What to Watch Verdict
'Resident Alien' begins to escape its 'outsider in a small town' setup as government forces threaten to expand the scope of Harry's adventures on Earth.
Pros
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👽 Director Jennifer Phang really elevates the cinematic qualities of the storytelling with an epic opening scene.
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👽 Michael Cassidy's arrival as the replacement doctor spotlights how Harry's emotional maturity isn't equal to his superhuman strength and intelligence.
Cons
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👽 The show's been really good at creating multidimensional characters, so it will be interesting to see how showrunner Chris Sheridan develops the annoyingly proficient Dr. Ethan as a contrast to Harry.
This post contains spoilers for Resident Alien.
Check out our last review here.
On Resident Alien, the stakes continue to raise for Harry Vanderspiegle (Alan Tudyk), the genocidal extraterrestrial disguised as a New York physician living in Patience, Colorado. Although Harry managed to broker a truce with young Max Hawthorne (Judah Prehn), the only person who can see his true identity, the local authorities have discovered evidence of a murder that may lead to him; unbeknownst to him, government agents are searching to identify and detain him; and his human alter ego’s wife Isabelle (Elvy) turns up at his doorstep seeking reconciliation. And at the beginning of “Sexy Beast,” movie night for a lighthouse keeper and his daughter gets interrupted when an enormous alien spacecraft appears in the sky. It’s unclear if this is happening before or after Harry’s arrival (although the lighthouse still has a tube television and the keeper’s daughter appears to use a Polaroid camera), but if other members of Harry’s species are here to finish the job Harry started, he could be in big trouble.
Four months before the present day, David Logan (Alex Barima) picks up the energy signature of an alien vessel, prompting his commanding officer General McCallister (Linda Hamilton) to assign him and his new partner Lisa Casper (Mandell Maughan) a secret mission to locate it and its possible pilot before bureaucratic red tape disappears the discovery forever. A few weeks later, they discover his vessel in a quarry, hidden by a cloaking device that renders it invisible. More immediately, however, Harry is quickly growing tired with Isabelle, who loves spending every moment — waking and sleeping — with him. But when he arrives at the doctor’s office, Mayor Hawthorne (Levi Fiehler) announces that his replacement has arrived: Dr. Ethan Stone (Michael Cassidy), whose good looks and understated proficiency immediately intimidate Harry.
Harry is simultaneously relieved to leave the job and slightly forlorn, and he complicates the truce struck with Max after realizing that changing diagnoses both confuses Mayor Max and embarrasses him in front of Ethan. Not long after, he challenges Ethan to an arm wrestling contest at D’Arcy’s (Alice Wetterlund) bar, and even though he handily wins, Ethan’s resilience when Harry dislocates his shoulder only endears him to the townspeople further. Ethan ends up sleeping with D’Arcy, who becomes unsettled by the sincerity of his romantic interest the next morning. Meanwhile, Sherriff Thompson (Corey Reynolds) unsuccessfully interrogates one of Jay’s (Kaylayla Raine) classmates about a missing prescription pad, but admits he’s impressed when Deputy Liv (Elizabeth Bowen) assembles a convincing string of evidence suggesting that Sam’s poisoning might have occurred via doses of insulin he took for diabetes.
Harry drugs Isabelle in order to locate the final piece of his ship out on a glacier, but not before D’Arcy, working with the wilderness service, demands to fly him off of the glacier where he found it. Later that evening, while D’Arcy, Liv and Asta (Sara Tomko) bowl, Asta discovers her ex Jimmy (Ben Cotton) there with a new girlfriend Becky (Jill Nixon) and confronts him about stealing the prescription pad. He predictably denies it, but Asta encourages Becky not to ignore Jimmy’s abuse as they leave. Reassembling the pieces of his ship, Harry prepares to complete his mission, but wonders how he’ll simultaneously prove to everyone that he’s better than Ethan and kill everyone who would be impressed by his doomsday device. After drugging Isabelle again so he can go to his ship Harry discovers that it’s been apprehended by General McCallister — who has sought the existence of alien life since she was a child, when she took a photo of a UFO above her father’s lighthouse with her Polaroid camera. Harry is surrounded by government agents at the crash site of his ship, with the fate of his mission, and his true identity, at ultimate risk.
