Liz is forced to confront some home truths. Isobel delves deeper into the truth of her powers. Michael continues to let his anger get the better of him.

I’m still not one hundred per cent sure when this season of Roswell is going to stop setting things up and actually let them run. That’s not a criticism – the way that the show is slowly ratcheting up the tension between various characters week after week is actually quite delicious, I’m just wondering how long the writers can keep it all up.

Liz breezed back into town last week, still full of self-righteousness that Max had destroyed her work and then not even bothered to reach out to her in the intervening year. Having dealt with the initial meeting that was where we left them last time out, the show goes about doing something quite clever. We know that when Liz finds out that Max is dying she will drop everything. We know also that her obsessive nature will leave her unable to stay away when she finds out that there’s another Max out there in the desert. So instead of going the obvious route the show instead has Ms Ortecho confront a few home truths about what happened between her and her beau a year ago, and how maybe the fault isn’t as clear cut as she might believe. When she’s heard that from enough people, maybe she’ll be ready to acknowledge it.

Max meanwhile is getting progressively worse as he wrestles with the impending doom foreseen by Maria and to whom exactly it might relate, and also the duality of his nature and his own upcoming (and apparently inevitable) death. Liz being back in town is about as helpful to all that as you might expect, but will he be able to put his feelings aside long enough to do what needs to be done?

Maria shares more details from a new vision with the siblings which seem to point out some additional clues, which just serves to strengthen certain convictions among them. Isobel makes the possible mistake of speaking to Jones who reveals something to her about the nature of her powers which she hadn’t apparently hitherto considered. All credit to Nathan Parsons for playing Jones absolutely right – as good and open as Max is, Jones is the polar opposite, but instead of opting for overblown scenery chewing there’s a quiet menace to Jones that means you’re never totally sure exactly what he’s up to or how genuine he ever is in anything he says.

As for Alex, he’s struggling to find anything new in the mystery he’s been drafted into Deep Sky to solve. I’m not really clear why he suddenly did a U Turn and went to Deep Sky, but the general theme here seems to be that he wants to somehow make amends for/possibly simply avoid the mistakes made by his father. There’s an interesting throughline on that here and I suspect we’ll see more of that (and of Alex and Michael, who let’s face it are every bit as fated as Max and Liz) as the season opens out.

And Michael? He’s now absolutely convinced that he’s the son of The Dictator, and every bit as inherently evil. If only he was wildly in love with a man also desperately in fear of genetics proving him to be eery bit as evil as his father before him. Oh wait…

Verdict: Still has the feeling of setting up things to come but all signs point to it being very good indeed. 8/10

Greg D. Smith