Roswell New Mexico is the newest series from The CW and it is a reboot of the hit ‘90s show with a new approach. This reboot brings in a lot of modern-day issues such as the debate over immigration and although this is a sci-fi show, it is still a great opportunity to address these issues.
We begin with Liz Ortecho who is the daughter of undocumented immigrants and is very afraid that her father will be deported. She is returning home to Roswell a decade after the death of her sister, Rosa, who was in a car accident that claimed two other lives. She isn’t thrilled to be back in Roswell, which she says is a town full of “small tragedies and small people.” When she is pulled over at an ICE checkpoint, she’s mad but soon recognises the cop as Max Evans who she happened to know in high school and he’s just pulling her over for a busted tail light. They don’t have much of a conversation and Max says, “you’re finally back,” as if he’s been counting down the days.
Liz has no idea that Max isn’t just a cop. In fact, he happens to be an alien who crash landed in Roswell during the 1947 UFO incident and was born decades later. He has lived his entire life passing as a human with his sister, Isobel and his friend/brother Michael, however the three aliens live in constant fear of being discovered and carted off to a lab to be experimented on. None of this emerges until later as Max has to use his alien powers to save Liz’s life during a drive-by shooting at her family’s diner that was deliberate.
Liz dies from her injury almost immediately and Max who is devastated, goes through a painful looking superpower process to heal Liz’s bullet wound, which also blows out the diner’s electricity. He then dumps ketchup over her to try to disguise the blood covering her. Max leaves her and is so physically drained that he calls his sister for help. Isobel is with her husband, but she leaves him to help Max. She finds him collapsed in an alleyway and hands him a restorative bottle of nail polish remover which he drinks (in the original Roswell TV series, the aliens drank hot sauce).
Meanwhile, Liz is sure that she was shot, despite Max saying it was all ketchup. She is sure she’s going insane and since there is a history of mental illness in her family, she goes to see her ex-boyfriend, Kyle, who is a doctor. He is willing to help her and gives her a CT scan. There is no bullet in Liz’s body but a strange handprint emerges on her where Max healed her. Liz ends up going to see her friend in a bar, but then ends up almost hooking up with Kyle before he notices the handprint and she bolts. Kyle goes directly to Master Sergeant Manes who is a war hero and is determined that aliens exist and are a threat. Kyle informs him of the handprint and Kyle is recruited into some government agency.
Max has just put himself, Isobel, and Michael at risk of exposure by resurrecting Liz and Isobel and Michael are mad. Isobel seems to have coped with her secret alien nature and just integrated into the human race as she got married and is now planning the high school reunion. While Michael has been living in an RV out in the desert, getting into bar fights and doing nothing with his genius IQ, however everything with Michael isn’t quite as hopeless as it may seem. When the military comes knocking on his door in the form of Alex who is an acquaintance newly home from Baghdad, Michael’s rattled as inside his RV there are formulas and diagrams suggesting that he might be building a spacecraft.
Liz agrees to let Max take her out into the desert alone to “show her something”, which isn’t really a thing you should ever agree to but I guess she trusts him. He shows her the glowing orbs in which he, Michael, and Isobel fell to earth in. He tells her that he’s an alien and it actually goes well as Liz is relieved she’s not going insane. Max also adds that since Liz is a scientist, she represents the thing Max, Michael, and Isobel are most afraid of.
Liz promises to keep this secret and the two share a super sexy moment out in the desert as Max reveals that the mark he left on her shoulder has created a temporary psychic bond between them. She lets him touch her handprint in order to share his memories of their relationship through the years, and show how much he loves her. Liz tries to kiss him and he doesn’t let her, saying she’s feeling an echo of Max’s feelings for her and she won’t be herself until it’s worn off. Liz says she’ll kiss him when it wears off. Yay for consent!
Meanwhile, in another part of the desert, Sergeant Manes (Alex’s father) is telling Kyle his version of what happened on the day of the UFO crash. He says that the ship was carrying an army of monsters who mostly died on impact. The handprint, he says, is evidence that at least one alien survived and is out for blood. Manes shows Kyle a low-tech underground military facility he’s calling Project Shepherd, which is somehow designed to protect “the entire planet” from aliens.
At the end of the episode, Liz attends her high school reunion where she faces a lot of hostility from her classmates who are muttering things like, “I thought she got deported.” She’s about to bail but her bartender friend Maria gets the band to play a cover of Liz’s favourite song, Counting Crows’ ‘Mrs. Potter’s Lullaby,” which we saw her dancing to at the diner earlier.
In another part of the reunion, Alex demands to know what Michael’s doing in that RV and he assumes that Michael is cooking meth as the military found some suspicious chemical traces. Michael denies it and is too busy flirting with Alex to come up with a good cover story. There’s so much sexual tension! Later, Michael finds Alex looking at a picture of himself as a teen which is projected onto a wall from a slideshow. Alex says, “We’re not kids anymore. What I want doesn’t matter,” and it’s clear that Michael and Alex have a past. It’s even more clear when Michael kisses Alex and I basically screamed cause it was so good!
At the end of the episode we go back to being more dramatic as Max tells Isobel, “she can never know what happened to Rosa,” and with that I’m sold on this show!
Final Thoughts:
Roswell is such a good new show. I love how they are tackling issues such as immigration along with the great characters and how diverse it is.
