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.Liz Parker credits IMDB.com
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.Ronald D. Moore, co-executive producer, October 8, 2000, Q&A Crashdown.com
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.
Recurring Themes Due to the nature of their relationship and the obvious difference between an alien boy and a human girl, Max and Liz's relationship is another modern example of forbidden lovers, with many references to Romeo and Juliet through the series by both the characters and the writers.
Most notable examples are when Maria De Luca called them "Romeo and Juliet against the world",Maria DeLuca in the episode "Control", season three or when Liz herself used the tragedy of Romeo and Juliet into her own tragic speech in the episode "The End of the World" from season two. The producers and writers of the series were not unaware of the parallelism either.
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.
In the season one finale, "Destiny", she goes with Max to the alien pod chamber in the rock formation that was disguised as the alien craft that crashed. Max, Michael, Isabel and Tess' destiny is revealed when they use the alien orbs to contact Max and Isabel's (alien) mother. Max, Michael, Isabel and Tess are the Royal Four of their home planet Antar. They were all killed in their former lives by their enemy Kivar. During their deaths, their alien DNA was mixed with human DNA and sent to earth so their race could preserve the Royal Four in order for them to return someday to rule again. In their former lives, Max was Zan, the king of Antar. Tess (Ava in a former life) was Zan's wife, Isabel (Vilandra) was Zan's sister and her husband was Michael (Rath), Zan's second in command. After realizing that Max and Tess are destined to be together and the importance of Max to his race, Liz decides to let Max go in order for him to fulfill his destiny, because she now sees he is destined to be with Tess, no matter how much they love each other. As she leaves the cave, Max follows her but Michael stops him, saying, "You have to let her go".
Season Two