Are you in need of some fun? Some escapism? Not entirely frivolous, not running entirely counter to international mood, but something that nevertheless offers some distraction, a break in the clouds? I hardly see how you cannot be. (Although if you cannot, please do send the secret of your impregnable insouciance to the usual address – thank you).
Let me lead the needy majority by the hand to Sky One’s latest offering: a sci-fi-tinted series called Resident Alien, starring the mighty Alan Tudyk as a visitor from outer space who has crash landed just outside the tiny town of Patience, Colorado, killed the owner of the first fishing cabin he came across, thrown him into the nearest frozen lake and assumed – via molecular reconstruction – the poor fellow’s appearance and identity. This, we learn, is in order to give himself time to find the device lost in the crash (ideally before the thaw that will let the bloated corpse bob to the surface and rather give the intergalactic game away) that will allow him to complete his mission. His mission is to wipe out humanity. Hello, premise! How are you, a not entirely novel incarnation of such a thing within the SF genre, going to unfold?
Very pleasingly, is the short answer. It turns out that the man the alien is impersonating is a doctor, Harry Vanderspiegle. When the town’s own physician is found dead, it is Harry they turn to first to establish cause of death (“A genuine mystery! Chung-CHUNGG!” says Harry, who has taught himself to speak our human tongue via Law & Order reruns during his first few months of post-crash solitude in the cabin and knows how such a situation should be soundtracked), and then to minister to the townspeople and their various ailments. Gradually he becomes more and more embroiled in their lives, forming a special bond with clinic worker Asta Twelvetrees (Sara Tomko), and learning more and more about relationships and society as he goes. Will this new knowledge and growing appreciation for humanity’s way – flaws, foibles and all – end up compromising his commitment to our eradication? You know, I wouldn’t be at all surprised if it does.
Resident Alien is not a programme that is going to eat up much of your mental bandwidth. That is, especially under current conditions, a large part of its charm. The rest of its appeal (especially once it settles into its stride after the pilot episode) comes from its humour – when Harry smells the body at an open-casket funeral, the bartender who has taken a shine to him murmurs thoughtfully to herself: “So intense. Not for everyone. But I like it” – and a clever consistency of tone. Although it frequently plays with the moments of misunderstanding thrown up by Harry’s ignorance and literal-mindedness, it’s never purely a fish-out-of-water escapade, nor simply an adult Mork and Mindy. It retains a hint of darkness throughout that means you never quite become complacent.
There is, for example, a non-negligible chance that Harry will indeed kill the mayor’s young son who has a rare genetic mutation that allows him to penetrate the disguise and see that he’s an alien. It keeps you on your toes while you’re laughing at Harry’s first taste of whisky (“It’s awful. Why do I want more?”), or his Googling of gynaecological examinations under the sheet where he’s supposed to be performing one, or the way in which he muses on the misfortune of the boy’s billion-to-one mutation occurring in a town with a population of 1,000. “Humans have a term for this,” he notes in voiceover. “‘Bad luck. ‘Raw deal’. ‘This is some Bull. Shit.’”
Beyond that, there’s the simple fact of Tudyk bringing his own inalienable Alan Tudykness to the part as well as his previous experience of playing hybrid-humanoidy type things (including K-2SO in Rogue One, Sonny in I, Robot and the 48 personalities downloaded into Dollhouse’s Alpha). It’s a wonderful performance: just eccentric enough to stay plausibly human, Tudyk maximises the laughs and the melancholy. Harry is curious and thoughtful in between his murderously detached moments so that despite the perennially unsettling feeling he generates, you feel a sort of warm worry for him as well as those around him.
Resident Alien knows what it is doing and does it with admirable sincerity. It deploys well-worn tropes without cynicism and plays with others without winking exhaustingly at its audience. It even solves the mystery of the doctor’s self-inflicted throat wounds, though only to reveal a deeper mystery behind that. Chung-CHUNGG!
