UPDATE: That was quick! Just a few hours after this initial post-finale story was written, The CW renewed Roswell, New Mexico for Season 2. So no fears that the Roswell storylines will forever die on those dark notes...
Original post:
Spoilers ahead from the Roswell, New Mexico Season 1 finale, Episode 13, "Recovering the Satellites," which first aired April 23.
Roswell, New Mexico fans are reeling from the big Season 1 finale, and hoping The CW renews the show for Season 2.
Not only did the show seem to kill off Max Evans (Nathan Dean Parsons), Max's bold move brought back Liz Ortecho's (Jeanine Mason) sister Rosa (Amber Midthunder) in the process. Also, Michael Guerin (Michael Vlamis) and Alex Manes (Tyler Blackburn) fans are not happy that the season ended with Michael blowing off the rest of his conversation with Alex to get romantic with Maria DeLuca (Heather Hemmens).
Show creator Carina Adly MacKenzie noted in post-episode interviews that Roswell, NM teased Max's death at the start of the season when Max told Liz he read all these religious texts about the man with the miracle hands tending to die a bloody death.
We need to have stakes on the show, so if somebody’s going to be coming back to life, we might need to take a loss. I think that it’ll be a really interesting journey for Liz next season, and in the end she’s the hero of our show and we can’t make things too easy on her — ever.
As Carina Adly MacKenzie told EW, the show needs to have some stakes or nothing matters. It does sound like she's hopeful for Season 2, so that's good news. MacKenzie said something similar about Max to TVLine:
Max’s story definitely isn’t over, but there are consequences for raising somebody from the dead. We can’t just have this guy on the show who’s capable of doing that. There would be no stakes.
Since Max is the guy who can resurrect people, and he's gone, what do they do? However, it sounds like hope is far from lost on that front, and Carina Adly MacKenzie is already thinking about more of Max's story in Season 2:
We’ve still got a lot to learn about Max. Next season, my hope is that we spend a little bit of time asking questions about 1947, about what brought them there in the first place. We had a very brief glimpse of Michael’s mother; we want to ask questions about her, and about Max’s mother and Isobel’s mother and whether those two people have the same mother. We still have more story to tell with Max, but that’s all I can say.
More on Michael in a minute, but what about Rosa? Carina Adly MacKenzie told TVLine Season 2 would pick up that story right away:
Rosa thinks she just woke up from a bad hangover, and she’s about to be very confused. There’s a line I really like that she says while they’re hugging: 'I’m here, it’s OK.' Even in her confusion and fear, her instinct is to comfort Liz. If we get a Season 2, we’ll literally pick up moments after this. Things will start to click for her, like how Liz looks a little different, and she’ll have to learn to adapt.
The showrunner was also asked if she felt pressure from fans to keep Michael with Alex for the sake of not losing another same-sex relationship on TV.
In her answer to TVLine, Carina Adly MacKenzie gave hope to Michael and Alex fans:
Yes, but this isn’t the end of that story. If the show ends at Season 1, it ends at Season 1, but I wasn’t ready to end it with everything in a neat little package. For as long as this show exists, the story of Michael and Alex exists — and it’s not over. I consulted with a lot of advocacy groups, we’ve got a lot of queer people on our staff who I talked to about this. You don’t want to stereotype the bisexual person and make them someone who can’t decide between two genders, or make them the person who needs to be with a man and a woman to be fulfilled, because that’s not the story we’re telling.
Carina Adly MacKenzie shared more on that Alex and Michael storyline to EW:
Yeah, I think they’re on a journey that will bring them back to each other in a lot of different ways over the course of the series. I don’t think that Michael loves Maria the way that he loves Alex, but I do think that he’s making a choice about the life that he wants and the way that he wants to feel. Things with Alex are extremely fraught; he’s tied to a lot of pain in Michael’s life. Liz starts the episode saying that if we could choose to fall in love, we might not ever choose it because it’s scary and dangerous, and I think that Michael is making a safe choice right now. I’m very excited to see Michael and Alex evolve as men and even as friends and maybe fall back in love, in a way that could be a little less painful. Hopefully we get to dig a lot more into Alex’s family next season — if we get it.
Yes, if we get it. She told EW she knew she was leaving things hanging on big cliffhangers, because her job as showrunner is to launch a story that could continue over several seasons:
Trying to give it an ending that felt satisfying as if it was a series finale was just never what I would plan to do. I want people to spend their summer or hiatus wondering what happens next, theorizing about what happens next and writing fan fiction. I never intended to make people feel satisfied by the end of this one.
So now we wait. The CW has renewed other shows -- like Legacies, which has a lot of connections to Roswell, New Mexico since several people in The Originals family are involved in this series -- so chances are pretty good that Roswell will see another season. It sounds like a lot of shows will learn their fates in May, so The CW may be tracking DVR and other data to factor that into consideration. We'll see. Do you want more Roswell? Vote in our poll below.
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