Retrospecting on Resident Alien
An Intergalactic White Boy Grows Up
Resident Alien, a SyFy/USA sitcom about a megalomaniacal alien stranded in an eccentric Colorado small town, ended recently. I’m a bit sad and a bit happy because I really enjoyed this show. I didn’t watch close to every episode, but that didn’t matter. As long as I kept in mind the essential premise of “evil alien pretends to be a small-town doctor and learns to be a good person”, I could always follow the general outline of every episode.
This, to be clear, is a positive. A TV show that’s good at being a TV show, which is to say a good TV show, doesn’t require you to have seen every episode to understand what it’s about and how it’s entertaining. Television is a disposable trash medium, a mode of pleasure. At this point I, the most jumped-up fake-smart intricate dude I know, am tired of jumped-up fake-smart intricate TV shows.
Back to Resident Alien. The heart of the show’s charm is of course the extravagantly talented Alan Tudyk as Dr. Harry Vanderspeigle, an awkward and sometimes murderous alien impersonating the town’s only doctor. When Harry arrives in Patience, Colorado, he’s plotting the total destruction of the human race, but in the course of his bumbling attempts at evil he finds himself captured in a web of community and forced to care. Alan Tudyk is so tremendously funny in this role. He performs not only Alien-Harry, but also pre-Alien-Harry in flashbacks as well as a number of doppelgangers impersonating Harry, and makes each of these alter-Harrys distinctive and humorous. Tudyk also always lands the ship for every heartwarming and tearjerking moment in the show. He’s one of the best American actors of my lifetime, and will never be recognized for this because he makes most of his money doing the voice of the chicken in Moana.
The supporting cast surrounding Tudyk kept up with his antics admirably, whether that required them to play the straight man or to go even bigger and sillier than Harry Vanderspiegle. Special mention must be made of Corey Reynolds as Sheriff Mike, who made every line from the super-pilled head of Patience law enforcement deliriously funny. Most important of all is Sara Tomko as Asta, the most responsible nurse at Harry’s practice and eventually alien-Harry’s best friend. Asta holds down a number of interesting storylines of her own, grounding the show in human-level relationships whenever Harry’s galactic antics become too abstract and green-screen-ulous. Asta’s identity as a member of the Ute tribe also provides the show with one of its enduring thematic throughlines: the values and practices of Indigenous American culture.
At the show’s opening, Harry has just arrived on Earth to kill all humans in order to stop our degradation of Earth’s environment. He’s assigned to do this because his species of alien claims Earth as their own up in the heady realm of intergalactic politics where space-faring species interact. But living on Earth Harry discovers that he loves humans more than he loves his cruel homeworld.
As I have teed you up here, you may easily observe some interesting parallels here between the arrogance and presumption of Harry’s assignment and the conduct of white colonizers in the Americas. Like European colonists, Harry believes wholeheartedly in his species’ superiority and their right to unilateral decision-making and their right to violence. But only when he’s just arrived.
Harry’s journey from determined exterminator of humanity to determined defender of humanity is a story of a colonizer giving up his mission and his allegiance to power. The creators of Resident Alien carefully and intelligently unspool this story so that Harry does not simply go all Kevin Costner with it. He does not become a more perfect human than the humans around him, nor does he become their sole savior. One of the most heartening moments of the series finale is when Harry realizes he is no longer needed in a particular role because the protective mechanism is external to him, it is a function of his community, not himself (for once, I’m being intentionally oblique to avoid spoilers as this show is so recent).
The creators also avoid the obvious, dumb play of bringing Harry and Asta together romantically. Instead, Harry and Asta become close friends, learning from each other, and when Harry has grown and become more caring he finds his ideal partner in a particularly amazing-looking fellow alien.
Basically, Harry unlearns the ideology of dominance and violence taught to him from birth by experiencing a community with a very different set of structuring beliefs. He discovers the value of connection and compassion, even as he struggles to then actualize and live these principles (relatable). If this arc of generally growing more good-hearted sounds a bit cheesy, then let me assure you it is! Resident Alien is wildly goofy, taking big swings with punchlines and storylines, and even dropping in frequent voiceovers to directly state the moral of each episode.
I guess we need that though, because it sure seems like half the world, half America certainly, needs a refresh on kindergarten-level morality.
As I’ve already implied, the theme of overturning colonial ideology to become a happier person reaches its apex in Resident Alien’s final season, particularly its finale. I shall try my best to continue avoiding spoilers, and say only that the series finale involves Harry coming to terms with final departures. Not death directly, but an obvious allegorical analogue. He struggles to process these departures, and eventually accepts that while life will continue without us, our mark endures forever in the people with whom we connected. Legacies of kindness, compassion, generosity, and courage are real.
I found this ending a deeply affecting counterpoint to the shoutingly pseudo-triumphant Silicon Valley pursuit of immortality currently en vogue among our society’s dumbest walking, talking, Oakley-toting bags of shit. The pursuit of endless life is up with the nukes at the apex of colonial ideology. The tech bro obsession with immortality combines the destructive endless growth mindset of capitalism with the utterly self-centered individualism of dickhead-brand libertarianism and the raw selfishness of a child whose parents have done a very poor job of explaining to them what we owe the world.
As trite and sentimental as it is, the truth of life remains that every second really is a gift, our atoms are briefly on loan, and the Earth is our only home. No one will ever live forever, and if they did it would be some extraordinary perversion of life, or as a tree. If you’re worried about what will be left of you at the end, focus on how to make your posterity bless your name and not curse it. All the supplements and blood transfusions in the world won’t help with that, especially if you’re draining that blood out of your actual posterity.
In the finale of Resident Alien, Harry accepts transience and he is humbled one last time by love and connection, realizing that we live on in our deeds and the memories of those who loved us, not as frozen heads in cryobanks.
Despite an extremely silly show, Resident Alien kept up a strong thematic throughline which it cultivated in the setting and in all the characters’ storylines, and in the end it landed that theme beautifully. I wept openly, much more than for much other TV I’ve seen lately. In truth, American TV in general has gotten a bit BORING: its cynicism rote, its style utterly familiar, the modern American screen acting mode more sleepwalker than subtle.
I was never once bored watching Resident Alien, and I was very often delighted. I was also happy to say an expected, planned-for good-bye to a show that wasn’t drawn out, stretched out, dragged into ten extra episodes, franchised seven hundred times, or otherwise immortalized for the worst. I will actually genuinely keep the show’s conclusion in mind for a long time.
So make your peace with the briefness, or you’ll never actually get to grow up. Let the finitude make the best of you, and not the greediest. Even a very silly space alien could do it.
