This is the final episode. The first thing is we kinda returned to Liz’s voice-over at the end. It started that way with the pilot episode, it was bookended with her writing into her diary. The first few episodes continued that then we gave that device up. Always had kinda mixed feelings about giving it up. I think when we stopped doing that voice-over, it sort of signalled a kind of change in the show that we were moving away from a certain point of view which was this young girl who falls in love with this guy who turns out to be an alien. It was sort of seeing it all through her eyes &, to me, made it kinda relatable. So we sort of gave that up because it started to feel forced because a lot of the story lines didn’t really come in through her point of view. We gave it up & returned to it in a few moments throughout the series & then I just thought that at the end it was appropriate too. It felt right to come back to it to open & close the show with her voice-over.

The other thing that you just sort of saw is this idea that Liz is starting to have visions & this sort of comes to a whole interesting turn the series was taking and this episode, the final episode, is essentially condensing an idea that we had for what the show might have been had we been able to do a 4^th season.

Roswell’s a show that was unfortunately what’s referred to in the business as a "bubble" show. It was constantly on the bubble, meaning we never knew whether we were going to get picked up for the back nine or the next season or that season or whatever, you know.

We were always on the bubble, literally from the time we did the pilot, it was supposed to be with Fox & we wound up with the WB. I kinda got used to being on the bubble and living there & any case, the final season of Roswell, towards the end of the season, we were again on the bubble & the writers were trying to figure out ways to see if we can breathe new life into the series & get the network or a network excited about bringing it back for the 4^th season which, of course, we didn’t wind up doing but our idea was to change the show a little bit.

It kinda came from a couple of episodes we did. One being the Christmas episode in the 2^nd season when Max healed all these kids with cancer.

 Isabel & Jesse’s Apartment

What I always liked about that episode was that Max was doing something to help others as opposed to always being about saving his own ass & their own asses which, that was good too, running away from the Government & all that stuff. But there was something emotional about him helping other people.

So, in any case, that was our notion about what the 4^th season should be if we could get a 4^th season was that that’s what they started to do. They basically left Roswell because they had to leave Roswell because, ultimately they no longer had a cover there. You know, they were no longer able to hide in plain sight. The idea was that they were going to leave Roswell and these flashes that she got into the future, clairvoyance, inspire them to go out & actually help people. They were almost compelled to do it and would be doing that as they were being chased by some larger force. You know, some kind of Government agency or something like that that we would create.

It would basically take the show on the road & change its format a little bit into trying to breathe new life into it. We were really excited about the idea but it just wasn’t on the cards for the show to continue.

What we wound up having to do, Ron & I, when we wrote this episode, is to take what we had. We sort of envisaged something that would take a lot of time to kind of reveal itself & we had to tell a whole story in one episode. With a beginning, a middle & an end. Basically that’s she’s clairvoyant, that they were uncovered in, that their cover’s blown in Roswell & that they have to leave & that ultimately they have this plan to kind of go off & try to help people. There’s some sense of kind of hope that they could do it.

So we had to condense it all in one episode so that was sort of like the challenge that we had to do this & of course, we were trying to track all the stories not just Liz’s clairvoyance but, the previous scene, Isabel’s marriage hitting a moment of transition, Liz going off to college and Kyle trying to figure out his future, Maria feeling like she’s kinda blown everything.

And, of course, this is all happening when they’re in this very, very dangerous situation of being exposed as we see in this scene.

You know, it’s funny, when you watch an episode after time away from it, there are things that kinda deliver on the promise that you thought they would have when you broke the story & then there are bits that weren’t that successful. Unfortunately, in this episode, this aspect of it, these guys over here was not the most successful aspect of this episode because, as I said, we had to crush it all into one episode.

We were going to create these great enemies & adversaries, the bad guys. Had all these ideas for that. What was behind this Government agency, what they were doing, but unfortunately, it all had to be condensed into a few scenes &, you know, it came off a little arch but c’est la vie.

The thing that really does work in this episode that I’m very proud of is this kind of scene. There is the emotion between the characters, between our main characters that sort of comes through & Max & Liz, you know, sort of rediscovering each other.

You know, it’s funny, those little flashes, there that we saw of everybody being killed.

What’s funny about that is to me, not funny, is that we shot those particular shots on stage on the last day of shooting & it was next to the last scene so you’ve got to imagine these people, these actors involved on the show for 3 years doing their characters & we all knew that the show was coming to an end & this was it & they all had to go up there in front of the camera & basically fall down dead & there was something so surreal about it. When I went to the set on the last day just to see what was going on that’s what I walked in on & all these characters taking a bullet in the head basically.

So again, essentially, what I like about this story is we were able to activate all the characters and give them all a little story & I like episodes like that.

This actress playing this role is very significant to me, playing the role of Madame Vivien. That’s Winnie Holzman who is a wonderful writer. She created "My So-Called Life" which was my first job in television. My first job out in LA. I came out from New York to write on it. So Winnie was like my boss. It was quite an incredible experience for me. I always think of it as graduate school for me because I learned so much from her.

I wrote this role, Madame Vivien, I think she actually came up earlier, she was in an episode in the 2^nd season & when I was writing this we thought that this episode was really all about the future. It was about what was going to be. This was what we were thinking about. We wanted to send ourselves off & the audience off with some kind of feeling about what was going to happen to these people. And so that became a recurrent theme in the episode. All about telling the future so we have the fortune teller here & of course, we have Liz’s clairvoyant flashes. In any case, I thought it would be great to bring Winnie back & write her into the episode & because it works thematically with what we’re doing in the story.

And so here what we see is these guys. Obviously, the bad guys are getting to the bottom of this. Now what we’re watching is the last vestiges of their cover being blown & they’re really getting the goods on them.

This kind of scene with Liz & Max having these flashes through getting hard & heavy together, it sort of harkens back to Sexual Healing which was another theme that we played with. That we sort of talked about on the show which was always kind of like interesting & fun. It again, the idea of what would it be like to have sex with an alien (chuckles), that was really what the question is. It’s what I love about the show because it’s all about, it all comes down to be a metaphor for adolescence. For when we’re, in this case, discovering who we are, discovering sexuality, discovering all this stuff. It’s all new, it’s all for the first time. Again the notion of having sex with an alien is a metaphor for just having sex as a teenager. For what it’s like to enter those waters.

This was shot out in Vasquez Rocks. We did a lot of desert footage & at some point you’ll see a wide shot with this beautiful other-worldly looking landscape. You see like a little bit of it here but it’ll get to it in a wide shot. There it is. You know this is where the exterior of the pod chamber was when we had that. It’s where they always had a lot of their secret meetings. It’s a great location.

We shot this a couple of days before we were done shooting the final episode. I went out there & one of the unfortunate parts of running the show is you don’t get to the set enough, you don’t get on location enough & unfortunately I rarely did get out here but you know I was sort of done writing & I was able to come out on this day & watch all these scenes being shot.

I had this weird moment out there where I was walking off the set and I saw this group of people, probably about 15 – 20 people standing out there. Sort of standing in a circle. They looked like it was a tour or something, you know, like a group going on a tour. And then, you know, I’m like walking past them, I’m like 20 feet away & one of them waves at me like they know me. So I walk over & it turns out it was a group of fans of the show who had come out because they knew the show was ending & they literally came from all over the country. They decided to meet there, for no reason, they just kinda like … & you know, it was also supposed to be very, like that always cracked me up, you know, it was all supposed to be very secretive. Where we were shooting, the scripts, nobody was supposed to know what was in the scripts, where we were shooting our schedules. Nobody was supposed to know all that stuff and somehow, of course, they did.

This by the way is one of my favourite scenes (Maria shouting at Liz) of the show. Like I feel Majandra, in that, throughout much of the final season, she was kinda frustrated, felt like she didn’t really have a role on the show & she got frustrated with that. And I don’t blame her. Sort of what happens some times when you go on in the series, you know, you kind of lose the characters for a while & you find them again.

I love this scene because she’s so good in this scene and so’s Shiri, you know. I really feel the love for them and I also think Majandra’s so lost here. It sort of reminds me how she kind of felt on the show. Was she part of this or wasn’t she part of it but this is the kind of moment that I really like.

One of the things I love so much & I really used it more in Roswell & really kind of than on anything else & really embraced it was music. Using music, not just a score but using songs in a score like way. Using songs to sort of bring out the interiors of what’s going on between the characters & bring out the emotion. I think it’s one of the most powerful things you can do in film-making & to me it’s, personally, it’s just so exciting. I thought this was the great use of a song here (the DVD replacement for My Sundown by Jimmy Eats World) because it’s bringing together all these little scenelets of all the conflicts & the idea of leaving home. Course this is what this song is all about, saying goodbye to your home town.

Then you have this moment here between these two brothers (Max & Michael) essentially which I always love these scenes of understated love between men. It’s very hard for us to say what’s on our mind emotinally & to be there in a moment like this of that understated emotion always gets me.

There’s another great thing about that scene. If you rewind & look back, the shot of Michael walking up to Max & you look at his right hand, you’ll see this little white thing sticking out of his sleeve.

That’s a cast (laughs) and Brendan, just because things can never be simple and to prove that to the final moment of doing Roswell, nothing could ever be simple. He was, I believe he was playing hockey, but he, like, broke his arm & this was during this shoot and suddenly we had 2 days or 3 days left to shoot & he walks in with this big cast on his arm (laughs). So if you see that, you can actually see we had to shoot around that. When he hugs Majandra earlier in the scene he has this one arm hug & in that previous scene when he hugs Max, he can only hug him with one hand & you can actually see, that’s the one moment when you can actually see the cast.

What’s nice about this episode for me is that you have all these storylines going at once. You have these very emotional storylines going on, you have this kind of thing of the danger & the idea of them being chased. We didn’t have enough time to really develop the bad guys so they come off a little arch but still it provides what we need to keep the story going.

In the 2^nd season we started developing this mythology about The Skins. They were sort of like this great enemy. It started in the first episode & went through the 5^th, 6^th episode of the 2^nd season then we sort of abandoned it & I kind of regret abandoning that because I felt like we sort of introduced this mythology that was really interesting, that could have been developed & it could of ultimately been an enemy that was complex & really as complex as our main characters. What happened was that we went away from that for whatever reasons. I think we got a no from the network or something.

I don’t even know what it was but when we moved away from that I felt like what happened is you start to lose a sort of sense of consistency in your vision & that’s always kind of dangerous to do that. And it sort of results in the enemies in this particular episode are sort of arbitrary.

Along the way, we had some really good enemies. Nasedo was the best one which started in about the middle of the first season & went through the end of the first season.

 We wanted to get to somewhere between these two because we felt the audience deserved to know what was going to happen with Max & Liz. I didn’t think it was fair to just send them off not really knowing. I remember seeing this happen in Superman when I was a kid in the show where he turned coal into a diamond & that always like stuck with me. Like the magic of that, the power of that & so I thought it was a cool idea here & I thought it would be this very romantic gesture.

Getting back to the other thing, again, had we stayed with a consistent enemy I think it would have helped us over time to feel more tension. Those 6 or 7 episodes at the end of the 1^st season was the best example of when we were really doing that well. You sort of had Nasedo, you had the Government, you had all that stuff going on & it was very, it felt very dangerous & very real because of that.

(Stays quiet while Max is proposing to Liz)

When we did this scene you just kind of expect that this scene’s going to be great. You know it’s gonna be great because their chemistry is so good together but then watching it a few years later & seeing how good they are together, you know that doesn’t come off …. it’s not that easy for that to happen. When you have chemistry, we were very lucky with the two of them, what great chemistry the two of them have together on the screen. For 3 years they could still do a scene like that & could still kinda get you. That’s pretty amazing.

This is a nice scene here, shot really well. It was interesting because I remember the other thing that happened was I think, it’s hard to remember exactly, but what happened was our order had been cut by a couple of episodes in that final season, I believe. It often happens when you sort of know, when the network knows they’re not going to pick up the show. It’s a way, I guess, to save money. So they cut us a couple of episodes so Ron & I had to write this really fast. Again, now that I’m remembering it, we had to condense what we were going to do in 3 or 4 episodes into a couple which is another reason why we didn’t have enough time to develop those kind of bad guys’ characters.

But in any case, the other thing that happened, because our order was cut by a couple of episodes is the director who directed the final episode, this episode, is Allison Liddi (-Brown) who’d never directed the show before which was not something that we intended. I think probably Patrick Norris was going to direct the final one but then we were, you know, the order was cut so Allison Liddi wound up directing our series finale, who was somebody we never had worked with before & at the time I don’t think she had directed a ton of stuff but she came through for us.

She did really a terrific job with the script that we gave her. I mean I think that she really sort of got just about every moment there was to get.

You know, it’s always tough on television when you’re working on TV budgets to do a big set piece like this. First of all you’ve got a Graduation, then you gotta make it look like there’s several hundred more people in that audience than what you really have & she did this here using a lot of long lens stuff & gave it a real sense of size & scope.

You know, there’s so much to do in this scene. There’s a lot of extras, there’s a lot of coverage, then you have to get .. because all the characters are in it, lighting effects which can be very timely. There’s an action sequence coming up. That’s a lot of stuff to do & she did a really good job & particularly, I thought she did a good job with the speech that comes up, the way that it’s shot.

It starts with him sort of just like a guy walking up to this podium & eventually she gives this moment over to him, to the actor & really lets him basically have his farewell to everybody. And of course this is working on several levels. Well, if it works for you, it’s on several levels. The one level being that Max is basically using this as a way to sacrifice himself & save his friends & family who are in danger, so that’s sort of like the plot level. But then there’s all these other levels which is he’s saying goodbye. He’s using it as a way of saying goodbye to those people & goodbye to his parents & he’s also using it as a way to sort of come out in a sense of who he is, who he really is.

The point when we knew this was going to be the final episode, I also thought that his words can also sort of bid farewell to the show in a way. And this is what I’m talking about where Allison has now taken this moment & really just made it his. Time just gets suspended here.

These kinds of speeches are the kind of speeches that Jason Behr kills, you know. He’s just so great. When I watch this, I think about like the Pilot when he tells Liz that speech when they were in the classroom & he tells Liz that he’s from up North (chuckles). It’s so real. I’m always impressed with how he invested himself in this & didn’t play it like a silly alien show, played it real.

 The Desert

So this is, as I was saying before, we get to this idea that what we were hoping to do over the 4^th season. That it would become about them going off together. Oh there, that’s where you see the one-armed hug because his arm’s broken. But, in any case, this is sort of where the idea kind of formed here & you see it beginning to happen, the scene of their disproving what Michael had said earlier which is "We’re stronger separately than we are together" & I guess they’re sort of saying whether or not it’s true, it doesn’t matter, that they need each other & they’re gonna be together which, of course, you’d like to believe is true.

This relationship (Isabel & Jesse) with Adam Rodrigues – Jesse & Katy, it really was something that I was very happy with in the 3^rd year that Katy really had a chance to do scenes like this & do real scenes where .. you know, it started out her character was the least developed of all the main characters & I felt like, by the end, we’d put her in this mature relationship & something that she could really invest in & really give her both joy & pain. She was able to do emotional work & go to a deeper place &, of course, she would really deliver on it & she did a wonderful job with it. So that was something that I was happy about because I know that was something that had been a frustration to her. You know, she wanted to play different kinds of things. She didn’t always want to play the bitch or be the tough one. She wanted to do other things as well & I think we were able to give her the material in the 3^rd season. She really did a great job with it.

These guys are just great! I mean any scenes between these two was always either funny or emotional, I mean whatever you wanted from it. Usually very funny. Again, this is sort of this understated love.

I was thinking, when I was watching this scene the other day to prepare for this, that it was so great to see Valenti back in a uniform. In a way though , I thought it was a great idea that he had lost his badge, that it was a great turn & sent his character into a different direction. I was thinking that I wasn’t so sure it was the best idea because seeing him back as the sheriff, you know, it’s what he’s meant to be in a way. It gives him a power that he kind of lost when we took it away from him.

And so now it’s basically as I said before where we’re returning to this voice-over thing & here, what we’re seeing is the words were being read by her father.

So she’s actually given him her diary. The diary which she’s kept since the Pilot episode which is another way of ending the show. It’s like she’s given him that & she’s sort of done with that part of her life.

You know this is just one of those images that you have when you’re breaking a story, when you’re writing. When you know where you’re going to end, it always helps you in writing it & I sort of knew, in writing this story, that I wanted to get to.. I wanted to get to this image of them being married & driving away in the van. Had those bumper stickers made up. Still have one somewhere.

There you go – Roswell, coming soon to a theatre near you, kidding!