Tell us about the concept of the dupes. Did you think that idea worked?
The dupes were the grand experiment of season two. I think we got mixed results with that.
We were challenging the audience and challenging ourselves with a very wild notion that we discover that there are these alternate versions [of the Roswell Royal Four]. There were two versions of the four pods that were sent down, so for each of the alien characters there’s another version running around.
I was most tickled by the notion of looking at it as a study in sociology, because you have the group of pods that were raised in one environment in New Mexico, and then you have these other group of pods, and those guys grew up in New York and were sort of like the street version of our kids. So the most interesting part of it to me was the difference between the two of them.
It was really fun for me to watch, for example, Isabel have a scene with Lonnie, her alternative version, and see how the two of them would relate. I thought that was really fun.
I think that the other side is that it became almost too much for the audience to process. You’re already dealing with a lot, which is there are four aliens, they crashed in 1947, they were in pods for forty years, they have protectors, there are people out there who want to kill them, other aliens, we’re already dealing with a lot of information. I feel we threw a major curve ball at the audience, we took the whole premise of the show and sort of twisted it a little bit.
I have very mixed feelings about doing that because I think part of television is wanting to know the world that you’re in and to have solid footing there. We did something that was very challenging and weird and strange, and it was a fun experiment to do.
I think that the cast were both really excited and really terrified of doing this. The way television works is, unfortunately, often you don’t have a lot of time to prepare. In this particular case, for the first of those episodes, the script came in a couple of days before we had to start shooting. So we really threw something at the cast, which was just not nice of us to do because suddenly they were given a script where they had to create a whole new character for themselves, not to mention the challenge of doing an accent.
My hat is off to them for just jumping in and doing it and finding the characters on their way. I think you can see the difference in those two episodes. In the first one it was a little bit us finding our ground, the way you would do when you start a new show. Then in the second one I think that the actors were at a point where they could sort of dive in and have more fun with it.
