Max is feeling guilty after the power outage caused by his outburst starts to threaten the wellbeing of patients at the local hospital. Liz’s search for answers about Rosa leads to some dark potential answers and Isobel’s practice with her powers to gear up for a second go at Liz leads to unforeseen consequences.

Honestly, at this point it’s difficult to keep up with what the writers of Roswell think that they might be doing, but this week they really knock it out of the ‘people don’t behave or talk like this’ park in an episode that is less entertaining than listening to the song is rips off for its title on a loop for an hour.

Max is overcome with terrible guilt by the impact on the town of his little tantrum last episode. We know this because he looks sad, but mostly because he tells us (via the people he talks to) in a series of increasingly overwrought monologues about doing the right thing, helping people out etc. When Isobel and Michael come to visit him, he agrees surprisingly rapidly to let Isobel ‘violate’ (his words) Liz so that she will leave town and their secret can remain safe. Then he spends quite a lot of the rest of the episode fretting about hiding away his abilities while people suffer. It’s about as confusing as it sounds, not helped by the fact that whereas I’m sure Nathan Dean Parsons is a lovely person, and he certainly has the chiselled good looks to appeal (I imagine) to a variety of people, he isn’t really acting in a way that is recognisably human. If this were a documentary, Max would have been discovered as an Alien after about the first five minutes.

Isobel, meanwhile is a little off her game after her failure to mind-warp Liz last time out, and decides that she’ll go and practice her powers for round 2 at the bar on one of the local idiots. However, getting rapidly bored of that she elects for a more difficult challenge that leads to a result she really wasn’t expecting at all. Turns out, there are reasons she hadn’t accounted for that some people hate her, and that leads to some confusion on her (and the audience’s part) about certain things.

Liz is still reaching out to whoever she can think of to try to understand more about Rosa’s last days. Having apparently decided that maybe Max isn’t the killer she thought he was but also not completely let him off the hook, she makes contact with Rosa’s ex to see what light he might be able to shed on things, but that leads her down a path that – if she’s right (and I’m almost certain by now that she isn’t – the show having made her the dumbest smart person ever to this point) – is going to have a hell of an impact on quite a few people.

There’s also a lot of sex talk in this episode. Like, the show hasn’t been shy about sex to date but this feels like an almost over-compensatory amount of talk on the subject as the show’s Mills & Boon-esque sensibility really kicks up a notch. Seriously, I know it’s middle of the desert America and everyone is bored but there are other ways to pass the time than humping (or talking about it).

But most egregious of all is that Michael pretty much gets to be a bit part in the background in this episode, and Alex isn’t around at all. As we’ve already established, I think those two are the single best thing about this show, and having one absent and the other basically acting as a talking prop for other people to interact with really hurts proceedings.

As the ep closes, it tries for some more mysterious drama and intrigue, but honestly I was too busy alternately laughing at the dialogue and terrible acting and being very cross that the best thing about the show wasn’t in this one that I didn’t care. Also, it’s super confusing, and it makes no sense in context that the three alien siblings keep talking in riddles among themselves about events that they all clearly know about. It’s such a stupidly artificial way of drawing out tension and it’s getting tired really quick.

Verdict: I’m genuinely nonplussed by the decisions this show keeps making – there’s so much opportunity here to write smart, relevant drama but the writers keep getting distracted by another opportunity for some character or other to get sexy or a loaded but meaningless (and pointless) conversation to be had between characters. Disappointing. 2/10

Greg D. Smith