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Previously: Max, Liz, and Isobel spend time with a coughing-up-blood Noah trying to decide if the need for answers about the aliens’ before-Roswell lives outweighs the justice they would get by allowing him die from Liz’s anti-alien serum. Michael, Kyle, and Alex find the secret alien prison Kyle’s dad sent him coded messages about. Inside, Alex confronts his brother, Michael meets his mother, Kyle faces the truth about his father, and they all despair over the fact that our Roswellian trio’s families have been in captivity for almost 70 years. Before we can really explore these new characters, the prison goes boom. We left off with a Max vs Michael face-off at gunpoint!
THIS WEEK ON ROSWELL, NEW MEXICO
Strap in, ladies and aliens, because we are about to fall headfirst in a whirling dervish of plot points. In a totally made-for-TV, unbelievable move, Max shoots the syringe of antidote out of Michael’s hand after holding him at gunpoint for what felt like FAR too long as they argued the merits of letting Noah live only to torture information out of him. Michael goes all Carrie on Max’s ass and throws him through the wall, knocking him out. He tries to take Noah with him to find the rest of the antidote, but Noah outsmarts him and stabs Michael in the neck with the broken syringe. Noah makes his way to Liz and they face off in the Crashdown’s walk-in freezer, but this fight is obviously very unevenly matched since Liz is but a mere human, so she also gets stabbed for her efforts. She calls Kyle to come stitch her up in a supremely badass move while her father sleeps blissfully away upstairs.
Max and Isobel drive out to find Noah in the desert, and when Max questions how Isobel knew where he was, Noah reveals he’s already inside her mind, again. He’s going to stick our alien trio back in their pods so when the winners of the war on their planet come back, he can trade them for a ride home, because Max is apparently a “savior”. Noah complains that Max isn’t using enough of his potential powers, which, in hindsight, seems like a weird thing to goad your prisoner about. With impeccable timing, Michael shows up to distract Noah, and Max decides to channel his inner Thor to harness the lightning, and then his inner Emperor Palpatine to use the lightning to kill Noah. While Noah is dying, Isobel warps into his head to give him back her wedding rings, and he tells her to, “take care of her,” which is sufficiently cryptic…until she and Michael go in search of his secret hidey-cave and find Rosa in his alien stasis pod!
In between all the action, we check in with Alex, who doesn’t get to do much but mope about Michael. Michael has decided that being with Alex is too hard even if he loves him, so he finds Maria at her bar. She is preening that she is the chosen one until she realizes that Michael is playing the guitar with TWO good hands (Max healed him while he was still on a high from killing Noah)…and suspicions, they are arisin’.
We wrap up Kyle’s storyline with the unsurprising news that Staff Sergeant Manes was behind Valenti going into the tumor-creating alien’s prison cell and getting killed. Kyle wrestles with the idea of buying a gun to avenge his father, but Manes sneaks up behind him (in his former secret lair) and shoots Kyle first! But, oh snap, Kyle didn’t buy a gun; he bought a bulletproof vest! He stabs Manes in the neck (so much neck-stabbing in this episode) with a syringe fulll of barbiturates and taunts him in doctor mantras like, “Do no harm and WHAT, son!?” It’s…a weird place to leave it.
Meanwhile, Liz is very, very happy to see Max is still alive, and they finally get down to business, complete with psychic alien bonding that seems to really enhance the mood. She then leaves him to go talk to Rosa at her grave, to explain she wishes Rosa got a chance to experience love like she is. This is when Max learns about Noah’s little Rosa secret. He gets it into his head that since she looks so, uh, fresh, it must not have been long after she died that Noah kidnapped her remains, and that it may be possible for him to bring her back with his newfound powers. Michael thinks Max is cray-cray and begs him to leave it be, but Max never listens to his family despite wanting them to always listen to him. He begins to heal Rosa, and Liz—still psychically bonded to him—races through the desert to where she feels Max literally draining away his lifeforce. Before she can find him, however, she runs into a newly resurrected Rosa…which is bad news bears for Max. We end the episode on Liz holding his super lifeless body, sobbing.
YOU’RE FROM WHERE?!
– Max shot a SYRINGE out of Michael’s hand? With zero injuries? I call bullshit!
– OMG, then Noah stabbed Michael! Between all this and his watching his mom get blown up before his eyes, it’s really not his night.
– When did Noah steal away Rosa’s body to use as a hunting trophy for his man-cave? For a second I thought she was still alive and had been stuck aware but frozen in his broken pod for the past decade. I can’t decide which option is grosser.
– Re: Maria’s necklace. Is Maria’s family going to turn out to be, like, shaman/witches who hate aliens like Bonnie’s family turned out to be witches who hate vampires in The Vampire Diaries? Stop cribbing from your own work, Ms. Plec.
– Does Maria noticing that Michael’s hand was fixed mean she will immediately jump to aliens, or something else? Their goofy smiles when they saw each other at the bar were cute, but you know Alex/Michael isn’t over, and Maria is only going to get burned in the long run.
– I see what you did there, show: that was quite a calculated move to use a cover of Dido’s “Here With Me” as the final song of the episode.
WE DON’T KNOW ANYTHING ABOUT THESE CZECHOSLOVAKIANS
– Did we…know about this magic pollen before tonight? Was this something Liz put in the anti-alien serum she made?
– Liz finally learns about Rosa being Kyle’s half-sister. I forgot she didn’t already know, and with so much else going on, this was a blink-and-you-missed-it revelation.
– Noah asks Max where he thinks human religion comes from, and insinuates that it all points to humans mistaking their alien race for gods. Talk about hubris.
– The real-life parallels felt extremely heavy-handed in this episode. We have the self-righteous white-man, government leader in Manes, ready and willing to do whatever it takes to keep his country “safe” regardless of rules or consequences. Noah killing a racist Roswellian made me feel like the show was wanting me to root for Noah in that moment; yeah, kill that bigoted jerk! And then there was the gun seller who listened to Kyle’s ravings, saw his crazy eyes, and was still going to sell him a gun at “25% off for the family & friends discount!” with no background check because “this ain’t California!” Oy.
– Michael gave good cry-face during that first scene talking about his mom. I felt myself getting a little emotional for him.
ROSWELLIAN OF THE WEEK: Rosa
Clearly it’s the person who just CAME BACK FROM THE DEAD.
SAY WHAT
“Liz?” –Max, answering the phone
“Noah got out.” –Liz, referring to her short-sighted plan to keep him locked in the walk-in at the Crashdown
(“No shit.” –Me)
“It’s a family heirloom. Mom always said it protected us from evil. Used to remind of the long line of badass women I come from.” –Maria, about her necklace
“Used to?” –Liz
“Guerin fixed it, and now it just reminds me of his stupid face, stupid voice, stupid hands…” –Maria
“Oh my god. Oh my god! No!” –Liz
“Don’t, don’t say it. It doesn’t matter, because Alex is in love with him, so…” –Maria, being a stand-up friend
“We’re defined but what we can control. Love is out of our control. Love’s the worst thing that ever happened to me, and I was in a spaceship crash.” –Michael
“You know, you never want to talk about Alex Manes, but…you do realize my romantic troubles now officially trump your flimsy little closet, right?” –Isobel, making it all about her, as usual.
WE NEED ANSWERS
– I guess the first question is: Will the show be renewed?
– The next most obvious question is who will heal Max, because if he’s dead there’s no central romance, and with no romance there’s no show. I’m betting he will be put in a stasis pod for an episode or two before he gets fixed. (I am also guessing he will lose his memories and forget who Liz is, because I know how Julie Plec works AND I am a CW’s-home-for-angsty-shows veteran.)
– Who are the winners of the civil war on the aliens’ home planet, and do we think they’ll show up in time for next season’s winter sweeps?
And that’s a wrap on season one! As of right now, The CW hasn’t announced whether or not it will be renewed—but I personally feel with so many of its other shows ending this year, The CW may keep Roswell, New Mexico around for another season just to be safe. Will you still tune in if that happens? Unfortunately, I think this is where Mandy C. and I stop (we stayed out of residual love for the original, but we weren’t swept away by this reboot), but we want to thank you for joining us for the recaps! Let us know what you thought about this finale in the comments below.
