Between Liz’s heart, Kyle’s wounds and the ever-increasing presence of ‘The Regiment’ in Roswell, it’s time for Max and his siblings to make some tough choices.

So we closed out the last episode with Kyle Valenti impaled on a spike, apparently about to fulfil Maria’s vision of his coffin at the funeral, while Liz was collapsing with an apparent heart attack as all the lights blew up in the apartment around her. Could these two events possibly be related? Well, sort of.

Turns out that the first person to happen upon Kyle is none other than Max, who does the very last thing he should but the absolute first thing you know that he will, Cut to the following morning and it seems that perhaps Kyle isn’t quite ready for the Valenti Coat of Arms-bedecked coffin to be fitted for him just yet. What’s odder is that Max seems a lot happier and healthier than he has in a while as well, which all seems good until his old flame rocks into town looking for all the world like she’s about to go into full heart failure at any moment.

As if this weren’t enough, ‘The Regiment’, the local self-appointed militia of the town, have a new reason to be pissed off at immigrants after the body of one of their own is found apparently burned to death in the barn of a local immigrant family. Cue lots of burning torches and openly hostile racist white guys insisting that it’s ‘their kind’ against whom all the odds are stacked in modern society.

Ten years ago, Roswell New Mexico might have seemed to be pushing these angles a little too far, but these days, depressingly, what we see here feels less like a simplified caricature and more like a mirror being raised to modern society. So much for escapism in genre entertainment, though at least we still have the actual aliens to provide an element of far-fetched fantasy to proceedings.

Believe it or not, even the death of this racist nonentity ties into the events which Max finds himself in the middle of. It’s time for a choice to be made – one which he and his siblings have been avoiding for a long time, and one which they may yet live to regret.

The way in which the show manages to tie all of its threads together in this episode really is quite clever, Jones remains as enigmatic as ever, and it’s as well that none of the siblings seem fully ready to trust him yet, and the underlying background of racism and violence in the town lends and odd grounding to things, such that the alien stuff seems quite acceptably normal. Now that certain dies have been cast though, it’ll be interesting to see how things develop.

Verdict: Another solid episode. 8/10

Greg D. Smith