The house of cards that is “Roswell, New Mexico” (Mondays, CW) collapses in the Season 3 premiere, “Hands.” The series showed potential from the beginning with a story more closely linked to the 1990s YA novels than the beloved “Roswell” (1999-2002), including emphasizing Liz’s (Jeanine Mason) Hispanic heritage.
It also regularly needle-drops ’90s songs and, indeed, names episodes after those songs. On the surface, there’s a lot to like.
Opens with a thud
After a long wait since the confusing and forgettable end of Season 2 last June, Season 3 opens with a thud. Jones (Nathan Parsons), a character I forgot about, is for some reason the enemy of his clone, Max (also Parsons), and the rest of the protagonists. Michael (Michael Vlamis) traps Jones in a magic alien cage for the time being.
“Roswell, New Mexico” Season 3 (2021)
Mondays, CW
Creator: Carina Adly MacKenzie
Stars: Jeanine Mason, Nathan Parsons, Michael Vlamis
Meanwhile, this episode written by show creator Carina Adly MacKenzie unfolds like a daytime soap opera. Characters, or pods of characters, have their own threads that don’t cross over with the others’.
Everything looks cheap, but not in a charming way. And it’s extremely talky. We’re supposed to pick up exposition referencing past events and current problems.
After the confusing Jones thing, another villain, Wyatt Long (Dylan McTee), crops up. He’s the brother of a girl killed in the decade-old car accident that Rosa (Amber Midthunder) supposedly caused but actually did not. Wyatt hates Rosa for that, and for being an immigrant, and for somehow being alive and unaged.
Credit where it’s due: Good for the writers for having someone in the town recognize this oddity.
Interested in love interests
As we pick up a year after we last saw everyone, “RNM” is mostly about everyone’s love interests. Liz and her lab coworker in L.A. are flirty. When Liz purposely leaks a patented formula, they far-too-easily do some under-explained off-screen computer hacking in order to erase her tracks.
As was the problem last season, “RNM” under-explains or obfuscates the big things.
Like a soap, the writers care more about the romance. Along those lines, there’s a decent setup where in order to pass through an ID scanner, the guy’s heartrate has to be in a certain range. So Liz flirts with him in order to get his heartrate up. “Cute,” he comments.
On the other hand, it’s so contrived and goofy. Why would this be the high-tech lab’s ID system?
Everything contrived
A decent line of dialog comes when Wyatt is forced to take an art class as part of his parole (or something like that). That’s not a cactus, that’s a penis, the teacher says. The guy rebuts: “It’s a cactus. See, there’s a flower on the testicles.”
We get more of “RNM’s” usual in-your-face progressive sexual representations, as Alex (Tyler Blackburn) catches up with his boyfriend, who then splits town. Alex and Michael had also split a season or so ago, but I can’t remember why.
Max and Liz are also apart now, I guess because of her job. I’m always hyper-aware that “RNM” is a written story. Characters split up because the writers say so. Heck, anything that happens is because, well, it’s on the page.
Nothing feels natural or organic (except the chemistry between Parsons and Mason, which made me raise my previously skeptical eyebrows out of the gate).
Weird on many levels
Adding a level of weirdness: At two points, someone mentions “the pandemic” as being among the problems the group has faced in the past year. “RNM” is supposed to be an escapist series about aliens and superpowers. Referencing the pandemic makes it too mundane.
And yet Steph (Justina Adorno), the girl Kyle (Michael Trevino) successfully courted last season, breaks up with him off-screen. This very much reminds me of daytime soaps and “Dawson’s Creek,” where each season was about a new relationship; the hell with the previous one.
The writers should’ve had Kyle mention that Steph died of COVID-19. If you’re gonna be topical, show that the current event has truly affected the characters.
While Steph is fine (if gone from the show), the big drama in “Hands” is that someone is going to die, as per Maria’s (Heather Hemmens) vision of a coffin. It’s not Max, whose heart transplant is failing, nor Maria herself, whose brain is harmed by each vision, since they are both alive in the vision.
It’s probably someone else who I don’t remember enough to care about. I guess if it turned out to be Liz, that would be daring. But only superficially – like everything else that’s almost good (but not quite) about “Roswell, New Mexico.”
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