Fanfic Flashback: Divergence

This was an idea for a fan fiction story that I had been mulling over for a long time before I finally started to set it down on New Year’s eve, 2004, with the encouragement of a great friend in the Roswell fandom community, TrueLovePooh. In fact, it was actually one of those stories that had two ideas thrown together to see what became of them.

The first idea was ‘what if Alex’s death was faked by aliens?’ The way that Colin Hanks’ character, Alex Whitman, was killed off the show has always been a downward turning point in my mind – I understand some of the reasons that Ronald Moore did it, he was trying to help free Colin up for more movie work, and had the story about a high school friend of his dying in a car accident to work with – but Colin wouldn’t have wanted to do movies if they’d been able to write better plots for Alex. But anyway…

The second premise was a bit less easy to sum up, but at the end of season two, Tess (Emilie de Ravin) is pregnant with Max’s baby, and apparently can’t carry it safely in Earth’s atmosphere, so the entire gang is about to follow her off to an alien planet on the Granolith, a powerful and much sought-after alien device that can be used as a spaceship, when suddenly Liz and the other human friends discover that Tess tricked Max and is in league with the bad’uns. Uncertain whether the bit about having to leave for the sake of the baby is true or not, Max allows Tess to board the Granolith alone.

Now, I can understand some of the reasons for that choice, but it seems poorly thought out when you realize that in the mythology of the show, this way of saving the baby involves letting Tess hand a powerful weapon over to Max’s alien enemies, a device that had already been used to rewrite the past. So, in ‘Divergence’, Michael and Isabel go with Tess, planning to find some safe situation for Tess to have the baby in, and then use the Granolith to come back home to Roswell. In the meantime, while waiting for them to arrive, Max and Liz discover that there’s yet more to learn about Alex’s ‘death’…

It’s one of my favorite stories, and kicked off a great series that led to the entire cast of characters leaving Earth for good and trying to find a home among the stars.