We then flash back, presumably to five days previously. Liz is working part-time as a waitress in her father's diner, the Crashdown Café, which caters to tourists nosing around for alien artifacts or just a hint of the peculiar.
Two such tourists, lost souls known only as Larry and Jennifer, are eager to do a bit of amateur investigating of their own, and they proceed to interrogate Liz about any strange local events she might have heard about. However, Liz demonstrates her moxie by playing a trick on the hapless tourists, passing off an old snapshot of a melted doll as an alien autopsy photo.
Maria De Luca, Liz's coworker and best friend, grows bored with these shenanigans and comes to Liz's rescue, dragging her away from the tourists. The pair chatter happily for a few fleeting moments, effectively filling the viewer in on the important facts of Liz's love life.
First, while Liz is currently dating Kyle Valenti, the sheriff's son, she finds him boring and safe. Second, the pensive Max Evans, who just happens to be eating in the diner at the time, has a certain something extra that makes him sufficiently exciting and giggle-worthy. Maria's romantic affiliation remains mysterious, however.
At just that moment, two obnoxious truckers who we earlier glimpsed giving Maria a hard time get into a no-holds-barred spat, apparently over money. A gun is drawn, the crowd sensibly ducks for cover, and Liz gets shot in the gut during the scuffle.
The truckers panic and leave, leaving Max to jump over the table and miraculously heal Liz, basically by pressing on her stomach and looking soulful.
Although it at first appears that he can only do this by thinking about video footage of children and school buses, we later learn that he is actually telepathically receiving a chaotic flood of memories from Liz at this time.
Thinking quickly, Max's pal Michael Guerin starts up the pair's jeep while Max lulls the already confused crowd by breaking a ketchup bottle and spraying the now-healthy Liz with the red condiment, as though she's been born again into a postmodern world of alien autopsies and other 21st-Century epiphanies. Which, arguably, she has.
She's only fallen on ketchup and broken a bottle, he says. Nothing to see here. Then the pair speed off, leaving Liz dazed and perplexed.
After the commercial break, Sheriff Valenti and his long-suffering nameless deputy are interrogating the witnesses. Maria's New Age habits keep her from being very helpful to the authorities, and she is quickly forced on the defensive when the sheriff takes wry note of her habit of snorting cedar oil when nervous.
As it turns out, Larry and Jennifer from the Crashdown Cafe, true investigators of the paranormal that they are, have done some detective work of their own and discover that the bullet is missing (presumably it evaporated when Max was doing his thing with Liz). This gets the sheriff's attention.
Liz remains dazed, but later discovers a silvery handprint on her stomach.
Sensibly suspecting that something freaky is going on with Max, she takes advantage of his nervous habit (nervous habits make up most of the plot momentum of this episode, if not the series) of chewing on his pencil in biology class to put his cells on a microscope slide. They're weird, being apparently big glowing energy reservoirs of some sort.
She confronts him with this between classes, dragging him into the band's abandoned practice room where the two surprise Kyle, her nominal boyfriend, looking very sinister in dark glasses and idly beating the timpani. Is he on drugs? We don't know, but he certainly seems spaced out as Liz pushes him out of the room so she and Max can be alone.
The pair then have a nice chat wherein it is revealed that he is not from Roswell, but is in fact from the great beyond. Liz takes this reasonably well, all things considered, but she says she needs time to think about it.
At school the next day, we meet Alex, Liz and Maria's long-suffering friend. He's calmly reading a newspaper about the shooting while Maria rants about how Liz has been ignoring her in home room and otherwise acting weird.
Cut to a taco joint on the outskirts of town, where Michael, Max and Max's sister Isabel are either grabbing lunch or ditching school. They are also aliens, as it turns out, and they berate him for giving away their secret.
He protests, noting that they all use their alien powers (the exact nature of which has yet to be revealed), but Isabel reminds him that she, at least, psychically alters her surroundings only "recreationally."
Michael, a relatively inarticulate Brando type, is so freaked out that he wants to bug out of town immediately. Despite this, they decide to act normal even though the possibility of being kidnapped and dissected by scientists is still apparently a looming threat.
Out of sorts and edgy, the three aliens get back in the car and drive back to town. Max, surly, chastises Isabel for playing a CD without a player. The sheriff pulls them over for speeding, but it remains unclear just what -- if anything -- Valenti knows.
When Valenti is gone, Michael, already irritable to begin with, decides to walk home. He reminds the others that their parents and "the others from the ship" didn't just wander off; presumably, they were killed.
Back at school, Maria confronts Liz in the girls' bathroom. All the weirdness is freaking Maria out, and now she's found Liz's order pad from the cafe with blood -- not ketchup -- all over it. She makes a scene, but Liz can't tell her what's going on.
That evening, Kyle walks Liz home, apparently after a date. She blows him off, but when she reaches up to get the spare key, her sweater rides up to expose the silver handprint. He's not impressed.
Later that night, she's hanging out on the roof deck and Max shows up and says he wants to talk. As it turns out, the images of kids that flashed into his head while he was healing her was part of a "psychic connection" between them. To explain, and maybe simply to recapture the moment, he touches Liz again and she sees how lonely his childhood was ever since the Evans family found him and Isabel wandering naked in the desert as 8-year-olds.
The next day, Liz is looking for her bookbag, where she hid the bloody waitress uniform from the other day. It's not in her locker, so she looks for it in the band room, which is eerily abandoned yet again.
Except for her friend Alex, who has either been lurking or searching the school for her. Alex confronts her with Maria's concerns, but she blows him off. He backs down, more than happy to be told the weirdness is over.
At this point, the deputy interrupts the conversation and brings Liz into the sheriff's office. Valenti softens Liz up by showing her autopsy photographs -- pictures of a body from 1959 with a silvery handprint on its neck. He says Kyle told him about the handprint on Liz's stomach, and he wants to know what's going on.
When she proves unhelpful, he demands to see her stomach, but the print has miraculously disappeared. That's okay, he says. "The other one faded too." Clearly, he suspects something.
Looking wrecked, Liz drags Max out of gym class to talk. Meanwhile, the sheriff gives her waitress uniform to an FBI agent, who mostly ignores Valenti's paranoid talk of aliens and murder. The agent reminds Valenti that they used to make fun of his father at the Bureau, calling him "Sergeant Martian," and it would be a shame if two generations of law enforcement officers both ended up crazy.
Liz, distraught, asks Max some questions she's prepared. He doesn't know where the aliens came from or where the ship crashed. All he knows is that it wasn't a weather balloon that landed in the Roswell desert in 1947.
As it turns out, he has the power to connect with people and "manipulate molecular structures," as he demonstrates by messing up a bad clay sculpture and then fixing it. He explains that he lived in some kind of "incubation pod" before coming out 8 years ago -- beyond that, he remembers nothing.
Not a particularly good liar even under the best of circumstances, he also lets slip that Michael and Isabel are also aliens. In addition, he confesses that he's got a huge crush on her, but when he finds out that the sheriff's involved, he freaks out and runs home.
Isabel is putting on a Princess Ardala outfit from the Buck Rogers TV show. She's going to the Crash Festival, a big Roswell party held annually in celebration of the alleged alien accident. Although she's not happy to hear they have to leave town, she goes anyway. They pick up Michael later.
Liz is thinking in her room when Maria appears in full Crash Festival green-velvet regalia, apparently having snuck in. Once again, she confronts her friend about all the deception and confusion, but this time Liz, perhaps tired of the whole thing, lets Maria in on the aliens' true nature. Maria flips out and then the two drive around town looking for Max and the others.
Eventually, Maria and Liz catch up to the aliens (who look extremely moody, as can be expected under the circumstances) and force them to talk to her. Liz apparently has a plan to get the sheriff off their backs, however.
She shows up at Kyle's house, where he's busy sulking. Throwing him a kittenish look, she apologizes and promises to meet him at the festival, then slinks away.
The festival itself is extremely loud and decadent, with everyone in costumes. It's so decadent that Jonathan Frakes is there as the master of ceremonies.
Together with his faithful deputy, the sheriff finds Max, puts him in handcuffs and pushes him out of the way -- but at that moment, the sounds of a scuffle catch the cops' attention. Maria is being menaced by some menacing bug-headed creature (actually Michael in a costume) who is wiping silver handprints on her.
Valenti scares the bug-headed person off, but when he searches the crowd he finds his own son wearing an identical costume. Could Kyle be the Hand Killer? What's going on here? Then he notices silver paint on his fingers from helping Maria climb to her feet -- it's all a hoax.
Unfortunately, he has no evidence of anything and, knowing when to quit, he lets Max go with an ominous warning.
Frakes, meanwhile, leads the crowd in celebration as a model flying saucer glides down a wire and explodes, releasing several burning rubber "aliens." Max, Isabel and Michael look on, horrified, then Max and Liz fumble for words for a few minutes.
