#120 Max To The Max – Primer

With Tess’s help, Max, Isabel and Michael discover the pod chamber where they were born. They realize their destiny has been predetermined when they view the book from Tess, which contains pairings of Michael with Isabel, and Max with Tess. They also realize they were engineered, and not born as they thought. Tess then reveals Nasedo is there to protect them from the alien hunter, Pierce, they now know is out there.

Wanting to flush out Pierce, Nasedo takes the form of Max and kidnaps Liz. Once on the road, Nasedo-Max leaves clues as to where he can be found. Liz soon realizes the man she’s with is not the real Max.

Max goes after Nasedo-Max not trusting he won’t hurt Liz in his quest to draw out Agent Pierce. Max follows their clues to a carnival outside of Roswell.

Frightened for Liz’s life, Maria and Alex tell Valenti that Max has kidnapped Liz. Valenti goes after Max, and follows him into a house of mirrors at the carnival. Valenti is then confused when he sees not only FBI agents running around but also two of Max. When Deputy Fisher shows up, he throws off the FBI agents by shooting the glass. Valenti watches as the FBI agents capture Max, but is unsure of which Max they actually have.

Later, while watching through a glass mirror, we reveal the alien hunter Agent Pierce is actually Deputy Fisher. Pierce tells his agents they will wait until morning to begin their interrogation of the subject, who we reveal is the real Max.

Jason Katims Commentary

“…There’s a huge carnival in this show! Are you crazy?”

Transcribed by Lena

In “Max to the Max” we got excited about this idea of having there be to Maxes and we realize in the show like Roswell you could do all these things, that you can’t do in other shows. You have a shape-shifter. Shapeshifter can turn into one of your characters and one normal Max and then the darker more nefarious side of him and that was sort of the conceit and so when we were breaking the story we started to think what would be a good visual metaphor where you have two of the same character and then we came up with this idea of that all leading to the house of mirrors and in this house of mirrors we wind up having both versions of Max and hopefully to get to the point where even the audience doesn’t know which Max is which and when we come up with our idea we’ve called Carol Trussell who’s our producer who has to make all these things happen and I said ‘Carol, look. We have this great idea for the story but we wanted to all end up in a house of mirrors and what do you think? You think can we do that, can we put that together because it’ll be really great?’ and she was like ‘yeah we could do that, we could do that house of mirrors, you know we’ll just do it on stage we’ll build it and we’ll find a way to do it’ and I was like ‘great’, so we wrote the script and then the script came in and Carol read it and it was like ‘What is this? There’s a huge carnival on the show – oh you’re crazy you wrote a carnival?’ I was like, well you know the house of mirrors, it has to be somewhere and so basically that’s how the show got to be what it was and we were able to do the carnival. We actually shot the carnival in the parking lot and the house of mirrors on stage. You know sometimes when we go into it, we’re not sure if we’re ever going to be able to do it, but we only seem to manage it.