YMMV / Roswell Conspiracies: Aliens, Myths and Legends

• Broken Aesop: The series' overall message against bigotry, by portraying all mythical creatures as disenfranchised alien refugees forced to live in secret to avoid persecution, ends up being completely undercut by the existence of the Shadoen, who are not only Always Chaotic Evil, not only do they like the other aliens hide amongst the humans except in order Take Over the World rather than escape persecution, not only are they the cause behind all the infighting within the alien races and The Alliance, but they are ultimately all destroyed in finale when they try to take over earth, which is the only other planet their dying species can survive in.
• Complete Monster: Many antagonists in this series are well-intentioned, tinted in gray, or otherwise redeem themselves. However, many are still irredeemably vile:
  • The Shadoen agent Wraith is the one responsible for nearly all the misery within the story. Stationed in Earth back in 1946 to divide the alien races and allow the Shadoen to invade and conquer the planet, Wraith butchers the real James Rinaker and assumes his identity, bombing a Conduit safehouse and killing several innocent aliens to pin the blame on the Alliance's co-leader Walter Logan before trapping Walter himself in eternal stasis to take over the Alliance. As Rinaker, Wraith traps hundreds of innocent aliens in the Alliance's prison and has little compunction in arranging torture, bombings, and heavily destructive missions with little care as to who or what gets caught in the way, whilst simultaneously sabotaging several of the Alliance's missions and endangering several more lives. After his initial attempt to pin his crimes on Nick Logan, Wraith personally murders Ms. Smith-Heisen once she gets too close to the truth without an ounce of emotion on his face before discarding his disguise, rigging the entire Alliance bunker to explode and take out half of New Mexico, and savagely murdering Trueblood with his own claws. Rejoining the Shadoen fleet and still unsatisfied with how he's being treated, Wraith tricks the Shadoen high command into being nuked by the human army and spearheads the invasion himself, ultimately resolving to blow up the moon and kill off most of humanity to conquer what remains, with his only stated regret being the loss of "breeding stock" this will incur. A traitorous, manipulative sociopath even by the standards of the world-destroying Shadoen, Wraith is the most dangerous—and vile—alien to grace the series.
  • Lord Hanek is the vampiric leader of Intracom, a powerful family of vampires disguised as a worldwide organization. Hanek is behind several of Intracom's malevolent affairs, such as burning down vast sections of the rainforest to biting and turning several innocent people into vampoid slaves. Hanek demonstrates his vileness by attempting to have the Tree of Light destroyed, which would in the process completely wipe out the Banshee Sisterhood, and turns an innocent woman into his vampoid concubine to hurt one of the Alliance's agents. Hanek truly comes into his own in his last appearance in season 2's "Showdown": to power his teleporter technology, Hanek attempts to utilize the Banshee as living generators, in the process torturously draining the life from them and eventually killing them. Hanek endangers the life of main character Nick Logan to lure Sh'lainn and the Sisterhood into his clutches, tricks the escaped Minotauri Kahn Mort into downing a helicopter filled with his own men into a hospital, and finally forces Nick into a Sadistic Choice involving the lives of Sh'lainn and his stepfather Nathan. Always possessed of a callous sophistication in whatever situation he's in, Hanek stands miles above the other major alien antagonists in terms of depravity.
  • "Devil Inside": The Aeseri twins, Odin and Loki are rampaging psychopaths released from the Alliance's maximum security containment unit to commit wanton havoc. Shooting down every Alliance operative that pursues them, Loki is captured and contents himself with playing sadistic mind games with Nick Logan, utilizing illusions and later attacking his way through the Alliance to commandeer one of their airships. Odin, meanwhile, makes his way to Iceland, attacking a submarine and a town in Iceland before making his way into the mountains. Once the two reunite, they reveal their ultimate plan: release and control the Frost Giant and cause an apocalyptic Ragnarok for no other reason than to thrill themselves, with Loki gleefully stating he can't wait until the two reach a populated city.
• Evil Is Cool: The main villain of the series qualifies. By the end, General Rinaker/Wraith has successfully outwitted everyone, running rings around every major faction with suave, effortless cunning that he retains well after his revelation as a Shadoen. He even manages to make the rest of his planet-destroying species look like a group of drooling idiots by how thoroughly he plays them.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: In "Devil Inside," the Aesiri Loki allows himself to be captured in order to steal an artifact located in the Bunker to release the Frost Giant. In The Avengers (2012) the Frost Giant Loki surrenders to Captain America so he can be brought on board the Helicarrier in order to steal the Tesseract and bring Thanos' army to Earth. Bonus point for both Lokis favoring the Breaking Speech and using their shapeshifting powers to mess with the heroes(though the show's Loki uses telepathy instead of true shape-shifting.)
• Magnificent Bastard: The ruthless General James Rinaker, secretly a Shadoen agent in disguise named Wraith, is the Alliance's cold, no-nonsense head and a mind more than worthy to lead the Alliance in keeping the masquerade steady. Rinaker's penchant for manipulation and subterfuge leads to countless successful missions with no fear about doing what has to be done in the process, with alliances made and broken at his own convenience and foes to his operation like Hanek swiftly disposed of through his agents. Even when he's ousted, Wraith nearly manages to wipe out everyone who knows his secret, and manipulates even the Shadoen commanders by convincing them humanity will be cowed through one show of force — a ploy that ends with the Shadoen high command wiped out by the ensuing retaliation, allowing Wraith to take over. At the end, it takes the unification of all the alien races Wraith meticulously turned against each other as Rinaker to finally topple the web of deceit he's fostered through decades of cool-headed treachery.
• Narm: The oni are impossible to take seriously; unlike the threatening designs of the lycanthropes and the vampires, the oni have cartoony, exaggerated designs and silly designs that make them look more like caricatures of actual ogres (albeit ones more-or-less accurate to the depiction of oni in Japanese art), and any menace they could have had when one devours a Yakuza in its first appearance is quickly robbed from it when the next that appears is defeated by slipping on marbles, further compounded by the ridiculous image of it squatting down in a car it barely fits in.
• Nightmare Fuel:
  • Hanek's ultimate plan in the "Showdown" two-parter is to use Banshees as living batteries to power his teleporter technology, rather horrifically revealed when Nick opens a door to a withered-up, screaming Banshee. We get a lovely shot of the Banshee being horribly electrocuted by the teleporter before outright disintegrating—at which point one of the vampoids remarks "we need a fresh one" in a bored, used-to-it tone.
  • The Storyboarding the Apocalypse simulation in the final episode. To truly drive in the nature of the Shadoen's apocalyptic plot, New York is shown in blistering detail becoming obliterated by debris from the Shadoen Detonation Moon plot. Wraith remarking "these are only modest estimations" makes the scene even worse.
• Obvious Judas: The writers drop so many overt hints that Rinaker is the traitor in the Alliance that the eventual revelation comes off as quite obvious after almost forty episodes of build-up. Granted, it also works to conceal a secondary twist that's harder to see coming: Rinaker's not only evil, he's an alien.
• Spiritual Adaptation: The closest thing to an Animated Adaptation of The X-Files.
  • Naturally, the episode "Target: Hero" with Superman expy Jerich makes for a pretty good Superman story.
• What Do You Mean, It's for Kids?: Roswell boasts a complex plotline and gray morality that's incredibly ambitious for a nominal kids' show, and beyond that, gallons of onscreen Family-Unfriendly Death and Family-Unfriendly Violence that weren't always hidden behind discretion shots — including onscreen torture, suicide, horrific mutation, the revelation that the main antagonist murdered the real Rinaker and flensed the skin off his bones to take his identity, aliens planning the destruction of all human civilization in the finale with a simulation showing all the gory details this entails (with a quip to the aliens intending to make "breeding stock" out of whatever's left), and a policy that Anyone Can Die (with one of the main characters heavily implied to have been ripped apart close to the finale).