Once, long ago, the WB and UPN both aired a show called Roswell, about alien teenagers going to
high school and trying to fit in. Now their successor network, The CW, has
launched a new “aliens in high school” show, Star-Crossed. But how does it stack up?
https://gizmodo.com/roswell-the-best-late-90s-alien-teen-soap-opera-on-the-5641730
The premise. Roswell was about young aliens hiding out
in Roswell, NM, who had survived a UFO crash and were now going to high school
— and we eventually learned they were clones of the Royal Four on their
homeworld, Antar. They kept their alien heritage secret from the FBI and
alien-hunters, while trying to learn their own forgotten history.
Meanwhile, in Star-Crossed,
everybody knows the aliens are aliens — and in fact, it’s more like District 9, except with ridiculously
good-looking underwear models instead of inhuman creatures. The aliens crashed
on Earth 10 years ago, fleeing their dying homeworld, and now they’re forced to
live in the “Sector,” a kind of refugee camp. But seven alien
teenagers are enlisted to go to the human high school, where they are bullied
and threatened with castration by the guidance counselor because they have
tattoo-like markings. (Yes, just like Beastly.)
https://gizmodo.com/new-tween-drama-teaches-us-that-tattoos-are-for-ugly-pe-5414869
Basically, Star-Crossed
more or less starts out with one of the members of En Vogue stepping in
front of the camera and saying, “Prejudice. Made a TV show about it. Wanna
see it? Here it goes.”
The love triangle. In
Roswell, the main triangle was Liz
and Max — Liz is the human who discovers Max’s secret and then tells a couple
of her friends. She and Max have a torrid relationship — but then it turns out
that Max and Tess are the clones of a husband and wife, back on Antar. So maybe
Max and Tess are destined to be together?
In Star-Crossed,
the love triangle is between a girl and two boys, because we’re living in the
post-Twilight era. Emery is a
kind-hearted 16-year-old who met an alien boy named Roman on the night the
alien ship crash-landed, and now she meets him again when he comes to her high
school. But meanwhile, Emery also has a thing for the adorably dorky Grayson,
who just transferred to her school a year earlier, and thus isn’t entrenched in
the popular kids’ clique.
Emery is torn between the two boys — but just like
Roswell’s triangle is really about Max’s destiny, the Star-Crossed love triangle is also a proxy for Emery’s divided
loyalties. Does she stand with her dad,the hard-working cop who helps to run the refugee camp, and with the
popular kids clique at school that inexplicably put out the welcome mat for
her? Or does she stand with the oppressed aliens, who are mistreated and shot
at and picketed and punched, but unable to fight back? (She winds up saving
Roman instead of running away with her friends in the pilot, which will
probably have consequences.)
The fateful healing. In
the pilot of Roswell, Max heals Liz
after she gets fatally shot, using his alien healing powers — and that leads
to her finding out he’s an alien, starting the whole business in motion. (For
some reason, ketchup doesn’t fool her into thinking she didn’t get shot.) But
Max’s healing changes Liz, making her into something other than a normal human
teenager.
In Star-Crossed, Emery
spent four years in a hospital before just recently being allowed to go to high
school. And her hospital buddy is Julia, who is dying of cancer with apparently
no possible treatment options left. Emery and Julia sneak inside the alien
compound, looking for a mythical herb called Ciper, which can cure anything —
only to be told it’s basically saffron. But after Emery risks everything to
save Roman, he sneaks into the hospital and uses the herb, plus some of his glowy
alien blood, to heal Julia, apparently curing her cancer.
The relatively neat thing in the Star-Crossed pilot is that Roman healing Julia has more personal consquences
than just someone discovering his secret or being changed — because Roman
stays out after curfew, his muckety-muck dad goes looking for him, and winds up
getting shot by Emery’s dad. That’s going to be awkward.
The power-mad aliens.
In Roswell, the big lurking storm
cloud is Kivar, the evil alien who wants to prevent the four hybrids from
taking their rightful places of rulership on Antar. (Plus other assorted
baddies who want to stop them or capture them.)
In Star-Crossed,
the big threat is partly just that humans will be so evil, we’ll crush the poor
aliens under our Lands-End boots. But also, there are alien conspirators who
want to rise up and put the humans into camps, instead of the other way around.
They want to crush the humans with superior alien technology. (Question: How
many Adarians are there? Like 100? 1000? Also, their technology didn’t really
help them when they first landed and the humans shot a bunch of them, right?)
All in all, this show makes a strong bid to be your new
guilty pleasure. And you never know, given a few more episodes, it might
actually turn into something better than that. Like the new Roswell, for example.
