Love is in the desert air of Roswell this week, reminding viewers that, no matter how repressed or extraterrestrial they might be, these characters are still teenagers. Even Sheriff Valenti feels the romantic urge.

Written by Jason Katims (series creator)
Directed by Patrick Norris

Dianne Farr - Amy De Luca

It's rare to see so many introverted people on television.

Even more than film, which has its occasional moments of Bergman introspection and loneliness, television is a medium that excels at portraying extroverts. TV characters are larger than life, loud, demonstrative, always willing to express whatever's on their mind in the most dramatic mode possible.

It's easier to write demonstrative characters -- all the writer has to do to create an episode is to create a situation and the characters will be sure to solve it themselves, keeping the viewers informed exactly how they feel about everything all the time.

And it's relatively easy for a performer to get the viewer's attention with a demonstrative, flashy character. So much of what passes for "great acting" on television these days is little more than over-the-top histrionics -- big emotions, big feelings, larger than life -- that many viewers assume that a performer's not Acting unless she's providing a moment of intense melodrama.

Extroverts chew scenery, in other words.

Roswell, on the other hand, is full of characters who are nothing like that. Out of the burgeoning ensemble cast -- seven teenagers, Sheriff Valenti, Deputy "Horse," parents, Topolsky and the agents -- only the effervescent Maria could be considered extroverted in any way. Everyone else is passive, self-conscious, reserved.

One natural result of this, of course, is that Maria gets all the good lines and serves as the freest human plot device, the wild card who gets the ordinarily more cautious characters around her into trouble. By comparison to Liz if nothing else, she's the "wacky friend" she always wanted to be.

Another natural result -- for better or worse -- is that Roswell is far more meditative than the typical teen soap opera that many of its detractors and casual fans want it to be.

At least in part, the show crawls because close to 90 percent of its starring roles cannot bring themselves to do anything unplanned or truly spontaneous. They fear change too much to embrace it. Instead, they hang back, studying each other, waiting for someone to make a move so they can get their allotted 45 minutes of plot out of the way for another week.

Max is the poster boy for mopey self-consciousness -- we see it again in this episode when he defeats the effects of the weird heat wave of love by thinking about how terrible it would be if things went wrong, or if things went right. Either way, he's convinced that change means pain, so it's taken him nine episodes -- three months, in Roswell time -- to even kiss Liz.

Actually, of course, that's the tip of the iceberg, so to speak. It that it took him ten years to even talk to her, after all.

The other aliens are the same way, paralyzed at the idea of doing anything that might jeopardize their secret lives in any real way, but they hide it better. You've heard all the psychoanalysis before -- Michael's a loner, a rebel, and Alex has Isabel pegged -- but the significant thing is that a series usually has just the one introvert.

We rarely see so many cautious people together on television; it's like a cat convention.

This can be frustrating to those who expect to see a lot of events, emotional explosions and noisy drama in their hour of television. If you overlook the aliens, instead of television, Roswell is giving us something that looks a lot more like real life -- muddled, rarely exciting, guarded.

That's not for everyone.

Could Valenti be Maria's father? He and Mom De Luca clearly have some sort of romantic past going on.

For that matter, if Valenti has alien blood (as many have speculated), would this make Maria half- (or quarter-) alien? Could she be Michael's cousin? Would that be weird?

Does Roswell have any actual police units, or does the (usually rural) sheriff's department handle all the usual law enforcement functions?

Ninety degree weather, while unseasonable for December, isn't exactly something to get worked up about in the Southwest.