Roswell, New Mexico - Episode 3.07 “Goodnight Elizabeth” Recap
Teleplay by Kristen Haynes & Christopher Hollier and Eva McKenna
Story by Kristen Haynes & Christopher Hollier
Directed by Heather Hemmens

by Emily Maesar, Staff Writer

I simply don’t have the words, but I will do my best. It’s the only thing I can really do, as Roswell, New Mexico slips and further and further away from the things that made me really love the series: character. However! I’m hopeful that all the messy and clunky plot stuff will give way to the really strong character work that I know the show is fully capable of. I’ve got my fingers crossed for that one.

Okay, so for the first time in forever we don’t actually pick up exactly where the last episode left us. Instead, we meet up with Maria who’s talking to Jones (still dressed as Max) in her mind. He’s also using his very special sword to make fire symbols in a field. It’s… a whole thing.

Meanwhile, Liz is trying to figure out how to bring Maria out of her coma. She realizes that the alien DNA acts more like a virus. Isobel and Michael come to visit them and give the news that Jones’s body is still in the pod. He didn’t swap places with Max. No, he’s pulling a Noah from season one and he’s invaded Max’s mind. A thing they think was able to happen when Jones healed Max. And it seems like Jones has been killing people with his very special sword in order to recharge and gain more powers.

Liz decides that their only plan of action, given all the information, is to recreate the alien blocker that they used on Noah in season one. She plans on microdosing him by putting it in his drinks at a charity event that Greg is holding on Maria’s behalf at the Wild Pony.

Michael discovers that Rosa can use her acquired alien powers to hear different vibrations, including alien tech. They do a cute training montage, before eventually using it to try and track down Jones’s alien sword during the charity event.

Picking back up with Alex, however, he’s been brought to a barn in the middle of nowhere by Ramos. The barn has Kyle’s body and we hear from Ramos about his side of the events of the night at Max’s house. Alex listens to Ramos, trying to form his own opinions on… whatever the hell Deep Sky is actually trying to do.

And okay, the big problem with Alex’s storyline currently is kind of personified through this episode. He’s so completely separated from everyone that he might as well not be in the show. A similar thing happened last year with Kyle’s storyline last year, and I think it’s symptomatic of the show pushing for more plot and less character. Something it did a pretty solid job at balancing in season one, but has struggled with in the two seasons since.

But then, of course, we come back to Jones and Liz. Jones has convinced Liz to leave the Wild Pony with him. Although that might be too strong of a word, in all honesty, because she knows what’s going on. She continues to try and drug him, but it becomes very clear to all parties involved, including us, that Jones knows something is wrong. He does a bit of a villain monologue, but Liz is able to escape into the desert surrounding Max’s house.

However, as he’s trying to kill Liz, the rest of our gang of aliens (plus Rosa) show up to save the day. In the ensuing altercation, a few things come to light. First, is that Jones was actually the dictator. Second… that makes Michael his son.

So, my feelings about all of that (if I should be so bold) are that I kind of hate both aspects of that. I understand the shock and awe of the whole thing, but I also feel like Jones, as a character and (particularly) as a villain, hasn’t been well established or defined. We’re over halfway through the season (presuming it has 13 episodes like the other two) and I couldn’t really tell you even a little bit about what Jones wants. As messy as the multiple villains in seasons one and two were… at least they had very clear motives.

As for the Michael thing? I should love that. I should love a daddy issue twist with my favorite bisexual mess, but there’s just something about this that doesn’t work for me. Maybe it’s something about how weird all of these alien lineage reveals of the last two seasons color their pre-established relationships?

I really couldn’t tell you, but I’m really hoping that maybe once we deal with all the plot stuff the show just can’t stop doing, we’ll get back to the heart of everything: the characters. But like… actually. Not for two seconds and surrounded by technobabble!

Roswell, New Mexico - Episode 3.08 “Free Your Mind” Recap
Written by Ashley Charbonnet & Joel Anderson Thompson
Directed by Ben Hernandez Bray

When a show, like Roswell, New Mexico, has a lot going on, the easiest way to slow everything down and give the audience time to breathe is what this week’s episode did. Make no mistake, though, there’s still a lot going on with our favorite aliens (and their buddies), but doing distinct storylines that don’t cross over all that much is a great way of refocusing the characters and their motives.

So, there are basically three things going on. You’ve got Maria and her mindscape, Liz trying to save her, and Michael trying to find his dad. Which is a pretty broad way to describe everything, so let’s get into the nitty gritty.

Picking up from where we left Maria and Jones, our great dictator has pulled Maria into a very specific memory of her grandmother, Patricia. Jones is looking for a piece of the alien glass that had an equation on it, and he knows that it’s somewhere at the end of this memory in 1969. Maria escapes from him, still in the mindscape, which is when Isobel and Rosa show up to help save Maria from the inside. They decide that it would be important for them to get the info that Jones is looking for, and end up having Maria live through Patricia’s day.

So, Maria gets to walk a day in her grandmother’s shoes, which ends up having a lot of emotional ups and downs. As it turns out, Patricia was due at Caulfield prison (where in seasons past the team discovered the government was experimenting on aliens and non-white citizens of Roswell). At first, they think she was being tested on, before the horror sets in that she was one of the people injecting local townsfolk. Maria is given a reprieve from having to recontextualize her grandmother’s involvement in something so terrible, though, when it’s discovered that she was giving people placebos.

Once they’re able to get past the trauma, Maria (as Patricia) gets to meet Michael’s mother, Nora. She gives Maria the alien glass that her captors at Caulfield made her make. However, it’s blank until they can get the equation into the glass via Theo. Except… Theo’s dead. Isobel realizes that they can still get the information they need by putting the alien glass over Theo’s forehead because of how she’s seen the glass behave in the past.

But, of course, once they finally have the equation on the glass, Jones pops back up. He’d been waiting in the corners of the memory because there was no other way for him to gain the information he needed, than to let Maria play it out and gather it herself.

On the outside, Liz is trying her best to keep Maria alive. Alex uses his military connections with Deep Sky to pull Maria out of the hospital and get her transferred. Which works, although they bring her to a different barn than the one Kyle’s stationed at (very odd, but okay). So, while Michael and Alex go on their mission (more on that later), and Isobel and Rosa go into Maria’s mindscape to help her there, Liz is tasked with stopping Jones’s cells from killing Maria. Alone, except for a horse, Liz tries her damndest to save her best friend. She eventually realizes she might be able to separate Maria and Jones’s cells using sound. If she can find the right frequency, then she can hopefully heal Maria and bring her out of the coma. To succeed, however, she ends up needing Rosa’s help.

So, Rosa leaves Maria’s mindscape, which allows the Ortecho sisters to work together. They manage to destroy Jones’s cells just as he pops up in the mindscape, saving Isobel and Maria (but not after Isobel gets to have a pretty fun fight sequence with him)!

The final storyline belongs to Michael and Alex. They’re on a quest to go find Jones, his weapon, and the missing pod with Max inside. Alex finally tells Michael that he joined up with Deep Sky, which he’s (quite understandably) upset over. But Alex, as he also tells Michael, only ever wants to do things that will protect and help Michael and his family. Alex also convinces Michael that, once they find Jones, they should only worry about getting Max’s body - the alien sword be damned. Which, of course, they manage to do (with some hand grabbing!). All of which means that whenever Jones gets booted out of Maria’s mind and body, he's left without Max in the pod.

Jones does catch the guys as they’re leaving. Michael tries to stop him, but ultimately freezes in the face of his father. Which is all very bad, until Alex just backs up into Jones and he and Michael are able to flee. Absolutely wild shit and I love it.

And so, with Jones defeated (at least for now), the team gathers back up at the Wild Pony with Maria awake from her coma. Michael and Alex kiss for the first time in forever, and the realization of where the Lockhart machine came from - and that Deep Sky might actually be the villains Michael feared them to be.

Roswell, New Mexico - Episode 3.09 “Tones of Home” Recap
Written by Alanna Bennett & Leah Longoria & Steve Stringer
Directed by America Young

The passage of time in Roswell, New Mexico is something of a parlor trick, it seems. Where we sometimes find ourselves, especially at the top of the season, opening new episodes directly where the last ones left off… the back half of the season has been a bit looser with that story convention. As is the case in this week’s episode.

So, where we left all our aliens, humans, and hybrids therein was with a victory (however slight) over the Big Bad of the season: Jones. He’s out of Maria’s head and doesn’t have the DNA sequencing info he was looking for in there. Plus, the gang got Max back. Despite him being in Jones’s failing body. (There’s a reason he didn’t want to be in there anymore, after all.)

Liz, determined to find the alien DNA information that will allow them to swap Max back into his body, and sever his tie to Jones, realizes that the closest she ever was to figuring it all out was with Heath. At the very least, though, she needs her old science. So, she and Max take a road trip back to her old apartment in Los Angeles. When they discover that the science is missing, even the hidden stuff, all signs point to Heath. Except, he’s not home. He does seem to already know about aliens, though, and has lots of info about one that Max and Liz don’t recognize from the medical reports.

On the other side of things, Isobel, Maria, and Greg are attempting to find any other aliens that might have crash landed with their families. Maybe some who are like our three alien leads, and didn’t wake up for a good, long while. They find some reports that lead them to a local Christian camp where a child was found wandering, disoriented (like Isobel was), years back. They head over to the camp, where Isobel lifts an alien pod from the frozen lake.

From there, they find out that the boy was taken in by the church. After Maria and Greg finally hook up, Isobel discovers some more clues that lead her to the office of the pastor who helped Rosa out a few episodes ago: Dallas. And, through all the poking around, they know he had a best friend. Who is, you guessed it, Heath. Unfortunately for everybody involved, Jones is the one who finds Heath first.

Now, as the rest of the team is trying to track down the new mystery alien and his buddy (whether they know it or not), Alex and Michael are trying to figure out the Lockhart machine over at Deep Sky. Well, Alex is. He’s only supposed to be spending a limited amount of time with the machine at a time, because of its “siren song” pull it has over people. And Alex is no different. Michael realizes something is terribly wrong when he hasn’t seen his newly minted boyfriend in a few days. He goes down to Deep Sky, only to find Alex with the machine - way overexposed. Together, though, they realize that Alex’s dad put something into the machine, and they’re able to take it out. So, we’ll see exactly what comes of that in the coming episodes.

But herein lies one of my biggest problems with Roswell, New Mexico this season. I’ve mentioned it before, but that little bit I said about Alex and Michael now being in a relationship? That’s basically the most they give us from the kiss at the end of last episode to this one. Where are the deep, rich character scenes for this kind of revelation? Especially since that’s been one of the big relationships “Will They, Won’t They” of the entire series. They didn’t quite get there in high school and then, as adults, everything was a bit more complicated. So, I think it would have been good for both the characters and the fans to see whatever that conversation might have looked like.

Another thing that is kind of related to that, and I think speaks to some of the other issues in the series, is that it often feels like Roswell, New Mexico plays pretty fast and loose with timelines - especially within the episode itself. Like, the Michael and Alex storyline plays out over the course of two days, if the dialogue is to be believed. However, the other three storylines really seem to happen in only a day and some change. Even if every piece of story happens over two days, the pacing within them is often a bit sloppy in execution. Which I think is a sizable component to any confusion the show elicits.

And that’s beside the point of if things like someone dying will ever come back into play this season. Like? Are we ever gonna go back to that funeral, or are we done with that now? Honestly… it’s kind of likely. I’m interested to find out, but I have a feeling the answer might be a bit disappointing. At least we got two of the three main aliens actively being their bisexual selves. That makes me happy enough!