[Warning: The below contains MAJOR spoilers for the Roswell, New Mexico Season 4 premiere “Steal My Sunshine.”]
There’s a new trio of aliens in Roswell, and while we have no idea what they’re up to — including why two robbed a bank or why the sky has turned purple — this can’t be anything good.
Elsewhere in the Roswell, New Mexico Season 4 premiere, Max (Nathan Dean) planned to propose to Liz (Jeanine Mason), only for her to ask him to wait since she felt like the other shoe was about to drop (and then it did, crashing through the Crashdown sign behind them). Michael (Michael Vlamis) moved in with Alex (Tyler Blackburn) and panicked after he broke a childhood touchstone, but Alex assured him, “what I can’t live without is you.” Anatsa (Sibongile Mlambo) told Isobel (Lily Cowles) she loves her, and the other woman responded in kind and was about to tell her she’s an alien when the sky lit up. And Maria (Heather Hemmens) finished treatments from Kyle and Liz to slow her brain degeneration, but that may have led to her losing her powers.
Executive producer Chris Hollier teases what’s ahead and promise a “satisfying” series finale.
What exactly is this new triad up to? And how did you want to use them in contrast to Max, Isobel, and Michael?
Chris Hollier: We have essentially a good one, so what does it look like to have one that is not good, or at least starts off in that place? We wanted to give more aliens to a show about aliens. I can’t say what they’re up to because that’s part of the journey. By the end, they are going about the alighting so we’re going to lean in and start to define what that means, but this is Roswell, so we’re going to dip in to get to know — they’re not just a wall that moves in unison. They all have their own thoughts and wishes and good and bad parts, and so we’re going to dip into all of that.
John Golden Britt / The CW
What did you want to do with Max and Liz’s relationship this season? How much will that proposal come up?
We wanted to try to play what I think happens —it’s been a minute since I’ve been that age — in that age group about when that stuff starts to come up in your life: What does it mean to start to redefine yourself right along next to somebody? We use that as a jumping off point. I don’t know if anyone’s gonna be staring at a ring every episode, but I think that the metaphor of what that means will live, which is, “I have to understand myself better. I have to be better with myself so that I can be better for somebody else.”
Clearly Michael’s the more hesitant one when it comes to taking steps forward in his and Alex’s relationship. They’ve made it past one obstacle already in living together, with Michael’s nerves. What’s next?
We know now that these guys love each other and are committed to one another, and so we’re gonna give them an obstacle that doesn’t question whether they love each other, but just because you love somebody doesn’t mean that life stops throwing you obstacles. So we’re looking for new ways for them to face things together.
John Golden Britt / The CW
Isobel did tell Anatsa she loved her, but before she could tell her she’s an alien, all that happened in the sky. Is Isobel going to change her mind after that or keep trying?
That to me is the fun because saying “I love you” comes with, “OK, now I get to really show you how I’m broken and unique.” And so that’s the part we really wanted to dive into. We wanted to pull some Season 1 show ideas into this. This is a fresh couple for us to explore this territory, to see what this particular obstacle looks like through them.
Especially since we see how intrigued Anatsa is at the end there.
Exactly. They all really chose incorrect people to fall in love with, right? A scientist, a military person, and now a reporter. We found that amusing in the writers room.
But then there’s the Kyle (Michael Trevino) of it. What’s coming up for him and Isobel?
One of the nice discoveries of the last season was how much chemistry they have. That was the other thing, too, is we started to pair people off into couples. We still wanted longing. We still wanted choices to be made and people to fight for. And it’s not like Anatsa is a bad choice. She’s a great choice. So what happens when sometimes you have two great choices?
John Golden Britt / The CW
It doesn’t seem like Kyle’s having much luck with anything. Now, he’s throwing himself into his work…
No, but he has such great reactions when the world is breaking around him. He’s so much fun to write to, so we’re like, how can we deepen him? We are gonna deepen his side of things. We’re gonna dip into his family. We set the ending of Season 3 in Careyes, which is where his family’s from. So we have more Kyle’s stories to tell.
Is Maria losing her powers as a result of the treatment or is this just the beginning of some sort of evolution of them?
This is something that we want the audience to ask: how your environment affects you, what happens when you start to grow personally, and how do you let certain aspects of yourself define who you are? What are other versions of yourself with or without those pieces is where we started to explore for Maria. We felt like she embraced this gift she had, even though it came at a cost, so we wanted to play around with, what does it look like to take that superpower away from her? Will others emerge? Or does she need any at all to be a Maria that we love?
John Golden Britt / The CW
How does she handle that?
I think the group has come to lean on her and it’s one of the things that helped bonded her to family. To this family of aliens, she’s one foot in, one foot out, and she took steps to say, “No, I’m OK. I belong with this group here.” And so we wanted to at least test internally for her what that meant for her. “Am I still a part of that family? What does that mean for me?”
What’s going on with Maria’s love life?
Gregory’s (Tanner Novlan) just mentioned off screen. I love the actor that played Gregory. We had some difficulty getting him for some of our work early on, but that presented an interesting opportunity when we saw scenes that Maria’s playing with Dallas (Quentin Plair), we thought it’d be fun to see if we could start to get something going. I’m curious to see what people start to put on that, if they think they might be good for each other or not.
The CW
Talk about casting Shiri Appleby and deciding on her character [Liz’s mentor, Dr. Allie Meyers].
It was interesting. Shiri and I talked about it even before we put her in the end of Season 3. We had a little chat about who she might be and it bent and changed a little bit, but what we wanted to do was kind of honor what Shiri meant to the whole series, meaning her own as well. We’re here because of her and Jason [Behr, who appeared in Season 2 as Tripp Manes], and we wanted to fold that into our show, to let her live large over our show as well.
What can we expect from her character this season?
We introduced that she was a mentor, and so we wanted to explore, as you find yourself, how do you go and look for people to kick you to that next level? And so for us, we liked onscreen and offscreen what that meant with Shiri Appleby.
What can you say about Liz and Allie’s dynamic then?
I don’t know if I could because I feel I’d be taking something from the audience to give too much away.
This is the final season. Talk about wrapping up the series. How much closure will the finale offer?
It’ll feel first like it honors what the season is and I think addresses a couple things series-wise as well. We of course always have more — if they want to reboot next year, we’re ready. But it’ll be satisfying. They did give us a little heads up, so certain aspects of it that might have been more cliffhanger-y got wrapped up.
What else is coming up this season?
I’m curious to see what people say online what they think about our villains and who they think they are because on Roswell, I think the villains grow just as much as our heroes and if we really want to pair them off, they’re going to help each other ask questions and evolve, some for the better and some to a dark-ish place.
Roswell, New Mexico, Mondays, 8/7c, The CW
