January calendar screen captures from "A Tale of Two Parties" and "Leaving Normal."
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December calendar screen captures from "A Roswell Christmas Carol" aka "The Miracle."
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Welcome to the Rosblog of shapeshifter (aka lizmythologistshapeshifter aka liz aka Nancy aka therealshapeshifter aka shapeshift-her). Anyone who sends thoughts in an email will be considered for posting on this blog. Please note: If I do not add your comments, it might be because I am busy or didn't get it, so feel free to send a follow-up email.

I am beginning this blog because:

1. FanForum's pruning policy means that threads must have frequent postings or else disappear.
2. The current FF thread is about to reach 250 posts which will also mean it will disappear.
3. SciFi's bb threads are difficult to track.
4. Blu5 and UPN-ll and Foreverdreaming are good, but I am a bit of a control freak, er, ah, I mean I am an archivist. (I really am a degree-holding Librarian.)
5. Roswell is on an indefinite hiatus at SciFi.com and so postings are likely to be infrequent, and I wanted to have a place that was bookmarkable to which Roswell mythologists and members of the Roswell Bureau of Investigation could return.

Jan. 7, 2004

SciFi is airing White Room, Destiny, Skin & Bones, Ask Not, and Surprise on Feb. 4th, starting at 10am CST. Thanks, Momo, for the heads up!

3 minutes to midnight, New Year's Eve 2003-2004, and coding...

Over at ColonialFleets.com, on the We were supposed to hear something thread, one of the board admins posted this:

"...for those who want info now, the actors contracts were extended a month. End of January is the new deadline for actors to be picked up for the new series...."

It's very late (11:41 pm--btw, Happy New Year, and do you know where your adult children are? Because I don't.), but still why does this announcement sound sooo Roswellian???

Almost New Year's Eve (Tuesday, Dec. 30, 2003).

I'm not really here. I'm 1500 ft. above sea level in Hawaii.
But there are some interesting discussions going on at these FF threads:

Almost Thursday.

Ros-fan Shilohara's hubby had a heart attack and needs prayers.

Sounds like Battlestar Gallactica will be a series: see here at colonialfleets.com. I hope they focus more on mythology and relationships, and not so much on attacking robot drones.

Friday.

Those who campaign for a remake of Roswell should beware--they just might get something. And if the overwhelming response of the diehard Battlestar Galactica fans is any indication of how the Roswellians would respond..., well, I don't even want to think about it.

The saddest part is that the BGers are so busy flaming each other that there is very little discussion about the show's characters, plotline, mythology, etc. Still, on colonialfleets.com, GreenBear did start a thread about the choice to afflict the President with cancer. As someone who is still recovering from cancer surgery, I too pondered this element of the story. I thought it was to reveal to the audience that she is not a Cylon. But maybe that's a ruse. Perhaps it will be later revealed that in cloning human forms, the Cylons too can get cancer. Similarly, one would assume that the father and son Adamas cannot be Cylons by definition. But perhaps the Cylons clone pre-existing humans. I can imagine in a future episode that the younger Adama would be suspect because he should have died.

Wednesday. Dec. 10

Last night on part II of BG, the most human female lead was revealed to be an EMBH robot.

Monday. Dec. 8, 2003

Seems I can't get away from Mr. Moore's influence. Maybe he is a relative after all (family name a few generations back). I just spent too much time watching the first installment of Battlestar Galactica.
Here's my Roswellian observances:

First: The SciFi Roswell Boards were mysteriously relinked (by Cylons?) tonight. They are now here.

The opening scene of Galactica begins with an attempted ripoff of the Max in the City scene which was originally so beautifully choreographed, photographed, and had perfect background music. But in BG, it's just a memory of the room with the briefcase opening. And then, who should appear (no, not ol' St. Nick--though that name can be a euphemism for Satan), but the evil alien (I mean robot) who looks like a tall Tess. She even seduces the weak-willed man with a kiss. And what is the line closing the scene? "It has begun." So familiar. All just proving that Roswell was much better than anyone chose to admit. Odd that SciFi chose this night to tweak their message boards.

Later the tall blond robot copies Lonnie's line about "lives hang in the balance."

The traitor smart guy's character is a version of the Luthors from Smallville. And the schoolteacher president is "Laura Roslin," as in Laura Bush (first lady school teach and librarian) and Roslin Carter (first lady who brought her sewing machine to the Whitehouse).

Unlike Roswell, Galactica has both the youth and the mature characters front and center, right from the start. That should give it more credibility with the critics.

Saturday.

It seems that Mr. Moore was just a little confused and responded with an attempt at humor.

Later that evening...

Is the Ronald D. Moore Starlog interview a fake?

I just logged on to the exclusive Chat with Ron Moore on SciFi and asked:

In Mr. Moore's recent Starlog inteview, he said there were plans for a season 4 Roswell in which the alien teens would go to San Francisco to do good with their powers. Was Isabel's desire to go to the university in San Francisco part of this plot?

but he only answered:

I think you have mistaken me for Kim Cattrell

Is the interview posted below and on a plethora of boards a fake? I will try to verify it with a local librarian in the next day or so, if no one else does so.

December 5, 2003

I tried to get the original text of this Starlog article, but evidentally the database that formerly delivered Starlog does so no more. So, here it is as I found it (more or less) on the message boards. As usual, this is posted purely for academic discussion; this is a non-commercial site.

It's interesting how the show's struggle between a teen-driven relationship focus and an 'adult' (i.e. TPTB) driven emphasis on SciFi is a metaphor for the original premise.

This article stimulates many lines of theorizing and speculation. Ron Moore is supposed to be on SciFi Chat tonight at 8 CST, but I doubt those questions will be asked. Like:

Starlog, January 2004, #318, pp 42-43

In an interview with Joe Nazarro in "Starlog" magazine about his current show, "Battlestar Galactica," Ron Moore spoke about his time on "Roswell" ...click to the rest of the article

December 1, 2003. Monday.

Roswell is returning to SciFi daytime rotation January 5, 2004, starting with Toy House, where they left off six months ago. I guess that's better than my ex-husband who moved in with a girlfriend after our six month estrangment.

Wednesday before Thanksgiving. Nov. 26, 2003

No Smallville tonight. It feels like Friday. Don't the French have a day off in the middle of the week? I like it.

I got my 2004 Roswell Calendar yesterday. I will enjoy it, but why are the pictures on the cover distorted? You know, like when you click and drag the side of a picture in Word to make it narrower instead of using the crop tool. This is a pet peeve of mine. And this is my Rosblog. So I can rant. And if anyone rants back in the guestbook, I can delete it. But no one hardly ever posts in my guestbook anyway, so not much likelihood of me having to play cop, which is good, because I do not like that role.

Friday.

Added to the Archives: the opening pages of threads 4, 5, and 6 of the "Is Liz Important to the Alien Mythology?" threads, with much of the original formatting preserved. They had 40 posts per page and well over 300 were "allowed" per thread--Thread 6 had 11 pages originally, which would have been over 400 posts. In fact, I don't think there were any moderators in those days (spring and summer of 2000) on FanForum. It was long before folks worried about planes flying into buildings on purpose.

So, I think all I've got left to add to the archives is formatting the rest of the tvwithoutpity.com threads, and uploading the RatDg site. Oh, and probably add somemore mindwarp discussions from SciFiBB--if they don't pull a FF and "prune" it.

Wednesday, Novemeber 19, 2003

Review of Turnabout, the last in the post-television series books:

Note: Bold **spoiler alerts** are followed by spoilers in light gray font--squint at the screen to skip 'em.

The overall writing gets a B+. It flows almost all of the time, but this is not the stuff of Pulitzer Prizes, nor is it intended to be. There is no eloquent prose, and there are a few typos.

Effort to please the fans and stick to the canon, also a B. It's really a shame it's not an A+, because heroic efforts were obviously made to tie up all the loose ends in a Mobius strip of words. But also obvious is that no hard core fans were invited to proof read for errors of content. In addition to reprinting the errors from the Prologue to Pursuit, there were several other definite mistakes in explanations of backstory, which leave the devoted and the unitiated both asking, 'why bother?' including:

• the gun that Isabel melted at the end of WDAMYK (and which makes the shot of a frying pan on a cooking show at the end so poignant) makes a reappearance on page 16
• on page 23 we are told Tess used a car bomb to destroy the military base in 4AAAB (does Liz, who was driving the car, know about this?)
• agent John Stevens evidentally was resurrected from the dead of the Crazy episode long enough to disband the Special Unit--instead of Nasedo impersonating Pierce having accomplished this deed, as we were told in Skin & Bones.

It would have been better if more space had been devoted to explaining the mechanics and biology of the scifi elements (which were, btw, quite cool) instead of doing a backstory rewrite.

Still, what really bothers me about Turnabout is the horror factor (also known as the 'yech facto'r in X-files). So how can I give a good review? Maybe Reggie or someone else will enjoy it more.

And **spoiler alert** was it a blooper that Alex says his final farewell on page 254 but then reappears on page 259? If not, pretty anti-climactic, IMO.

And just one more thing before I go watch Smallville: It is so uncanny that RTFC had the Parker parental unit suffer the same fate as Mangels & Martin assigned them, and at the end **spoiler alert** Kyle is bonding with Ava, whose hair now is dyed the same color as Serena's in RTFC.

With Roswell, 'there are no coincidences.'

Wednesday, November 12, 2003

 B&N called a couple of days ago to say my copy of Turnabout has arrived--haven't picked it up yet. I'm thinking I really should re-read Pursuit first, but will probably just skim.

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I have uncovered the RAMS hideout. They've been avoiding me. will post more later. But who needs endless references to "KHo" when you have the eloquence of Skovde on the SciFiBB:

...brings up that horribly composed Dock scene.

First of all, who wrote that dialogue betwenn Max and Liz?

Well, Liz, you know it's all about my biz. I gots to get me some of that hybrid sumptin sumptin. It's allz about keepin my silver pimp hand strong, and I just made Tess my podzter, hot-rodzter bee-yatch.

Then, how the heck did that dialogue pass through quality screening! That was just an awful few lines of dialogue that didn't do the two characters justice.

Hence, my conclusion that the audience was mindwarped into thinking that Max and Liz actually had that conversation.

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Meanwhile in Tvland, next week on Smallville, Lex visits Max's White Room.

Saturday

Regarding the 'kiss in the rain' from "Tess Lies, and Videotape," Roswell Mouse has received an answer from writer Thania St. John (who worked on the 2 eps. before & after that one) as to whether it was a mindwarp.

*Drum roll* She replied: "It depends on who's watching it."

Anti-climatic answer? Maybe. But it's okay.

Since the vast majority of fans--both Rebels and Dreamers and everyone inbetween--think it was not a mindwarp, I guess that makes it not a mindwarp for the purpose of Roswell cannon.

But I will continue to believe that it might have been a mindwarp because of the box full of Max pictures Tess had, because she mindwarped him in a sexual way earlier in that episode, because, as Yellow Finch points out, Tess refers to the kiss at the Prom as "the infamous kiss" as if it was a first, and, primarily, because of this dialogue from Destiny:

LIZ: You told them both at the same time to go to Hondo?
TESS: Pierce told them to go to Hondo.
LIZ: Can you just do that with everyone? Make them see things that aren't even there?
TESS: Sometimes it's easier to do that than to make someone see something that's right in front of her eyes.

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Moving on, Shiri is to play "Lillith" a movie. Search Lillith in the archives to read our discussions about Tess and Liz as types of Lillith (the sort of anti-Eve).

Friday, November 7th,

I found this interesting metaphor on a Rebel's thread:

...Tess represents the adult world, ... facing up to real responsibilities (a baby and a wife, a planet full of people waiting for you to come and put an end to the war,...

Looking at Tess in this way, the pod squad would resent her much like teens in the 60's resented adults when they admonished each other "not to trust anyone over 30."

A plot line that would have followed this metaphor would have the young people (as they matured) come to respect Tess's willingness to do her duty (although, what girl wouldn't with Max?). In a sense, this happened at the end of 4AAAB when Liz left Tess at the military base. And, given that the old folks of the Vietnam era and the present era are evil in that they lead the young men into harm's way, I suppose making her an EMHB makes sense. Moreover, giving her the power to mindwarp completes the metaphor of the cultural, political, and commercial brainwashing foisted onto each new generation by the last.

I had wanted her to become integrated into the group, and, as a second best, thought it was really cool when she blasted off in Departure. But seeing her as an authority figure gives me a new appreciation for the development of her character.

Almost Thursday

The Smallville episode, "Relic" aired tonight; it was very good (i.e. no FOTW), and it was totally Roswellian:

Wednesday, Nov. 5

Since the FF Pod people (Positive something-or-others) are going to be watching and discussing Missing, and I'm home this afternoon, I thought I would too. One thing I noticed for the first time was a bit of cinematography that seemed to deliberately set up Liz as "Venus." In Kyle's room, when Max and Liz are looking for the lost journal, the camera is set so there are large sea shells in the foreground, across which Liz walks, invoking the image of Botticelli's Birth of Venus.

But in today's world, a girl needs more than a gesture to clothe her innocence:

Read Zero's synopsis of our previous musings about Liz as a type of Venus.

For blooper buffs, see the changing books from the scene in which Liz tells Max the journal is back. The tall book was shot in a take in which Shiri plays the scene with a lot of seductive intimacy. In the "short book" take, she is more perky and chatty.

What really bothers me about the episode, though, is why does she tell Max about the missing journal, only to ask him to wait a day before doing anything about it? And why does Max tell Isabel and Michael, only to tell them not to do anything? I fear this type of writing is what led to the show's downfall.

Saturday, November 1, 2003

Turnabout has been released. If you call your Barnes & Nobel (or other local book store) now, they can order it for you and have it "in a week to a week-and-a-half." The ISBN is 0689864108. Or, you can order it online & get it sooner, but pay shipping.

Info about the Season 1 DVD (Feb. release) is below.

Recovering from surgery, I rewatched Destiny yesterday. How is it that we never considered the significance of the healing crystals to the fate of the shapeshifters that were "killed" in the crash? We obsessed ad nauseum about TicTacs, and how the lack of the ingestion of them by Nasedo indicated that there were 2 shapeshifters. And, in Season 3 we were finally rewarded with a second shapeshifter in the form of Joe Pantoliano.

But if Nasedo clearly knew that the crystals could resurrect one of his own....

Perhaps he wouldn't.

Still, this would leave open the possibility of someone else doing so.

Then again, we saw the crystals explode when Max tried to heal Liz in Ch-Ch-Changes...or did we...?

Thursday, October 23, 2003

Let's get into Phase 3 for Roswell: The Movie.

And Shiloh says on the SciFi BB that Season 2 of the DVD is going to be released in July or August.

Sunday.

This review of Turnabout just posted on the FF Books thread by Rosta, who got an early release copy at The Strand in Manhattan:

Mangols [sic] delivers the goods: great followup to the setup in PURSUIT, and a few of surprises. Mostly action oriented and will be hard to put down. Excellent use of all main characters and some others.

Saturday, October 18, 2003

Info about the Season 1 DVD:

shapeshifter would like to know: How many will be produced? If they sell out, would they make more? And what's to stop bootlegging of it once it hits the street?

Episode 4, "The Marriage Caper," of IDOJ aired again. I hadn't seen it before. This one dispenses with Tony's finacéé from the opening episode. I was struck with how neatly they handled it in contrast to the advent of Tess on Roswell. Ah, those were the days, my friends...

Wednesday, Oct. 15, 2003

In tonight's Smallville, the writers openly make reference to the Shiri Applyby film, Swimfan.

Tomorrow the pilot of IDOJ, "The Lady In the Bottle," airs at 2:30 pm CDT, and on Friday at 9:30 am CDT.