Elizabeth Parker is a fictional character and the protagonist of the Roswell High book series and Roswell television series that ran from 1999 to 2002. The character was portrayed by Shiri Appleby. In the CW reboot, Liz is of Mexican descent therefore having the surname Ortecho (like in the original books that preceded both TV series) and is played by Jeanine Mason. In the series her name is Liz Ortecho.
Liz is considered to be the protagonist of the series, along with Max Evans. Liz is the main narrator throughout the three seasons and she has been described as the "heart and soul" of the show. She made her first appearance in the Roswell pilot episode and remained a core character until the series finale.
Contents
Fictional character summary
Note: This article is about Liz Parker as the television character of Roswell only. Although the two versions are similar the character of the original books is considered an alternative universe version.
Liz Parker attends Roswell High School, where her favorite subject is science. Her best friends are Alex Whitman and Maria DeLuca. At the beginning of the series, she breaks up with boyfriend Kyle Valenti and engages in a relationship with alien-human hybrid Max Evans, which serves as the crux of the television series.
Characteristics
Liz Parker is portrayed as a typical girl next door, at least from the outside. She is beautiful though she doesn't really realize it. She is smart and very direct about her opinions, sensible, confident and levelheaded. Her home was above the diner her family owns, the Crashdown Café, and until the last episode, she worked there as a waitress after school. She did well in school, especially in science that had been her passion since she was a child. Her dream was to go into molecular biology at Harvard university. However, after the events in the season three finale, Liz's whereabouts are unknown.
Liz is a complex character; very sweet and kind overall, yet strong and determined. Control is something very important for her: with it, she can get facts and answers and this makes her feel more safe about herself, those she loves, and life in general. However, her real nature isn't really so controlled. When Max saves her life and she falls in love with him, everything in her life changes; Max is the living proof that people cannot control everything and even science doesn't have all the answers. She understands this, and realizes that she has to follow her heart and live in the moment, because no matter how people try, they can't control everything and they can't choose with whom they fall in love.
However, in the second season Liz becomes a character who is prone to extreme illogical behavior, often engaging in unreasonable accusatory behavior and mixed messages to others in the Roswell group. The second season is perhaps the worst for Liz as a character, and many audiences find the season 2 Liz far behind the sweet girl of the first season and the confident and free Liz of season 3.
Liz emerges as the "brain" among the group. She is the one who continuously gets the very core point of their problems and is able to find a solution most of the time - especially if the problem is science related.
However, her determination and selfless spirit mixed with her sometimes controlling nature can also be a character flaw when it leads her into making decisions where she takes too much of the responsibility. This is also a characteristic that she shares with Max Evans.
It is stated that she loves White Roses in the season 2 episode, End of the World.
Relationship with Max Evans
The important premise and core plot of the show is Liz's relationship with the character Max Evans.
The Co-executive producer of the series Ronald D. Moore, along with Jason Katims, stated more than once that Max and Liz represented the heart and soul of the series.
"Heart and Soul of Roswell, I think that Jason (Katims) would share this opinion, has always been the relationship between Max and Liz. That's where the plot begins. He saved her life and he exposes himself at the same time. The love between those two characters is fundamental to the show's success."
Max has been in love with Liz since the first time he saw her at school, when he was just eight years old (shortly after emerging from the pod). However, he kept himself distanced from her, primarily because of his concerns about being an alien and her being a human, so Liz did not know about his feelings and did not suspect that her laboratory partner had been secretly in love with her. This secret ends only in the pilot episode when she gets shot at the Crashdown Cafe and he saves her life, risking everything for her and starting the lead plot of the show.
Liz does love Max from the first time she gets the chance to see his soul and to really know him. This happens when Max does give her the chance to connect with him through a reversed connection created by his alien powers in order to make them even since the same happened when he healed her and he got flashes from her about her life and her inner feelings. In that moment, Liz can see his thoughts, especially about her, and she realizes that he's lonely, he loves her and he does not want to hurt people, so she starts to help him and his friends, from the beginning making the decision to renounce her normality.
She shares a deep, mysterious connection with him. It is with her involuntary help that he starts to find more clues about his origins. Also, Liz is able to feel whether Max is in danger or hurt (in the third season she feels when he dies), and they save each other's lives more than once. For this powerful connection between them and their deep and natural affinity and compatibility, they are considered soulmates by both the characters of the story and the creators of the series.
Effect of Max's powers on Liz
After Max Evans heals her in the pilot, he converts her to the alien side and she changes. At the end of the show, she is still human, but has developed some alien powers.
In the episode "Four Aliens and A Baby", Liz blasts Tess Harding twice, using a green energy that exited from her hands. In "Graduation", she starts to see flashes about the future after touching people. She sees a customer of the Crashdown Café in danger and she and Max save her. While she is making out with Max she gets a flash of Max, herself, Michael and Isabel being killed by someone. Thanks to this power, they flee Roswell at the end of the series, before the FBI can kill them.
In the season two episode "Max in the City", viewers can see her "change" start to develop when she saves Max's life by projecting her image from Roswell to New York with Isabel's help.
Fictional biography
Season One
In the pilot, while Liz is working at her parents' restaurant, Crashdown Cafe, she is shot accidentally by two men who are having an argument. When Max saves her life by healing her gunshot wound, her life is changed forever. He puts his hand over her wound and miraculously makes the wound and bullet disappear. Realizing that there is something incredibly amazing about Max, she decides to investigate. She takes Max's pencil, which Max had been chewing on, places the saliva collected from the pencil tip on a slide, and examines the slide through a microscope. She can see that his cells are not human. When she confronts Max about everything that had happened to her and his alien cells, Max confesses to her that he is an alien that had been on the alien craft that crashed in Roswell in 1947.
With growing suspicion coming from the local sheriff, Jim Valenti, Liz devises a plan to throw him off Max's scent. She is successful and Valenti, though still cautious and wary of Max, lets him go. After this incident, she starts developing deep feelings for Max, despite her current relationship with the sheriff's son Kyle Valenti. For a while she lies to her friends Alex and Maria, but eventually Maria confronts Liz about what is going on. Liz eventually relents to Maria's questions and tells her all she knows about Max, Isabel and Michael. Kyle grows jealous of the growing relationship between her and Max, and a group of his friends beat up Max. She breaks up with Kyle in response to this, causing a rift between them. However, her relationship with Max grows very strong and she finds herself falling in love with him. An incident involving Michael Guerin, however, scares Max away, and he realizes that doesn't want to hurt Liz in any way. He is an alien and doesn't know what is going to happen to him or who might come after him; he wants her to be safe.
However, Liz and Max end up falling in love. Max, as an alien, had a profound effect on her, and when they kiss Liz gets images of Max's past, which help Max, Michael and Isabel discover an Alien Orb. This doesn't last long, as Tess Harding arrives in Roswell and begins to influence Max in a strange way. Liz sees Max and Tess kiss and is heartbroken, but after hearing Max out she and the others start to believe that Tess could be the fourth alien named Nasedo using a female appearance and she's influencing Max's thoughts by making him hallucinate. She forgives him and with her help the group discovers that Tess is not Nasedo but another hybrid like Max, Michael and Isabel and her unique power is to create mindwarps.
Feeling that Liz is a threat to his plans, the real Nasedo shapeshifts into Max and takes her. When she kisses him, she realizes he is not Max because she has visions of his past. Max, worried about Liz and what Nasedo might do, goes after them. Maria and Alex tell Sheriff Valenti that they are worried because Liz is with Max and she called claiming that she was scared because Max was acting weird. This was done in order to try to find Liz faster. They are found in a theme park. In the house of mirrors, Max is grabbed by the FBI and Nasedo grabs Liz. She kisses him and again realizes that he is Nasedo when she gets images from his past. She is deeply heartbroken when Max is abducted by the FBI and has to tell the news to Michael and Isabel. With the help of Nasedo, the gang saves Max from the FBI.
Season Two
Season two begins with Liz returning from a summer away from Roswell. She has a new job as an intern for Congresswoman Whitaker, who later turns out to be a Skin, an enemy of the hybrids. While Liz continues to have strong feelings for Max, she stands by her decision that their relationship stands in the way of his destiny. Max, on the other hand, tries everything he can to be with her.
In the episode "The End of the World", Liz is asked by a future version of Max to help him get the modern-day Max to fall out of love with her. Future Max claims that if they don't do this, the world will end and they will all die. Shocked, she only accepts it when Future Max predicts that Max will turn up with a Mariachi band and sing a love song for her. When this transpires she agrees to help Future Max. He goes on to tell her the kind of future present-day Max and she will have if they do not succeed. He tells her that after she and Max had sex for the first time, it cemented their relationship and they were never apart again. This upset Tess and she left Roswell. Max and Liz were married in Las Vegas when they were 19 and were together until the end of the world came because when Max's enemies came to earth, Max, Michael, and Isabel were not strong enough in their powers without Tess. So they have to get Tess and Max together to save everyone and rewrite the future. She tries to get Tess to help by attracting Max towards her but it fails when Max catches Liz watching. Liz at the end has to resort to making Max think that she had sex with Kyle. This succeeds; as Max walks to the window, he sees Liz talking with Kyle in bed, which breaks Max's heart. Liz has one last dance to her future wedding song, "I Shall Believe" by Sheryl Crow, with the Future Max, but he disappears because the future has been changed and he no longer exists.
Liz attracts the attention of Maria's cousin, and they have a few dates, but nothing serious comes out of it., She is left devastated when she hears that Alex has died in a car crash. She visits the destroyed car that Alex was driving and finds a picture of Alex and a girl he met in Sweden, but his head was cut off in the picture. This leads her to suspect that Alex was murdered, and she begins to try to find the supposed truth by asking the last person who saw him what Alex had said to him. At the funeral gathering in Alex's home, she accuses an alien of killing Alex. This deeply offends Max and the others, more so Isabel who had grown close to Alex. This creates a "them vs. us" scenario and the whole future of the formerly tight group looks bleak.
Season Three
At the start of season three, viewers can only see flashes of some moments of the summer when Liz and Max reconcile in order to understand what happened after departure and what brought them to "busted" and then together again. They arrange to go out on a date, a way to start things over from the beginning. They are on their date when Max decides to go skinny dipping. As Liz is about to join him, Max gets a vision from his son and begins to drown. Liz saves him. Max realizes that his son is in trouble. They search for a ship that they believe is held in a storage facility in the basement of a convenience store in Utah. Liz and Max come up with a plan to hold up the store and when Liz is holding the shop clerk hostage, Max will go down and check to see whether the ship is there. Max gives Liz a gun and when they hold up the convenience store, Max finds that there is a ship and it is still working, but his time is cut short as the police arrive. They try to escape, but they fail. They are caught after a police chase, and both are arrested and held in the local jail. Max is let out after the police find that nothing was taken from the shop. They couldn't find the weapon, but due to a witness seeing Liz with the gun, Liz is kept in jail.
She gets saved by Max, as he is able to bribe the FBI into pulling some strings and getting the case dropped. However, Liz's panic-stricken father forbids her to see Max, and bans Max from coming into the Crashdown Café. She defiantly breaks the rule, and upsets her father on numerous occasions. The reason that her father bans Max is that her father was a wild teenager, and his high school sweetheart died in a car crash because of his drunk driving. Realizing this after her mother tells her, Liz's attitude towards him changes and they begin to reconcile their differences.
Even if Tess' fiasco still did hurt her, Liz takes responsibility for her own mistakes and realizes it wasn't only Max's fault things went that way. She and Max love each other and they don't want to give up on their love no matter what. She understands that Max does need her so she stands by him trying to help him, putting herself in danger, finding and saving a baby. Thinking about Max's serious problem, she hides her inner feelings for most of the season, giving him her support, but then she begins to suffer some side effects towards Max's touch. Whenever Max touches her, a spark appears on her body and causes her pain. This scares her, as she realizes that when Max healed her in the pilot episode, saving her life, he changed her and they don't know whether she is safe or not. Max is scared for her; he wants to contact the FBI, the same people who tortured him in the end of season one, in order to find a way to keep her safe and know what is happening to her. He realizes that what happened with Tess is still hurting Liz and they need to talk about it. But Liz realizes that she needs a little time alone away from Roswell and Max in order to find her balance again and give their love another chance. She decides that she wants to leave Roswell temporarily, so that she can get better and understand what is happening to her, not only the alien aspect but the confusion about her life. Max respects her decision, waiting for her in Roswell. She goes to an all-girl boarding school to start fresh.
Shiri Appleby about her character
During the time when the show aired, Shiri Appleby was interviewed many times about her character The actress originally auditioned for all the three female roles in the show (Liz, Maria, Isabel) before finally landing the part of teen heroine Liz Parker.
"Well, I actually auditioned for all three of the girl parts numerous times [panel laughter]"
From the same interview she also explains what drew her to the story:
"I think what really drew me was the writing, It really spoke to me and it is written in a really realistic way, so for people my age, it’s easy to understand. And I got really lucky in working with a really good group of talented young people and so we’re able to work together and bounce ideas off of each other. I think that’s what really appealed me to the entire show."
Appleby describes her character as both the innocent and strong-tempered woman that is a result of her evolution through the series.
"Liz is very interested in learning. She is very innocent, somewhat naive, but with the ability to read what is right or wrong. She has a big crush on this guy but she knows they can’t be together because of the circumstances, but she still hopes. She’s experiencing a whole lot of new things in her life, so it’s exciting to see how she deals with that."
The actress is particularly proud that Liz has always stood by her convictions and she believes that her character can be a positive example for younger girls:
"A lot of younger girls, I feel like they look to Liz for guidance, because she's able to say no to a lot of things. That's a really uncommon thing for younger girls. The fact that she can take charge, stand up and voice an opinion, and not be insecure about other people's opinions, it's great. She's a fictional character that's standing up to a boy at points, and there's something to be said for that.