Still in the Alienmobile, still under cover of still darkness. Impulsively, Max pulls over to the side of the road and tells Liz, "There's something I need to tell you. It's about Tess and me." Liz impatiently tells him that she knows that they're together, but it turns out he's got another bomb to drop: "We spent the night together." Max? Just bottom out and call it "making whoopee" already so I can stop making fun of the ten million old-man expressions these people have put in your mouth. Nevertheless, it's better to have the Stones in your head than England Dan, and I don't think there's anyone out there who's going to disagree with me, up to and including England Dan himself and England Dan's entire family and all of his friends and John Ford Coley and his mom, too. Liz expresses an inability to express shock. Natch. So he drives it home: "Liz, Tess is pregnant." The "writer" knows that Act I must end with a dramatic turn. But really, we already knew that one. Not a turn. Not a twist. The "writer" thinks it might be okay to end with a straight line. And so he does.

People, how good was that Buffy? God.

Liz looks through a microscope, the bloody Leanna tissue sitting, infecting, right near them. Liz posits, "If I were an alien and I was having trouble threading a needle, I'd probably use my powers." Hey, all hail the rare but correct use of the singular conditional in all its [sic]-free glory. Hail not, though, the use of logic, for Liz blathers on, "But I probably wouldn't need a needle to begin with." Well, maybe Leanna is an alien so conditioned to being watched -- as she was when she pricked her finger -- that she takes pains to act like a human no matter what befalls her? Liz doesn't think so: "They're human blood cells, take a look." Microscope close-up. They're red. Well, I'm convinced. So then maybe Leanna's a human acting as a henchman for an alien -- as Liz was doing at Las Cruces -- and she's really a dupe who has successfully convinced them that she's innocent when it's still very, very, very possible that she still really isn't. I'm just saying, her relevance was written out and put to bed a little conveniently, no? Max asks Liz who she thinks did it, and at her promising that she really doesn't have any idea, has the raging freaking gall to whisper all meaningfully, "You must have some idea who it could have been." Maybe she's just hoping to wait until she's sure you suck enough to react the exact same way you did the last time she made a suggestion. Asshole. Liz hazards that "whoever did it set up an innocent girl," and lays out a plan by which the only way they can know for sure who did it is to "start from the beginning." Max can't do that. "I don't have time." Liz doesn't know what that means, so Max spills it all out in one very creepily breathy breath: "He can't survive here. He's dying. We're leaving." Liz asks, "Where?" He responds, "We're going back." She holds up a finger (no, not the one I'm holding up right now), mimicking the same action Max performed when he first explained to Liz where he was from back in Episode One: The Phantom Interesting Plot Line. How could she be expected to remember the exact thing he did with his hand three hundred episodes ago if they can't even conjure the names of hundreds of FBI agents and ambiguous government operatives who spent months of their professional careers trying to capture and kill them? Maybe it would have been a better move if this really had been the last episode, and that moment was just acting as the series bookend. Maybe a lot of things would have been better if this were the last episode.