which serves alien-themed dishes. At the beginning of the pilot episode, Liz is waitressing in her parents' restaurant when a disagreement between two customers breaks out. A gun is fired, and Liz is shot. We are introduced to a character named Max Evans, a seemingly normal high school student, who rushes to Liz's aid and saves her life by healing the gunshot wound with his alien abilities. The healing leaves a silver hand print on her stomach. To hide what he has done, Max pours ketchup on Liz before fleeing the scene with his friend Michael Guerin. The shooting acts as a catalyst for the rest of the series action. Liz is presented as an insatiably curious character, obtaining a sample of Max's saliva, analyzing it, and finding that his cells do not look like normal human cells. When she confronts him, Max admits that he, his sister Isabel and their friend Michael, are aliens whose spaceship crashed at Roswell in 1947. In a dialogue between other characters, we learn that Max, Isabel, and Michael had a pattern of isolating themselves from other students. A love triangle begins between Max, Liz, and Kyle Valenti (the sheriff's son whom Liz was dating). Though sworn to tell no one, Liz does divulge Max's secret to Maria in the pilot. Eventually, Alex also learns about the aliens. Secrecy and the tension that surrounds secrets become major themes of the series, important to character development, relationships, and plot. Fear of authority is another theme of the series, and the teenagers must protect the secret from antagonists who are in positions of authority: Roswell's sheriff, Jim Valenti, and a series of FBI agents. Two romances develop between human and alien characters. Liz and Max's romance is portrayed as tender and sweet, while Michael and Maria's is portrayed as passionate and often explosive. Later in the first season a tentative romance develops between Isabel and Alex. Toward the end of the season another alien character is introduced. Nasedo is a shape shifter, with a violent, murderous past. The gang initially believes that Tess Harding, the new kid in town, is Nasedo because she seems to have a strange effect on Max, but this character turns out to be a teenage alien raised by Nasedo. At the end of the season, it is revealed that Max, Isabel, Michael and Tess are clones of the "Royal Four" of