#102 The Morning After – Primer

Liz and Max continue their lives, with an obvious new bond between them. Liz attempts to maintain her relationship with Kyle, but what she and Max have created begins getting in the way.

Maria shares her fears with Liz about the aliens, who she refers to as “Czechoslovakians.” Liz tells Maria there’s nothing to worry about, but when Liz meets her new Geometry substitute, MS. TOPOLSKY, who seems to know little about Geometry, Liz herself becomes suspicious. Liz’s suspicions are further raised when Topolsky questions Max as to Michael’s whereabouts.

Liz also goes to Michael telling him about Topolsky, and Michael questions her about the photo Valenti had shown her. Michael decides to break into Valenti’s office to find the photo. Once there, Michael finds a key that instantly causes him to have a flash of an unclear vision.

Later, Max and Liz overhear Topolsky revealing a further interest in Michael, but all suspicions are resolved when Topolsky reveals she’s the new guidance counselor and was only concerned about Michael’s lack of attendance at school.

FBI Agent Stephens meets with Valenti to tell him his findings were found insufficient. Agent Stephens then proceeds to clear out Valenti’s office of all UFO related files. Although Valenti had managed to hold on to a key whose origin is a mystery to him, he is later surprised to find the key is missing.

Jason Katims Commentary

“A lot of what that episode was about was setting up…building blocks.”

Transcribed by Lena

Doing the second episode of the series after the pilot is one of the hardest things to do, because I’d spend close to a year on that pilot and when you get to the next episode you have a very short amount of time to get it going and you have much less time editing. It’s much more condensed in space and also a lot of what that episode was about was setting up things that we wanted to sort of set up as building blocks. So for example Michael breaks into the sheriff’s station because he’s so obsessed with needing to find out more about this photograph that was learned about in the pilot and he finds a key and when he touches the key gets a flash and if you think that it sets up everything that happens for the entire year, because the flash of the key leads to him being able to sort of visually understand what that was and that becomes the clue that leads them into you know the road trip on 285 South and another thing that we did in that was set up the character of Topolsky and we thought it would be really good to have somebody within the high school who was a character that we weren’t sure who she really was and so in doing it if we use Liz as a person who was doubting her and concerned about her and used this idea that everybody else thought well Liz has just learned about this whole thing with them being aliens, so she has all this paranoia about it and in the episode Topolsky has proven to just be a guidance counselor, when in fact later we realized that Liz was right all along you know my favorite stuff in the episode are a lot of the moments in
between and particularly the scenes when Liz and Max are in this little room
together spying on Topolsky because I and I feel like a lot of times the best moments of television are the moments in between and the moment when they’re sitting there waiting to seek Topolsky and it’s a time when Max and Liz have a chance to talk and I thought that those scenes were really sort of you know fun to watch.