Want To Know How It Ends? Me Too!

This is going to be one of those posts about how you can't trust streaming services and how if you want to be sure of the things you value you need to keep them close at hand, not on some server far away. And then again it's not going to be exactly that.

Nothing's ever so simple, is it?

I've been watching Roswell, New Mexico. It's a TV show that's hard to explain. Not the basic premise, which is that the Roswell UFO landing was real and that aliens live among us. Anyone can work that much out from the title alone.

No, where it's hard is in figuring out how this show sits in context with other iterations of the same... franchise? Brand? No, neither of those, exactly. 

Shall we call it an IP? Why not? 

The Roswell IP began as a series of books written by Melinda Metz and published by Pocket Books in America back around the turn of the millennium. There were ten books in the original series, collectively known as Roswell High. They all came out in an astonishing gush between 1998 and 2000, which is some going even for a pulpy YA series. 

They must have been pretty successful because they spawned a TV series almost immediately. Simply known as Roswell, it aired from 1999 to 2002. The show must have done pretty well too because it sloughed off its own series of novelizations, eleven in total, three of which came out while the show was on air and eight more, from a different publisher, after it ended.

You might have thought that after twenty-one novels and three seasons of a TV show the whole thing would have been tapped dry but you would be wrong. In 2019 the IP returned for another run on TV, this time under the name Roswell, New Mexico. It ran for four seasons, ending in 2022. 

I came into this story late. Roswell was streaming on one or other of the services I subscribe to and I watched it maybe five years ago. I was under the impression I'd posted something about it at the time but it seems that while I've mentioned once or twice in passing, I've never actually given it a post of its own.

That was remiss of me. Although I've only watched the series once, I have it pegged in my mind as one of my favorite shows of all time. Without a re-watch, that mostly suggests it made an extremely strong first impression. I'd need at least one more go-through to calibrate and preferably a third for confirmation. Usually my first impressions run true, though, so I think it's safe to say it's pretty good.

Luckily, I certainly felt strongly enough about it at the time to buy the box set on DVD, so any time I feel like refreshing my memory, I have that option. Technically, it also exists to stream on Prime but I've just checked and it suffers from the same problem as the later version, of which more later.

Given how highly I rated Roswell, it's perhaps surprising I took as long as I did before getting around to the sequel. I had my reasons and they weren't just the obvious "too many shows, too little time". The issue I had with watching Roswell, New Mexico is that I wasn't entirely sure what it was supposed to be.

I called it a sequel just now but it's not. I thought it was, until I watched it, but it turns out I was wrong. What I knew about it, going in, was that it featured the same characters ten years older, when Liz Ortecho, one of the leads, returned to Roswell after a decade away.

Naturally, I assumed that meant the story would pick up from where it left off. It does not. I hadn't checked but I also figured it would mostly feature the same cast. It doesn't do that, either.

Roswell, New Mexico is a kind of reboot of the original although again, not really. Maybe a re-envisioning? It's not so much that it takes place ten years later, although it probably does. It's more that the characters are ten years older. 

Instead of them being in high school they all graduated long ago. Instead of being adolescents aged from sixteen to eighteen, these people are all genuine young adults, in their mid-to-late twenties, with jobs, responsibilities and pasts. 

Liz is a high-flying microbiologist, Max is a deputy sheriff, Michael is a mechanic and Maria owns and runs a bar. The whole thing takes place against the politicized backdrop of the Trump administration (I almost wrote the first Trump administration...) and the tone is quite different to the original series, much more politicized, with a great deal of play being made between the aliens' situation and that of illegal Mexican immigrants, of whom Liz's father is one.

I honestly don't even remember Liz being hispanic in the first series although Maria definitely was. The new Maria is black. Also half-alien but we won't talk about that for fear of spoilers. We also won't talk about the plot, not at the risk of spoiling anything but because it makes absolutely no sense. I'd need to watch the first series again to be certain but I'm fairly sure that, wild though it was at times, it never thrashed around like a snake in a hot tub the way this one does.

The science also makes absolutely no sense, which wouldn't be an issue if there wasn't so damn much of it. Liz is a professional scientist and so is her ex-fiancee, who turns up in Season 2. One of the new characters is a hacker for the military, another is a surgeon. Even Michael is apparently an untrained but intuitive scientific prodigy. 

The show oozes science, all of which might just as easily be magic, not least for the way it compacts years of development time into hours of frenzied lab-work, but also the plain fact that even the people doing the "science" don't always know how it works. The part where they perform an alien heart transplant in a back-room without anyone knowing about it is particularly fine but every episode seems to feature one of the cast doing two impossible things before breakfast thanks to "science".

Most of the negative comments about the show, of which there are plenty online, revolve around one or other of these flaws. My front-loading them might suggest I didn't much like the show either, especially in comparison with the original but that would be wholly wrong. I fricken' loved it! From the opening episode, when I realized about halfway in that we were starting over, not carrying on, I've been on board all the way. 

To set against the issues with the plot, which even the characters archly liken to a telenovella, we need to stack the dialog (Crackling.) the performances (Compelling.) and the characters (Convincing.) Add to that the stunning New Mexico scenery and it's a great watch. Just don't make the mistake of trying to untangle the plot.

As always, it makes a huge difference to me that I like most of the characters, even if it took me a long time to warm up to the new Maria. She was my favorite in the original and the new one is very much not a grown-up version of that character. She's someone completely different. 

I did come around, though, and anyway I took immediately to the new Michael, who seems much more likeable than the old one, so that was a trade-off. The new Max is also less annoying, while the new Liz is really similar. I can't now remember if Liz's dead sister was alive in the first Roswell or not but Rosa in Roswell, New Mexico is a standout, so I'm glad she came back to life. (Don't ask...)

All the new characters are pretty good - Michael's on-again/off-again love interest Alex, Alex's terrifying father, school bully turned empathic doctor Kyle, Max's friends-with-benefits police partner Jenna  - but my absolute favorite is the third of the alien trio, Isabel, played in an almost indescribably odd manner by Lily Cowles. At first I thought she couldn't act at all. Now I'm convinced she's the reincarnation of Elizabeth Montgomery, which is about the highest praise I can offer.

I was going to wait until I'd seen all four seasons of Roswell, New Mexico before I posted my thoughts, so why are we here, now? 

Because, despite all four seasons being clearly indicated as available in the drop-down menu on Amazon Prime, where I've been watching the show, I was extremely irritated to find, when I came to start on Season Three, only the first two are actually there. In a new wrinkle in the streaming service I've not tripped over until now, it's apparently permissible to promote shows you can't even watch!

I'm used to shows having three seasons of which only two are on a given platform. That's happened to me several times. I've never known a show to list all of the seasons and then refuse to show half of them to you. That's tantamount to taunting!

I did a little research and it seems there are "rights issues" involved, although nothing I've found wants to try to explain what those issues might be. I did also discover there were some ructions during the production of Roswell, New Mexico that led to the unexpected departure of the show-runner around the time of the third Season but whether that factors in I have no clue.

As of this post, I also know that the same situation applies to the original Roswell. I checked just now and while the first season is available to watch on Prime, the second and third, although listed, are similarly flagged "Currently unavailable to watch in your location". 

Sticking to Roswell, New Mexico, I suspect, although I don't know, that it might have something to do with the show having been bought by ITV for terrestrial broadcast in the UK. Then again, it's not available on the ITV Player either, so maybe not. 

Meanwhile, all the various "Where To Watch" sites cheerfully claim all four seasons are available in the UK on just about every service imaginable,  from Prime and Netflix to AppleTV and Google Play. I've checked them all and in every case it's only Seasons One and Two that are available.

I'd happily buy the damn thing, either digitally or preferably on DVD, but that's not an option either. There's no digital version of the full series I can find for sale in this country, nor are the individual seasons three and four for sale, at least not in the U.K. As for a hard copy, I'm pretty sure only Season One was ever issued on DVD, anywhere. 

For now, I seem to be out of viable options. I could try a VPN, of course, but I've never had much success going that route in the past. It's all very well having the right I.P. address but if it's a paid service they usually also want a valid, local payment option and sometimes even an address to go with it. 

I may give it a try anyway. VPNs are very cheap. Certainly a lot cheaper than streaming subscriptions.

There's also an outside chance the problem might just fix itself if I wait. I note from various forums and reddit threads I've lurked in that at times the missing seasons have become available briefly before slipping back behind the veil. Maybe something is happening behind the scenes although I suspect if it ever was it isn't any more. 

Once again, it's the old "everything's available forever online until it isn't". Millennials are coming into the nostalgia zone about now, with Gen-Z due to start arriving a decade or so later. It's going to be interesting to see what happens when they find they can't have their childhoods back on demand.

Until this gets sorted, I recommend a return to physical product, or at least a download on hardware you physically posess. Not that  it helps me with my Roswell, New Mexico problem but then you can't have everything. 

Sometimes you can't even have what you were told you already had.