Ron Moore Answers Roswell Questions (01/26/2004)

I would like to extend a huge “thank you” to the folks over at Galactica2003.net for taking a few minutes of their precious time during an interview they conducted with Ron Moore on Monday to ask him a few questions compiled by the moderators of the Roswell boards on Media Blvd. Thanks also to Mr. Moore for answering them.

The Roswell questions and answers can be found here: Moore on Roswell. Enjoy!

Moore’s Thoughts on Roswell
Interview conducted by Farvoyager on January 26, 2004

Why didn’t we get to see more of the Dupes?
Oh, I wanted to. I talked about doing them some more. We never quite came up with a story that we really liked for bringing them back. But if we’d gone to a fourth season we probably would have seen more.

Why didn’t we see more of Kivar?
Uh, Kivar… yeah, well, heh, he just wasn’t one of our more successful ideas. He didn’t quite… I dunno, it didn’t quite gel with the writers. We never really got a great handle on Kivar exactly, how that worked, and who he was, and we just… I dunno, somehow Kivar was better off camera than he was on camera. Like, it seemed like a better sort of device that there was this guy out there someplace, and you could sort of talk about him, but bringing him into the here and now just didn’t seem to satisfy.

When was the decision made to make Tess Alex’s Killer? And why Tess?
Well, it was “why Tess” because we were starting to work towards the idea of Tess leaving the show, and you know… that Max would have to make a decision, and to sort of underline ultimately that she was evil in… and I think, I’m trying to remember now, I think that we came up with that, that part of the plan after we had done the episode. And it was one of things, it was just sort of a breakthrough thing that came from the writers as we got further into the plot and we were starting to talk about, you know, things we would never forgive Tess for, and killing Alex was really one of them.

In season one and the beginning of season two she was becoming more in tune with her human side after Nasedo was killed, then she came out of nowhere as the deceitful alien. Why?
Well, the idea was more like, we wanted her to. And she wasn’t so much in tune with her human side, she was just getting better at it — she just sort of got better at blending in. She was always after Max, that was sort of a constant. Her thing was to get Max and to have a baby by Max, and that was always the motivation, so she just got better at being appealing really, rather than suddenly having a change of heart. At least that’s how we saw it as the writers. And I should correct something I said earlier: Now that I remember, we did decide that Tess had killed Alex before we did that episode. That’s one of the things that made that episode work… that Tess had done it ultimately.

Was Kyle ever considered as a love interest for Isabel?
Uh, yes. We did go down that road a little bit. At least, we were starting to go down that road, the last season…

Did you envision continuing down that road?
We probably would have kept playing it a little bit more, yeah.

Was the character Jesse accepted like you had hoped or did you ever regret introducing Jesse in to the show?
Never regretted introducing him. I remember there was some resistance on the part of the fans for some bizarre reason. I always thought he worked really well in the show, he had a good dynamic with Isabel and we got some great comedy out of the fact that he didn’t know. It was like “oh, there’s somebody in the regular cast who doesn’t know. This is fun.” I mean, it was great stuff, there at the wedding, it was a great episode, the “I Married an Alien” episode was fantastic… Jesse was a really good addition I thought.

If you could go back and change one story line in the show, what would it be and why?
It would probably be before I got there. It would probably — I think the writing staff also would choose it – it’s where the Network stepped in, in the middle of the first season and said “we want more action and we want more hard science fiction.” The show really sort of fundamentally changes, and not really for the better. The first half of year one with Jason was playing with this alien aspect, and was much more metaphor than it was action, and those early episodes just had a great feel to them and they were really intriguing to watch. When you get to the point where the Network’s insisting that they want more hard core scifi and then you end the first season by saying — when the hologram shows up and mom says – well, you’re the king and the trusted soldier, and you’re the sister, and there’s a planet back there and there’s rebellion.. .from that point forward the whole show just changes. ‘Cause suddenly these kids, you know, have these larger responsibilities to the planet that nobody has seen or cares about, the show is much more hard-core scifi, and it’s developing the powers to fight the battles. They stop becoming high school kids, even though we still tried desperately to keep them high school kids and we really were more interested in the relationships in the show and how they were as people than we were the alien aspects of them. That would be the big thing I’d go back and change.

What episode pleased you more than any other and why?
I think that the Alex dies episode is probably my favorite. It just was very emotional — the kids seemed to play the death of on of their friends very honestly, and it had a lot of punch to it. I really liked the way the different characters reacted to the way it happened and how it affected them, and what Alex meant to all of them. It seemed like it wasn’t just cliché; it was really an emotional episode, the actors all really liked it, it was well directed and I think everyone was very pleased with that episode.

What can we expect from future DVDs?
I have no idea.

Will there be more outakes?
I know they’re doing a DVD release and I don’t know anything about it.

And you don’t know if there will be more commentaries, or…
I don’t know.

If Roswell were airing new episodes today, where would the podsters and their friends be?
They would all be in San Francisco, where they were gonna go. They were gonna take that van, the “Mystery Machine” as we called it, and they were gonna take that van to San Francisco and they were gonna start new lives.

Sounds like a plan to me. Why was Jim Valenti left behind in Roswell?
It didn’t seem like he would– Jim was a guy who– he was the sheriff, and it seemed like he wanted to take him back to that. He didn’t ask for any of this. He started off as their antagonist; he became their friend. He wasn’t a guy who seemed like he would go out on the road with them, and just, you know, say “come what may and whatever adventures may happen”. It seemed like he should get his badge back and he should go back to being sheriff, and it seemed like the right end for his story.

Why did you stop using Liz’s journal entry voice over at the beginning of episodes?
I dunno. That just sort of fell away. It just didn’t seem… it was nice when we came back to it later in the last season. Yeah, I don’t really know why we stopped doing that. It just didn’t fit into the show for awhile.

What was the reason for splitting up Maria and Michael in season three and do you think looking back that it was a good idea?
It seemed to work, and it also mirrored their off camera relationship. I mean, [chuckle] it was like the actors were on-again/off-again and their characters were on-again/off-again.

“Busted” was a very different season opener than the previous two. Why such a drastic change?
New network, we were trying to revitalize the show, we wanted to surprise and shock the audience, and we just wanted to sort of move things into a different gear. We were all very aware that we were on the bubble which the show had been from the very beginning, and we wanted to grab the audience and try to move forward, and make it a success.

Why did Liz never explain to Max about the visit from Future Max in “The End of the World”?
Well, Future Max told her not to, as I recall. And, you know, with the classic sort of time travel thing, you never let a person– you don’t give the people in the past too much knowledge of the future. And Elizabeth– I think that Liz eventually did tell Max about Future Max, if I’m not mistaken. I think eventually she did.

Paradox situation. Yeah.

Were you happy with the way Roswell ended in “Graduation” or would you have liked more episodes leading up to the end?
Oh, we could have used a few more episodes. I mean, they cut our order short. We were gonna have– we were gonna have a few more, I can’t remember what they were, but we were counting on another like 2 or 3 episodes that would have given us time to really lay in some more things to pave the history, and the final episode had a certain rushed feeling to it, because, you know, at first it was gonna be a two-hour finale and then we were given a one hour finale without there being more episodes leading up to it than we did, so we had to sort of, we didn’t get to do as much as we would have liked to in the last show.

Okay, anything else you would like to say to Roswell fans?
I miss it. It was a great show. I really enjoyed it, and you know, I miss those characters and I miss working on Roswell.