feel like with the amount of writing i want to do about this show i should just crib the vulture review format and write up fully graded, serious recaps. anyway im on 2x04 now and it is like...the whiplash throughout what is in many ways a filler episode like yes they are advancing the plot but mostly isobel is trying to make the diner instagrammable to the absolute bafflement of liz’s dad, liz and kyle are stealing equipment from his job and fake making out in a closet and bumping into a new alien nobody knows about that he just thinks is some weird chick at work, and michael and alex are attempting Platonic Bros Hardy Boys Time and climbing fences (michael: effortlessly, like a guy in an orville peck song) (alex: understandably badly. christ dude do you want a hand) and running into a guy with a suspiciously unassuming unrelatedness to the plot who seems specifically designed to appeal to alex’s long-buried scene boy sensibilities. and then in the middle of filler episode nonsense there’s a scene where like. michael sees one of those height markers that people do with their kids and assumes it’s some kind of esoteric code because he has never seen that before in his life. not because it’s an alien custom (his mom who had been on earth for a single year knew what that was) but because he has no memories before the age of seven and after that time just never had anyone in his childhood do anything as simple as make a note of his growth . even the guy whose dad spent his entire parenting career trying to groom his offspring into carbon copies of himself for the glory of the american military industrial complex marked their heights . and you’re like oh that is very heartbreaking. oh and that dad is possibly trying to get his hands on a bioweapon that is specifically capable of wiping out entire demographics and it's not hard to guess what he'd point it toward first. and there are flashbacks tinted in the warm, saturated tones of a feel-good family movie from the nineties, complete with a caring single father figure and a spunky kid, but you already know how it ends and it ends in such pain. oh and isobel, in an attempt to help rosa’s re-integration into the world (and more importantly, her family), stumbles upon one of rosa and arturo’s worst fights while looking around in his brain, and is like oh, this is a job for an Influencer, and all he wants is to be forgiven for what he considers his greatest failure as a parent, and maybe a miracle can be constructed to give him that, and maybe it’s not that, cannot be that, simple. and seventy years ago, nora’s idyllic year recovering from the crash that left her stranded on an unknown planet, hiding out with her friend and her friend’s human lover, unable to even know if it would ever be an environment safe enough to consider bringing her child into, is cut short and she is separated even from those few loved ones and imprisoned for the rest of her life and won’t see her son again until the day she dies