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ROSWELL
BRIDGES
THE GALAXIES BETWEEN US
From space.com
(thanks to Ghosty for sending this into the RoswellUK list):
On the WB’s Roswell,
which chronicles the adolescence of three aliens living in New Mexico,
normal anxieties about fitting in are blown up to galactic proportions.
Despite its otherworldly concerns, the show's first season also sneaks in
a subtle message about what it means to be human.
Max, Isabel and
Michael -- all stranded by a UFO which crashed outside of Roswell in 1947
– have to confront the pressures of growing up as well as mysterious
shapeshifters, guidance counselors on loan from the FBI and parents who
don't understand who or even what they are
Their dislocation is
made worse by being at a naturally insecure age. Roswell’s
aliens have more than zits to worry about. They might wake up one
morning with tentacles.
My
so-called extraterrestrial
Television drama
sometimes tries to be too realistic, presenting only the everyday events
that most teens experience. Shows like the short-lived Freaks and
Geeks fail because they regurgitate verbatim the trivialities that we
don't need to watch on TV.
In contrast, fans and
critics met Roswell’s far-out premise with immediate enthusiasm.
Fans sent thousands of bottles of Tabasco sauce – which the aliens put
in everything from pizza to ice cream – to the WB to ensure the show’s
renewal.
Many of those bottles
were sent by teenage girls, who traditionally do not care for science
fiction. Roswell caught their attention because no matter
what otherworldly metaphors are employed by the show, its core of
emotional reality is easy to relate to.
After all, what parent
hasn't wondered whether their offspring is from another planet? What
adolescent hasn't felt that they live on a hostile, alien world?
This
Earth thing called romance
Much of the first
season focused on the mercurial relationships between the visitors and the
three humans -- Liz, Maria and Alex. They have a lot in common –
Isabel once told Alex that to understand her anxieties he should simply
multiply his own by a hundred.
Some of the
relationship issues are completely mundane. Michael and Maria have a
conversation in the Eraser Room – it’s the one about how they just
make out and never talk – that duplicates almost word-for-word a
conversation between Angela and Jordan in My So-Called Life, the
teen drama which Roswell creator Jason Katims wrote for back in the
mid-1990s.
On the other hand,
most of the dating problems get an interspecies twist.
Liz has to worry about
being used for sex, not for the usual reasons but because she’s having
visions of the original UFO crash when she makes out with Max. Is
she being used . . . for breeding stock?
Max’s alien mother
appears as a hologram in the season finale to tell Max that he’s already
betrothed to another alien.
As for Liz’s
parents, they’re already bothered that their little girl is growing up.
If they ever find out about Max’s origins, it’s safe to say that the
old "you’re from two different worlds" speech will take on a
new meaning.
On the
morality of Roswell
On the surface, Roswell
is a fairly simple allegory of adolescence, but there’s a profound take
on humanity of all ages hidden underneath.
After being captured
and interrogated by government alien hunters, Max asks one of his
tormentors "who's inhuman now?" Roswell is not the
first series to question what makes one human, but it is one of the first
to give a satisfying answer.
The first season
presented FBI moles, shoot-outs, car crashes, harrowing escapes, near
misses, a brutal torture scene and murder. What initiated it all was
a simple act of compassion.
In On the Basis of
Morality, German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer asked why the
suffering of another human being could move a bystander to endanger his
own life. Believing reason unable to answer this, Schopenhauer
explained it as a transcending of empirical perception.
When such an act of
altruism happens, Schopenhauer wrote, the barrier between "I"
and "Not-I" temporarily dissolves so that one suffers with the
other individual, "in spite of the fact that [their] skin does not
enfold [his] nerves."
Early in the series,
Katherine Topolsky, the FBI agent posing as a guidance counselor, shows
Max a picture of children playing. He identifies himself as the
child who is hiding behind a tree in the picture.
Max may be secretive,
but in the pilot he sheds his concern for his secret as quickly and
efficiently as one might shrug off a t-shirt. When Liz is shot, the
barrier between two different people – two different life forms, two
different planets – is shattered.
On Roswell,
compassion seems to be the key to humanity. Both Max and Liz repeatedly
cite the day he saved her as the day each of them truly came to life. The psychic connection
Max and Liz make in the pilot reverberates throughout the entire season.
Max proclaims to Liz that "knowing you has made me human," and
who are we to disagree? Back
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