Resident Alien: Heroes of Patience (Season Finale)

April 1, 2021 2:28 AM - Season 1, Episode 10

D'arcy gets blindsided, Deputy Liv gets suspicious, the kids know everything.
posted by porpoise (17 comments total)

Great season finale! Amazed at how the kid's parents really REALLY stepped up to the challenge of fighting off the agents - and the musical overlay was perfect :-D And did anybody peg the real Harry as the murderer of Sam? Wow! Can't wait for season #2. Best show of the year, for me.
posted by davidmsc at 7:23 AM on April 1, 2021 [4 favorites]

It looks like Marticus called it!

So what's humanHarry's motivation?!
posted by porpoise at 4:08 PM on April 1, 2021 [2 favorites]

I didn't like the kids, but thinking about it, I might have loved them when I was younger in a wish fulfillment kind of way.

lol yeah, the Hawthorne's wigging out on the MiBs was great.

Heh, just noticed the background right after Asta bails out D'Arcy - that's a Pharmasave drug store and a Canada Post outlet.

I guess lady MiB isn't an alien and is just power tripping and just knows a little more background than her conscripted partner.

Oddly, corpseHarry doesn't seem to be missing a left foot.

Was skeptical about the show, but it really came together. Stoked for season 2.
posted by porpoise at 4:50 PM on April 1, 2021 [1 favorite]

TV Line - Resident Alien Boss Talks Harry's Heartfelt Season Finale Decision, Teases Possible Season 2 Storylines
posted by oh yeah! at 4:55 PM on April 1, 2021 [1 favorite]

~o~
posted by Marticus at 7:02 PM on April 1, 2021 [1 favorite]

This one felt a little higglety-pigglety to me, kind of unfocused with dangling threads (not cliffhangers, just stuff left loose or ignored). Pandemic issues, maybe? I don't know if/when they were affected. Though yeah, the best set piece was the parents whaling on the alien hunters--that was a very refreshing take on a story element.

I was almost a little disappointed that MIB woman didn't turn out to be an alien herself, because she's such a psycho, but I suppose it puts the other MIB guy (I can't recall any of their names) out there as a free agent now to work with our people, since he also knows Linda Hamilton's a murderous nutcase too. I confess to finding that a bummer--I was hoping for just an aliens obsessive who was more on the Hooper end of the scale, not someone well on the Quint end of the scale. But I hope the poor doctor will be all right. I love Asta, and D'Arcy, and Asta and D'Arcy's friendship; they are fantastic characters I haven't seen before and I'm loving it.

I'm still confused by a plot point: when she first shows up, Harry's wife says he's divorcing her. Then it's never brought up again, and in this episode dead Harry and alien Harry are both rhapsodizing about loving her. Did I miss something along the way? It's entirely possible with my attention span these days, but that bugs me. Now that we know Harry killed Sam, the divorce thing seems even more critical.
posted by kitten kaboodle at 11:37 AM on April 2, 2021 [1 favorite]

Also, man, sending a large vehicle like that down a steep hill and into fast-moving traffic was just...astonishingly awful. Someone could easily have died. For someone who works in search and rescue, D'Arcy made a really poor decision with that and it was not a great thing to do with Jaye.
posted by kitten kaboodle at 11:53 AM on April 2, 2021 [4 favorites]

The truck thing was just insane. I couldn't handle it. We heard it collide with someone's vehicle! That's a random person t-boned by a pickup truck! The same with the non event of hitting a little girl on a bike with a motorhome. What an inconvenience for the drivers!

I like this show, but I want to grab everyone involved with these scenes by the scruff of the neck and... Force them to read statistics? Ride along with EMTs? Just slap them?

Especially the part where it was played like the girl (she has a name!) was trying to profit by asking for $100. These writers are so far into car culture they don't know how wrong they are about important issues like road safety AND about trivial ones like bike prices.

But the deputy, Asta and her dad, the alien, and the bartender were all such good performances that I still want to watch more.
posted by Acari at 12:27 PM on April 2, 2021 [1 favorite]

Asta's speech at the end seemed to be a little convoluted. Other than that, I think they stuck the landing. I think that as a new series evolving through a first season, it was pretty damn good.

The actual price of the bike doesn't matter. She was just haggling as a diversion after planting the cell phone. If she quoted the actual price that might have shut down the exchange instead of prolonging it.

D'Arcy is not exactly in a good place and making some rash decisions. Causing an accident isn't cool but it's within the scope of her character.

Man, I loved the Hawthorne parents opening a can of whupass on the MiB. That was cathartic.
posted by Ber at 7:52 PM on April 2, 2021 [1 favorite]

I was super disappointed crazy lady didn't turn out to be a lizard alien. It was such a great idea everything fails in comparison. And yet, I was pretty impressed with the general okayness of things. There wasn't any flagrant sucking and even some of the effects were fun.

I was intrigued with the whole wife thing when it seemed he had real feelings for her but then they dropped it like wet sack, which made it seem disposable and a waste.

So it seems human Harry was on the run for some reason, which is not as interesting as Asta and Harry possibly flying around and smiting people in righteous retribution, Asta trying to get him to tone it down but maybe letting him take out some cops and Mounties, but now he's out of blasto-balls.

sigh.
posted by provoliminal at 12:05 PM on April 3, 2021 [1 favorite]

Especially the part where it was played like the girl (she has a name!) was trying to profit by asking for $100. These writers are so far into car culture they don't know how wrong they are about important issues like road safety AND about trivial ones like bike prices.

My read on that scene was that they didn't actually hit her - she just made them think she did so she could plant the phone.
posted by Ragged Richard at 5:00 PM on April 3, 2021 [6 favorites]

I don't think we have confirmation that the violent agent is NOT an alien. They have to keep some powder dry for season 2.
posted by rikschell at 8:21 AM on April 4, 2021 [3 favorites]

The only explanation I can come up with for why anyone in the production thought that sending the locked driverless car off into traffic was ok, is that maybe they had it differently in the script (like, having it roll into the lake or off-road into trees or off a bridge) and then it being the final episode they were out of time and budget to do whatever they planned originally, and somehow thought they could get away with just the sound effect of the car's impact, not realizing how much worse it is to leave us wondering what the impact was with. At best, it hit a parked car or empty building rather than t-boning and critically injuring some poor schmuck driving by, but that's still no picnic for the person whose parked car got wrecked or storefront destroyed.
posted by oh yeah! at 1:53 PM on April 4, 2021

Some redditors have IDed the pizza as coming from https://www.robertsstreetpizza.com/ in Ladysmith and the bowling alley as Sandcastle Lanes in White Rock.
posted by porpoise at 4:50 PM on April 5, 2021 [2 favorites]

that pizza looked really terrible.

that said, what a fun show!! the core characters were all so great and I really loved the various "human interest" storylines introducing us to them, and showing us their lives.

parental smackdown was 1000%.
posted by supermedusa at 11:11 AM on June 15, 2021 [1 favorite]

TV Line - Resident Alien Season 2 to Premiere in January, Will Be Split in Two Parts (January 26th premiere, part 2 returning in summer sometime)
posted by oh yeah! at 1:01 PM on December 9, 2021 [1 favorite]

Just watched this. What happened at the end of the episode? It all made sense up to where the cops were talking about the murder? Suddenly truck crashes through the door and Asta and Max are there. Was that alien hanger even in Colorado? I thought he crashed in New Mexico?

I guess it makes sense that Max has the location from the RV, even though they didn’t show the RV go there after the phone was attached. And sure, I guess Harry could have tracked his ship, even though he hadn’t done that before. But then suddenly everyone is crashing onto secret military bases and Harry everyone is best buds on pain of death?

Really liked this show, but this was weird. Did the cut 11 episodes down to 10 or something? What happened?
posted by BeeDo at 7:14 PM on December 18, 2021