#118 Tess Lies And Videotape – Primer

Suspicions about the new girl, Tess, are further raised when everyone notices Max is oddly drawn to her. Unable to fight his attraction, Max kisses Tess not knowing Liz is watching in the distance. Max attempts to explain the kiss to Liz as something he had no control over, which raises Liz’s own suspicions about Tess’s identity.

Isabel and Michael each explore Tess’s identity, but neither can prove she is anything but a normal high school student.

After Michael and Max discover a hidden video camera in Michael’s apartment, they think it might have come from Tess.

Liz decides to take the camera to hide in Tess’s home. There she meets Tess’s strange father, ED HARDING, who insists Liz stay for dinner. As Liz strategically places the camera, she breaks a precious statue. Michael, Isabel, Maria and Alex watch as the camera goes blank.

Fearing she may be in trouble, the kids go to rescue Liz from the Harding residence. After a successful rescue, the kids all watch as Tess reconstructs the statue using alien powers, revealing she is the fourth alien.

Meanwhile, when Valenti checks up on Topolsky at the mental hospital he realizes she’s been killed. Feeling the kids may be in real danger, Valenti decides he may be the only one to protect them. Wanting to gain their trust Valenti takes the communicator (orb) back to Max.

Jason Katims Commentary

“Our original plan was…reveal the fourth alien as the season finale…”

Transcribed by Lena

“Tess Lies And Videotape” was supposed to be where we were going to get to at the end of the season. The original plan was we were going to reveal the fourth alien and that was going to be the season finale and then because we were encouraged to accelerate the storylines it happened in this episode, so that we would get the opportunity to play out a little bit more of what that meant to our characters. So because of that we introduced Tess in “Crazy” and made this the you know the episode where we accelerated her effect on people in terms of Max starting to have fantasies about her and finally lead to the point, where at the end they discovered that she’s an alien and once we’ve done that we’ve really put ourselves in place
where it’s totally new territory. It started out to be show about three aliens and now there’s another one and then you got to be asking ‘who’s Mr. Harding and what’s his deal?’ so I’m really glad that we accelerated the storyline, because all that adds another level and now that we know that she’s an alien is all about ‘what you doing here and what are her motives and what she up to?’.