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:: ROYAL THREE ::

Saved, yet again, at the 11th hour, Roswell is about to embark on a third series. Co-creator Jason Katims breathes a sigh of relief...

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FOR a number of years Max and Isabel Evans and Michael Guerin shared an extraordinary secret. They were aliens; or at least the evidence to hand suggested as much. Then, following the events of a shoot-out in their local diner, information and rum ours started spreading.In a relatively short period of time, Max went from anonimity to being abducted by the FBI.

For those following Roswell on the BBC, that's about as far as things have progressed. The last we saw of the aliens and their human friends was their heroic rescue of Max, who was in the midst of a regime of torture and interrogation. One episode of Season One remains unbroadcast. It's that episode, however, that casts a great deal of light on the following season, which finished airing Stateside, and on Sky 1 in the UK, this summer. It was a brave move, considering there were no guarantees that The WB would give the series another year.

Cult Times caught up with Roswell's executive producer Jason Katims, to ask him how he felt about Season Two and where it leaves things for the imminent third season. A season which again follows a period when it looked like the series was close to cancellation.

"Very close," agrees Katims, who sat on pins and needles as The WB officially cancelled the genre series and then UPN swooped in to pick it up. "It was very lastminute in terms of the final decisions being made. UPN finally announced that they'd secured the show at nine in the morning in New York City, at their upfront session. It was extremely nerve-racking." Fortunately for Katims and the show's avid fans, UPN not only picked up Roswell, they agreed to produce a full 22-episode season. They also slotted the show in after Buffy The Vampire Slayer, an even higher profile acquisition and yet another WB cast-off, thereby providing Roswell with its best lead-in series to date. It's no wonder that many observers consider Roswell the show that won't die.

"I've been involved with three networks in less than three years," Katims says, referring to the fact that Roswell was originally produced by Fox for Fox, before the network passed, leaving The WB to grab it at the 11th hour. "I've started to think of Roswell, if not as the show no one can kill, at least as the little engine that could. It has squeaked by based on having passionate fans. These fans aren't just the ones who watch the show at home, but fans at the studio that have supported it and fans at the networks that we've been involved with. When it came to this last situation with UPN it was somehow a little less nerve-racking, because it just seems to be the history of the show, that we're always squeaking by. We've been lucky, very lucky."

The perception is that UPN will allow Katims to make Roswell as he sees fit. If that's the case, of course, it implies that The WB interfered in some manner with Katims' vision. As Season One gave way to Season Two, and as each season unfolded, the series seemed to veer from romance to Sci-Fi to action, from standalone episodes to multi-episode arcs, all the while dispatching characters and storylines in the blink of an eye. The producer attempts to address the issues as honestly as possible, but without pointing fingers. "I think that coming to a new network is exciting for me because I get to continue to do things I was really happy about with the show, and it gives me a really good excuse to adjust things that I might not have been that happy about," he explains. "I would say that the major change that I'm interested in making, which fortunately is what UPN wants as well, is to move towards stand-alone episodes, to do more complete stories within an episode, and to not do such complicated, continuing mythology arcs. They were really fascinating for us, but they start to get sort of unwieldy and it gets hard to come to a satisfying conclusion at the end of the episode. You're always waiting for the next one.

"One of UPN's needs is to introduce our show to their existing audience. It's not just a matter of us bringing our audience to their network, but of us bringing our show to their audience. So it's important to them that you can see an episode of Roswell and not feel lost, not feel like you had to have seen the last several episodes in order to understand what's going on. So in that way the direction I want to go in and UPN's needs are absolutely in sync. And that's something I'm very encouraged about. I would point to certain episodes we did last season as models of what I would want our new episodes to be like. The episode The End of the World, when Future Max came back and told Liz that she had to break up with Max in order to save the world, essentially, so he could move forward with Tess [Emilie De Ravin, who played the fourth alien], was a good example of an episode that has its roots in Sci-Fi and has a really interesting twist to it, but what you're really following is the relationship. That, I think, is the heart of the show. Similarly, the last group of episodes we did last season, starting with the death of Alex [Colin Hanks, who played the core group's close friend and Isabel's would-be boyfriend] in Cry Your Name and through the final episode [Departure], were all built on relatable themes and universal ideas. All of those episodes had the Roswell twist, but they were based in very relatable ideas. For example, Cry Your Name was about having to say goodbye to a friend. You can relate to a friend dying, but the Roswell twist was 'Was Alex murdered by an alien?' That brings the human drama into the Sci-Fi realm. Later, Max sleeps with Tess and gets her pregnant. There are a lot of shows in which you'll see a guy get his girlfriend pregnant, but there are not that many where, if you don't get that foetus off the planet within 48 hours, it will die. That is the fun of the show and the excitement of the show, and it's also where we want to go with the storylines.

"I don't want to say that The WB was forcing us to do a show that we didn't want to do," stresses Katims. "It's typical to blame the network. The one thing that was true about them was that they were very much encouraging us to explore these mythology arcs - The Hybrid Chronicles - and to do it with continuing storylines. It begins to get difficult for the audience to keep up with it."

"We're just now getting started on year three, but I'm very, very excited by the direction we're taking," continues Katims, whose writing staff this season will be complemented by the participation of Melinda Metz, who penned the Roswell High series of novels on which Roswell was based, and her partner, Laura Byrnes, as well as David Simkins, whose credits include Freakylinks, Dark Angel and Charmed. For the record, Ron Moore will remain as one of the writers and co-executive producer, and is scheduled to direct two of the first 13 episodes, with more likely down the road.

The series' third year kicks off on 2nd October in the US with Busted, in which Max and Liz get arrested. When last seen in the aforementioned second season finale, Tess had betrayed everybody and the aliens lost their one and perhaps only shot at ever returning to their homeworld. "I'm interested in seeing how those developments affect all the characters in the show, particularly the three remaining alien characters," Katims notes. "I believe that Max, Michael and Isabel are all affected in different ways and they'll all take very different journeys because of that. I see Max going through a little bit of a role reversal with Michael. Max is haunted by having his son taken away from him, so he's the one on a quest now, the way we'd seen Michael in the past. Max will stop at nothing to make contact with his son and to right the wrong that's been done, and Liz goes along with him. Michael, on the other hand, is someone who has basically spent his whole life not investing himself at all in life on Earth because he always thought he'd be leaving. Now, suddenly, he's staying. That should be interesting. He's supposed to be a senior in high school and he's basically never completed a class. We'll see Michael try to graduate. We'll also see him get a job and start to be successful at that job and move up the ranks. So his journey is about coming of age and getting into the workplace.

"Isabel is another one who has never really allowed herself to get close to anybody here and now she's suddenly here forever, too. We're going to send her to college and we're also going to give her a love interest this year. That relationship will accelerate very fast and then, eventually, that will turn into a love triangle with a Roswellian twist. We'll also be very involved in developing the characters of Liz and Maria. As I said, Liz will go along with Max, so we'll see them together and Maria will pursue her interest in music. And as far as Tess, because a lot of people ask me about her, she is gone but not forgotten. I would actually love to try to bring Tess back for a guest appearance later this season if Emilie if available."

It sounds as if pretty much the entire third season is already mapped out. That is and isn't quite the case, as Katims explains: "The way we've done it this season is to, in very broad strokes, know where we want all the characters to get by the end of the year. As in life, the joy is in 'the journey. So, depending on the character, we have a specific or general notion of where we want to get each character and the fun part, which is not as mapped out, is getting them there."

Roswell crashed into Katims' life three years ago, at which point he was a complete stranger to the Sci-Fi genre. His credits included such terra firma fare as TV's acclaimed My So-Called Life and the little seen feature film The Pallbearer. His time boldly going where no alien teen had gone before has greatly enhanced his appreciation of Sci-Fi. "Absolutely," he says. "What I really love about Sci-Fi is the ability to tell stories using metaphor and the opportunity to really tell stories using the imagination. I think that any story works best when you can find what's relatable and human about it. What I'm most excited about with Roswell is the opportunity to tell very imaginative stories that are really about something. For me, that's what Roswell is about. It's about Max and Michael and Isabel and Liz and Maria and Valenti. People become invested in these characters and care about them. Somebody said that the pilot was all about outsiders, that that was what was most interesting to them. Even the sheriff, who was our antagonist at the start and represented the establishment, was an outsider. What I have found about the show, as I hear stories from people who've embraced the show, is that the outsider theme carries over to the people the show appeals to. It appeals to people who are a little bit on the outside, and I like that." Ian Spelling

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