Roswell
"To Serve and Protect"

Airdate: January 22, 2001

During a bout of dreamwalking, Isabel begins to have flashes of a terrified girl being kidnapped and tortured. While helping her and the ever-present (but never useful) Max find out who and where the mystery girl is, Sheriff Valenti's actions are put under a microscope. The investigation into his behavior was prompted by his shooting of that crazy, Billy Bob Thornton look-alike back in "The Convention" (you remember, the first season ep where our web designer Lisa's ex-crush Jonathan Frakes made a total ass of himself?).

Dude, she's your sister. Hands off!

There are mistaken identities, a case of a really dysfunctional parent/child relationship (what teenager doesn't call their parents when their car breaks down on a road trip? What parent gets angry when law enforcement actively searches for their missing child?), some confusing leaps of logic (or rather leaps of non-logic) and lots of inappropriate touching between Max and Isabel, but eventually they do dig up Mystery Girl. Literally. However, despite the fact that he saved a kidnapping/torture victim, Valenti is asked to turn in his badge.

God forbid we encourage law enforcement to actually save people now and then, right?

The alien component of Mystery Girl and the performances of William Sadler as the concerned, if a little overzealous, Sheriff Valenti and Katherine Heigl as the troubled, but powerful alien seer, Isabel, might have made for a really good episode (well, at least as good as Roswell is ever gonna get), but something else was added to the mix of the A plot and it offset the potential of all the other elements. That something else was Max Evans. Although the audience has been force-fed the idea of Max as leader and king, too often he comes off as weak, or, as in this case, utterly useless and a jackhole bastard to boot.

The confident Isabel of "A Roswell Christmas Carol" would never have needed her brother to act as either emotional prop or go-between. And considering Valenti's overenthusiastic reaction to Isabel's visions, it wasn't like he needed convincing from the King of Dull either. In fact, the unprovoked verbal attack Max aimed at his obviously agitated sister was entirely unnecessary and only served to make him look like a complete asshole. Some might point to Max's power shield having been necessary to the saving of Mystery Girl, but we've seen Isabel kick serious ass ("Surprise") without any help from anyone, so it would have been perfectly understandable if she'd had Valenti dig out Mystery Girl while she put the alien whammy on the shooter thereby negating the need for the presence of her overly touchy-feeley brother.

Stop now and nobody gets hurt.

But, of course, we couldn't have had that. A mere girl being the hero of the piece? What was I thinking? This is Roswell, after all.

The subplot -- or more appropriately, the subplotlet -- regarding the arrival of Maria's much loathed, juvenile delinquent cousin, Sean (Devon Gummersall), might not have been so bad if not for the return of Liz's gawdawful cow-like stare. Poor Sean, to be the focus of that brainless, spineless, talentless attempt at... Hell, I don't know what Shiri Appleby is going for when she does that, but Lord it just needs to stop. Now. Before someone gets hurt.

Almost as fun as Maria reading Sean the riot act was Tess openly mocking Kyle for his fear of changing into an alien. She's not as spunky as she normally gets around Buddha Boy, but that can be forgiven since, despite his expanded horizons, he's still got a bit of jackass left in him. However, that's okay since it allows him to be more interesting and multi-faceted than Max.

Obviously intended to be a setup episode to the whole Hybrid Chronicles story arc, "To Serve and Protect" introduces what looks like a whole new facet of the alien/human equation. Oh, and it adds a couple of new characters in the mix, because, you know, secondary characters like Alex and Brody and Kyle and Tess and every single parental figure minus Sheriff Valenti -- and, in this episode, even Michael -- are working too damn hard so they need more people to shoulder the burden of Jason Katims' genius.

Yeah, right.

Oh, and there's just one more thing. I'd like to pose a question to the producers/writers/casting directors of Roswell: Are there no Latinos in the entire state of New Mexico?

-- Linda M. Najera

Roswell airs Monday nights at 9pm EST on The WB.

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