Roswell Season 3

[angrycowboy]

• At the end of season 2, Max, Isobel and Michael discovered a secret alien trapped in the turquoise mines along with a pod he'd stayed in. He's called Jones, and he looks exactly like Max.
  
• They learn a number of important secrets from Jones about their history; their planet was called The Oasis, and their species is Oasian. Michael and Isobel's mothers led a rebellion against an immortal dictator leading their world, called the Tyrant.
  
• They also discover turquoise which appears to have been altered by the crashed spaceship. Michael studies the turquoise, and discovers that it amplifies the properties of anything that carries an electric current, and as a result it amplifies the aliens' powers. It can also create and manipulate the alien glass that Michael has spent his life studying.
  
• Jones claims to be the Savior, an alien with remarkable healing powers whom the Tyrant used as a weapon. He claims Max is one of many clones, and that Michael and Isobel's mothers had kidnapped him to do harm to him.
  
• Jones is later revealed to be twisting the truth; he is the Tyrant, and his immortality is assured through his clones, whose bodies he possesses when the time is right. Michael and Isobel's mothers had destroyed the science used to make the clones, and kidnapped Max, the last clone, to keep him safe.
  
• Jones had also told them that one of the Tyrant's abilities was that fire can't hurt him. After growing suspicious, Michael sets his own hand on fire and discovers that he's fireproof. He confronts Jones, who admits that he is the Tyrant's son and heir.
  
• Later, Michael is able to catch a weapon that is genetically keyed to Jones and kills anyone else who touches it. Michael realises that he must be related to Jones, and that Jones is really the Tyrant and Michael's father. This also means that Michael's genetic father is Max.
  
• Michael struggles with the reality of who his father is and worries that his own anger issues mean he is too much like Jones. Alex reminds him that he is always looking for a reason to hate himself, and says that if Michael is his father, then Alex is his. The two of them grow closer, and their romantic connection starts to rekindle.
  
• Michael also grows closer to Rosa. He apologises to her for the events surrounding her death and admits that he had always carried guilt for how the community turned on her afterwards; he says none of them thought about what it would mean to put Rosa in the driver's seat of the crashed car. Rosa forgives him, and later he works to help her control her developing alien powers.
  
• While they still trust him, Jones convinces Max to allow him to heal him, as his body is dying due to rejecting Noah's heart. Jones uses the moment to switch bodies with Max, which the others do not discover for some time.
  
• Meanwhile, Maria has been having visions that someone close to them all is going to die, and that they will cover it up, indicating an alien connection. Eventually they realise that the coffin in her visions bears the name Valenti.
  
• The gang work to protect Kyle. Michael volunteers to babysit Kyle during this time and they get more friendly. They also repair an old radio that Kyle's father had left for him. When Kyle later goes missing, Michael blames himself.
  
• At the same time, Maria has fallen into a coma caused by Jones. Michael asks Alex to help him investigate Kyle's radio, suspecting it has something to do with what's going on. Alex, who is working in secret for the organisation Deep Sky, realises that the radio is similar to the Lockhart Machine in Deep Sky. Michael gets angry with him for not helping, but talks to Sanders about the radio instead, and with his help discovers that the signal from it leads to Deep Sky's building.
  
• Alex has been investigating what's happening himself and discovers that Kyle is the nephew of his boss at Deep Sky. His boss is revealed to have found a comatose Kyle and is taking care of him.
  
• Alex and Michael later work together to rescue Max, who is trapped in Jones' body and held inside his pod, from Jones while the latter is engaged in a psychic battle inside Maria's mind. Alex helps Michael to control his emotions and complete the mission successfully by telling him the story of how he lost his leg in Iraq. Alex relates letting his emotions get the better of him after an Iraqi boy he had befriended was killed. Alex tells Michael that he is a part of him that he can't bear to lose. After the mission, Michael kisses Alex and they become an official couple.
  
• Alex then gets caught up with investigating the Lockhart Machine, which causes him to have hallucinations that almost lead to him jumping to his death. Michael reaches him in time to pull him off the ledge, and they finally work on the machine together. Michael uses his powers to open the machine so that Alex can remove the technology causing it to malfunction, which is revealed to be tech created by Alex's father.
  
• The gang discover that the Lockhart Machine is coded to give a message to a specific alien, a new one that they track down to a preacher called Dallas. Michael is initially uncomfortable with speaking to him as they have very similar histories in foster care, but Alex convinces him to face his past and talk to the man. He does so, and Dallas agrees to receive the message. It reveals the key to separating Max and Jones, but unknown to Max and Isobel, it also warns Dallas that if separating them does not work, he will have to kill Max.
  
• When Sanders questions why Michael doesn't work on developing his powers, Michael admits that he inherited his father's ability to possess other people and completely control their actions. He admits to having once done it by accident, when he was angry during a fight, and that he almost killed someone because of it. He doesn't want to use those abilities because he fears becoming just like Jones. Sanders tells him that there is no darkness in him, which is later reinforced by Max and Isobel. Michael later successfully uses the ability to push Jones out of the Sheriff's head when he is controlling her.
  
• Michael also builds handcuffs to inhibit Jones' powers, but he and the others are pulled into Jones' mindscape before he can use them. Jones is shown able to invade the minds of all the others, but Michael resists him. Jones shatters Isobel's sword, and the shards embed into Dallas' chest and neck. Jones then kidnaps Michael to try and break into his mind.
  
• Michael manages to break into Jones' mind first, discovering that he had killed his Triad to gain power, and that he wants the Lockhart machine. They fight, and Michael almost escapes, but Jones injures him and then attacks Sanders. He then finally gets into Michael's head, seeing images of his love for Alex and the Lockhart Machine. He stabs Michael and then leaves. Maria's visions lead her to Michael and she's able to staple his wound together before he bleeds out.
  
• Michael goes to the Deep Sky facility, where everyone else had taken Dallas so that Kyle could operate and save his life. Jones is threatening the rest of the gang and is holding Kyle, Eduardo and Heath out a window. Michael gives him the Lockhart Machine but Jones opens Michael's wound again and lets them fall anyway. Michael, Isobel and Max manage to save them, after which Max presumably heals Michael's wound as it isn't shown to trouble him afterwards.
  
• Liz has injected Jones with a serum that will separate him and Max. They need to defeat him within the day or the serum won't be effective. Michael rigs up a machine to trap Jones and inhibit his powers, while Alex turns the Valenti radio into a copy of the Lockhart machine (which they can use to switch Max and Jones' bodies back). Michael is worried, not that their plan won't work but that it will, and he'll end up killing his own father. He admits he's afraid that he'll hate himself afterwards, and that the self-loathing will drive him and Alex apart like it had in the past. Alex reassures him that neither of them are the people they used to be.
  
• The plan works to an extent, but when bats are attracted by the infrared signal from the machine, their swarming breaks it and Jones is able to get free. Isobel fights him and Jones' sword is broken. He and Max end up struggling and in the end, it's unclear who is in which body. Liz is able to work it out from talking to them, and she shoots Max with the serum that will permanently sever his link to Jones. Jones attempts to grab hold of Max and switch back, but Michael sends a shard of the broken sword into Max's hand and he uses it to kill Jones.
  
• Afterwards, Michael and Alex meet in front of the statue of Alex's father, and reflect on their past. Alex unwraps the hand that Jesse had once broken and they walk down Main Street hand in hand, finally feeling that they've won.

Comments

[angrycowboy]

**PLACE CANON UPDATE IN SUBJECT LINE**
Michael Guerin | angrycowboy | Kerry
New Canon Point: End of Season 3, episode 13
Personality Changes: It's notable, first off, that there is a time jump of a year between the end of Season 2 and the start of Season 3. In the intervening year, Michael has grown much closer to Isobel and Max. He says that he has made a promise to himself to drink less tequila and spend more time looking after the people he loves. He recounts that in that year, Maria had dumped him, Alex had left town, there was a global pandemic and he was more broke than ever, and yet he had been happy because he had his family with the two other aliens. This positive development happens offscreen, but it informs Michael's mindset in Season 3; he has become highly protective of his friends and family, and takes more responsibility for taking care of them.

Season 3 is a significant one for Michael. He's spent his whole life not knowing where he and his people come from or what they were running from when they came to Earth. In this season, he gets those answers, but he struggles greatly with what's revealed. He discovers that his father was the Tyrant who had killed so many of his people, who his and Isobel's mother had been rebelling against and running away from when they came to Earth. Throughout the season, Michael struggles with the self-loathing that he's known all his life, which finds a focal point in the fear that deep inside, he's just like his father.

It is a fear that helps to bring him closer to Alex again, because it's to Alex he looks for support when those fears overwhelm him. This is a marked difference from how he has behaved with Alex in the past; a younger Michael would've pushed Alex away when he was struggling, but this model reaches for him instead, and Alex is finally in a place to reach back. The two of them end up facing the pain of their past together, and deciding to move past it. They get back together, and spend the latter part of the season fighting for each other. By the end, they're able to face Jesse Manes' statue hand in hand, and turn their backs on it. They're more solid than they've ever been, and both are determined to make things work this time. Alex and Michael are also shown to work well together as a team; Michael is prone to losing control of his emotions, whereas Alex is more restrained, making them a good balance for each other when working together. This is notable, since in Season 1 Michael felt that he and Alex were not good for each other. Now, both of them seem stronger when they're together.

While that relationship is strengthened, Michael also learns to become more accepting of himself. Sanders has now become a father-figure to Michael, and he encourages Michael to see himself not as a bad and monstrous person, but as a very good person, who could not be more different from his father. With Sanders' encouragement, Michael reveals an ability that he first discovered at age 18, but concealed from everyone because he was afraid of what it can do. Like his father, he's able to enter another person's mind and take complete control of them. Michael finally accepts this ability, and uses it to fight against his father in the end.

He is also shown to be making deliberate efforts to let go of the troubled person that he used to be. While cleaning racist graffiti off the Ortechos' wall, he apologises to Rosa for the events surrounding her death and admits that he had always carried guilt for how the community turned on her afterwards; he says none of them thought about what it would mean to put Rosa in the driver's seat of the crashed car. Rosa forgives him, and later he works to help her control her developing alien powers. He's grown closer to Kyle Valenti as well; where in Season 1 Michael still held a grudge against Kyle for bullying Alex in High School, he now helps him when Kyle asks, and he takes it upon himself to protect him when the gang thinks his life is in danger. When Kyle goes missing, Michael takes it personally and is determined to find him, feeling that Kyle disappeared on his watch.

During the course of the season, Michael also meets a new alien 'brother', called Dallas. He's initially uncomfortable with him, in part because he's a Priest, and in part because he has a history with the foster care system that is very similar to Michael's. With Alex's encouragement, Michael opens up to Dallas about his own history, and in so doing, he faces a lot of the pain that he's done his best to bury. This is part of Michael's road to becoming more accepting of himself during this season. He still has a long way to go, but his past is no longer the taboo that it was.

One relationship that has suffered across the two years is that with Maria. She and Michael no longer appear to be close, with Maria tending to go to Isobel rather than Michael when it comes to alien matters. Their interaction is largely restricted to when one of them is in danger. When that happens, they still rush to help each other, but that is the only indication they still have any feelings for each other. In normal time, Michael is distant and short with Maria, and neither of them display any jealousy regarding Michael's rekindled relationship with Alex, or Maria's new one with Gregory. The implication is that their split at the end of Season 2 prompted Michael to push Maria away; she's no longer his confidante. This seems to reinforce Michael's longstanding issues with abandonment. He doesn't do well when people leave him, and it's something he clearly still finds it difficult to move past. This will be somewhat offset in game, since in Duplicity Maria apologised for breaking up with him and they got back together here.

As a result of everything that Michael dealt with in Season 3, I would like to update his top negative trait to Anger, rather than Untrusting. It's been made clear that the issue he has most struggled with in this season is not his difficulty with trusting people or his abandonment issues (although those are still present), but his anger, his hot temper, and his own self-loathing. Michael's anger is his greatest challenge. His temper is always liable to get him in trouble. He's not the guy for whom a cooler head ever prevails; he struggles to control his emotions, and anything negative tends to be expressed as anger even if he's predominantly feeling something else, like sadness or guilt. At this moment in time, I think this is a greater issue for him than his difficulties with trust, particularly given that he has improved his relationships with almost everyone.

Power Changes: Michael was always the alien who trained the least with his powers, and showed little interest in developing them beyond his telekinesis. In Season 3, we discover that Michael has always had more power than what he revealed to anyone, and that he inherited these abilities from his father. The following additional powers are shown:

• He is inherently fireproof. His father is also able to generate and manipulate fire, and so it's possible that Michael could learn to do that too. However, for the moment, this power has only been shown as something passive - he can't be burned, even if he covers himself with fuel first. Yes, he tried.
  
• He is a very powerful psychic. He can enter another person's mind and read their thoughts. He was able to do this to his father, who also has the ability, and who was trying to keep Michael out at the time. He is able to take control of another person's mind and command them to do what he says. He does not appear to have a passive psychic ability, i.e. the ability to hear the thoughts of everyone around him. Other characters are shown to have that ability. Michael's ability seems confined to a deliberate effort to enter a mind, though when he does, he is able to see any part of it he wants. He could also pull another person into his own mindscape, where he would have control of them. It should be noted that despite overcoming his initial rejection of the ability, Michael would still be very hesitant to use it unless he felt it was the only solution to a dire problem. I'm honestly not sure if those circumstances would ever arise in game, but just in case, I'll have a permissions post and opt in for this power.

NOTE: Season 3, episode 13 was released in the US on Monday 11 October. If you're content with this update, my intention would be for him to fall into an update coma on Monday 18 October, and return to Duplicity on Wednesday 20 October, right around the time new applicants are arriving.