ROSWELL on PLANET-SF

After hanging on for two seasons on The WB, Roswell followed Buffy the Vampire Slayer to UPN for its third and final season.

Rewatching the episodes for the first time since their original broadcast, it was disappointing to note the continuation in the series' decline from the highpoints of season one.

Tess' departure for Antar at the end of season 2 could have paved the way for a sidelining of the Royal Four nonsense, and re-establishing the central Max/Liz relationship that got many of us hooked in the first place.

However, Tess' pregnancy means that Max is now obsessed with getting his son back, although quite how he plans to do this is a bit of a mystery. The season opener sees he and Liz holding up a convenience store to discover the spaceship that hidden in its basement, although it's unclear what he actually plans to do with it. As Isabel helpfully points out later, the ship "sucks. It's a lemon. It crashed to begin with. That's why we're stuck here."

Max's obsession with his son and getting home also take him to Los Angeles where he meets shape-shifter Kal Langley and, in a bit of UPN cross-promotion, auditions for the part of an alien on Enterprise.

Meanwhile, Alex's death meant that a new love interest for Isabel was required, and by episode 6 she's married to Jesse Ramirez, who works for her dad's law firm. The relationship didn't convince me back in 2001, and it still doesn't. In fact, the producers would have been better off pairing her up with Kyle, since it would have given him something to do other than trying to get his dad off the couch.

Michael gets a couple of good episodes during the course of the season, notably Michael, the Guys and the Great Snapple Caper (featuring Lost's Terry O'Quinn), while he's at his grouchy best in Samuel Rising. Unfortunately, this Christmas episode shows that lightning rarely strikes twice and it fails to emulate the success of season 2's A Roswell Christmas Carol. Nice elf outfits for Maria and, especially, Liz, however.

With a reduced episode count, the season, and the series, comes to a rapid conclusion involving the return of Tess and Isabel's parents discovering her and Max's secret. Which leads to the series episode as Kyle, Liz, Maria and Max prepare to graduate, only for Liz's developing alien powers to show a glimpse of the future - one in which they're assassinated.

Max gets to deliver a statement that's just as much about the show as anything else, but with just 42 minutes to play with here and the reduced episode order in general, this takes up valuable time and leads the Men in Black bad guys as poor adversaries for the last ever episode.

As Shiri Appleby has pointed out, we get the ending that most fans would have wanted - Max and Liz married (Shiri looks bloody gorgeous in the wedding scene and there's a good use of an Ash track over it - shame it doesn't continue over the credits), and a conclusion that ties back to Liz's diary narrative of the first season.

Extras are confined to commentaries by Jonathan Frakes, Ronald D. Moore and Jason Katims. Katims' commentary on the finale discusses the probable format that a fourth season would have taken, and it's probably just as well that we never got it. There's also a brief Class of 2002 featurette.

Overall, a entertaining but slightly unsatisfying conclusion to the Roswell saga. Too often the writers appear to get an idea and run with it for a few episodes without wrapping it up in a way that convinced me that they'd had it planned that way from the start - it's a bit too much of "it's not quite working, let's do something else instead". The ending feels rushed, but it does give us Max and Liz together (plus Valenti getting a job as deputy).

If I've sounded a bit negative, it's probably that while I thought the characters were great, some of the science-fiction aspects were a bit suspect and some of the story arcs didn't seem that well planned. Roswell was certainly an enjoyable series, but it could have been an even better one.

Even so, most people who've picked up the first two seasons will want to see how it all ends, especially those without Sky, and now they can. back to the top

ROSWELL
THE COMPLETE THIRD SEASON

Starring SHIRI APPLEBY,
JASON BEHR,
MAJANDRA DELFINO,
BRENDAN FEHR,
KATHERINE HEIGL,
ADAM RODRIGUEZ,
WILLIAM SADLER,
NICK WECHSLER,

20TH CENTURY FOX HOME ENTERTAINMENT

REGION 2 DVD (CERTIFICATE 12)

RATING: 6/10

PREVIOUS RELEASE:
THE COMPLETE SECOND SEASON