Star-Crossed: Nothing Special, Not A Bad Thing

Emery and Roman, the leads of Star-Crossed.

WARNING: This review/synopsis contains spoilers from the pilot of Star-Crossed

The new CW show, Star-Crossed, was not even on my radar until I saw a review of it on io9 asking if it’s the new Roswell.  I always thought Roswell was a highly under-rated show that was much deeper than the “Aliens in high school” soap opera it came across as.  It was one of the earlier shows  Ronald D. Moore worked on, who would go on to blow the roof off science fiction with his re-imagining of Battlestar Galactica.  So, given the comparison to Roswell, I decided to check out the pilot.

Unlike Roswell, on Star-Crossed, alien existence is well known.  A race called the Atrians crash land a giant ship on Earth while fleeing their dying planet in 2014.  The US military takes a shoot fist, ask questions later stance, and a young Atrian boy (Logan Lindholm) flees the scene to find himself hiding in a shed.  A young girl named Emery Whitehall (Maggie Elizabeth Jones) discovers the young boy in a scene that feels like a mash-up of something out of E.T. and Back To The Future.  After helping the young boy, the next morning the military finds the two kids in the shed, and the young boy is fatally shot protecting Emery from all the guns pointed at them.

Flash forward 10 years later, and the Atrians are being kept in camps (think District 9), and a 16-year old Emery is starting her first day of high school after being out of the school system for 4 years, sick in the hospital with an immune-deficiency condition I don’t believe they name.  She’s better now though, and starting school the same day that 7 Atrian teenagers are being integrated into a human school system for the first time ever.  One of those 7 is Roman (Matt Lanter), the boy from the shed, who apparently did not die.  He recognizes Emery right away, and goes out of his way to make contact with her.

While not original, the metaphor of racism that is commonly used in science fiction is once again used in Star-Crossed.  There are bullies, just like in every high school in the world, and they don’t take kindly to a different species hitting on “their” girls.  While not original, it’s done well, and gets it’s point across.

Emery has a friend from her time in the hospital, Julia (Malese Jow), who is losing her battle with an immune-deficiency condition at the moment.  In a last ditch effort to help her, Emery and Julia sneak into the Atrian camp in search of a rumored miracle-cure drug known as Sipher.  Like always happens in cases like these, the girls find trouble, and Roman happens to be there to save the day.

Much to the girls dismay, Roman lets them know the Sipher is their planet’s equivalent to Saffron, nothing more than a spice used for cooking.  This is also the point where Emery discovers that Roman is the boy from the shed, who did not die like she had been guilt-ridden of for 10 years now.

At a point in the episode where all the teens are at a party, and Emery and Roman are about to kiss to throw Romeo and Juliet into the list of cliches the show has used so far, Emery receives a call that Julia is in critical condition, and she has to go be with her in the hospital.  Roman sneaks to the hospital, and combining the Sipher with his blood, injects it into Julia’s body, saving her life.  This is a stretch, but it’s somewhat similar to the way Max heals Liz in the pilot episode of Roswell.

While there have been plenty of spoilers in this review/synopsis of the pilot, I’ll leave the very end out.  It’s once again, nothing you haven’t seen before, but done decently.  I’m going to give Star-Crossed another episode or two to see if things get deeper and more interesting like they did on Roswell.  I have no idea if they will, but if they don’t, it will be a few hours of television I watched for no good reason.  Not the worst thing in the world.  Who knows, maybe The CW will pleasantly surprise me like they did with Arrow.

Star-Crossed airs Mondays at 8pm on the CW.