only be talked about freely among a small group of people, most of them his surviving victims. In a small-town story, even the most brutal struggles exist on the micro scale; conflicts are between individuals, and perhaps that’s why it took me nearly as long as the characters to fully grasp the impact of this new antagonist’s motives. Even though Jesse Manes started out talking about large-scale things, he had gradually fallen into the general background layer of feuding and rivalry, and just like his son, I underestimated him. The conflict is bigger than his attempts to live up to what he perceives as his family’s legacy. It is bigger than a grieving woman trying to end him in a way she feels is fitting to his crimes. It is bigger than his hatred for a specific group of three people living quiet lives in Roswell.

If he fails tonight, he will likely hardly suffer. Sure, he’s literally planning a terror attack, but he is a white, resspected veteran, and society will find a way to excuse his actions even as our heroes, lest they risk exposure, struggle to provide proof of what he’s capable of. Succeeding, he will harm, probably kill, dozens of people (and that’s a conservative estimate), adding to the already boiling atmosphere of xenophobia and intolerance that informs not only his worldview but that of half of his children, many of his neighbors, and absolutely his authorities. The stakes are not tidy or personal now.

I’ll admit, I was surprised to see ‘conspiracy thriller’ win out over ‘revenge killing’ - though not displeased. This show sometimes stumbles into or out of its forays into social and political commentary, but in the final stretch of the episode it fires on all cylinders. Our little Scooby Gang isn’t the cast of Person of Interest; they’ve never had to thwart domestic terrorism before. They’re a bunch of mostly-unemployed twenty-nine-year-olds, and the only one with anything approaching experience is chained up miles away so he doesn’t die in Helena’s counterattack. But not for long. Our local cinderella man (trapped by a cruel family, wants to go to the festival, looking for a lost foot shoe) is fully fed up waiting. When Flint next comes in to taunt him, he figuratively jumps at the opportunity. First he appeals to compassion - not that Flint has that anymore. Then he tries heritage - it sounds like once upon a time his big brother used to have softness and creative impulses of his own. “When was the last time,” he asks, “that you made something that wasn’t supposed to be destructive?”

But Flint doesn’t have any respect for weaving, or stories, or the quiet pleasure taken in giving life to something that’s just nice to look at or comforting to wrap around your shoulders. He doesn’t hum new bars of music to himself to while away the captivity. He doesn’t take out his pent-up trauma on something useful, like firewood. He’s got one hobby, and that’s being the best Manes man he can be. Dad didn’t mess him up! It’s just Alex that’s that way! Alex is the pathetic one. He and Clay turned out fine! (Up to this point, I had forgotten Clay existed. This may actually be the first time Brother #4’s name has even been mentioned. Wherever he is, he sounds like a chip off the old block). Even Gregory’s going to CrashCon! By now he is right up in Alex’s face, which means he’s within kicking distance. Cinderella brains Drizella and grabs the keys. Risk of dying in a targeted DNA bomb be damned, he’s getting his foot and he’s getting the fuck out of here.

He arrives after dark, as the rest of the gang try futilely to minimize the damage they know is coming. Liz tears off to the lab, where she concocts something that seems to be working correctly when it explodes a beaker - but she’s followed in secret by Diego, who I guess is already tired of being a tertiary character. Rosa and Maria (and Cam, elsewhere) are trying to figure out how in the hell to evacuate a whole fairground, bumping into Greg Manes (he’s not just your cool brother, he’s a mild-mannered grade school teacher! Good lord!) and awkwardly telling him to get his field trip back on the bus and out of the line of fire. And Michael’s bang on the money when he takes one look at Nora's project and decides Max and his tachycardia aren’t allowed near it because he might accidentally set it on fire.

Then Flint shows up. He’s overpowered Charlie and arrived with Jesse’s bomb canister (the one Charlie was supposed to dismantle). And then Alex confronts his dad. And then Max decides the most useful thing he can possibly do is singlehandedly try to stop Flint from completing the attack and it’s one exertion too many on top of his constant insistence that he’s totally fine, god, guys, quit making such a big deal about the fact that I almost died of heart failure this year!

The fireworks have ignited the Highly Flammable Location. Charlie is trapped in the burning house. Jesse is this close to setting off one bomb canister (the one that’ll kill him and also three-quarters of his family). Maria’s finds the other bomb canister and chucks it way out into a field, but not before she starts bleeding in a super-distressing way. Gregory finds his family at the exact wrong time and so does Michael and a shooting seems very extremely imminent. Max tries to hand-kill Flint??? And maybe succeeds? And then has another heart attack — Rosa and Liz stand frantically over him —

It’s a cliffhanger, folks! We’ll see you next week.

A fun nod to the fact that these characters would swear so much more if they weren’t on network TV from Rosa, who has resorted to saying ‘give a duck’: “Oh, I just found out about autocorrect, it’s hilarious.”

Arturo’s Arturo’s Churros hat. That man loves him some novelty headgear.

Alex, in any situation where he could use Michael’s first name: lastnames him

Liz still with the Mikey: exact opposite situation. Trusted friends and research partners can nickname you but the love of your life will call you what he’s called you since twelfth grade because anything else would either indicate a moment too intimate for words or be too weird

Max, still miffed about not being as much of a Fitness Guy as Kyle and Diego: “I don’t think they drink beers; it’s not keto.” Don’t worry, king, I like your lack of ab definition, and that’s not sarcasm I mean it sincerely. I think you need more of a muffin top.

“I was held hostage, Max! I deserve to ride the Scrambler until I barf cotton candy...and maybe watch a bad man die :)”

In the Manes family, if you are named after a rock or a geographical feature, you’re a really fucked up dude. If you have a basic-guy name you’re chill though

“She...doesn’t wanna kill aliens?” “Nope. Avenging her murdered lover.” “Oh my god, I love a good telenovela.” This show is a great at being a novela, and I can’t believe I forgot that

One last ominous nugget to stay up with at night: Jesse tells Alex he should understand collateral damage ‘better than anyone.’ Is he talking about the obvious: he’s missing a limb; he is collateral damage? Or is he talking about some shit Alex did over there that we still don’t know about?

#this one took fucking forEVEr because the last time i was watching tv was sunday and then i didnt sleep #so i had to take a break for my fucking health #absolutely disgraceful situation that i am in #roswell nm #q #recaps #reviews #roswell: new mexico

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