VanIsle staff didn’t start wearing tinfoil hats. But we did crouch in front of our screens to watch the season premiere of Resident Alien.
The quirky hit TV show is like Mork and Mindy crossed with the X-Files and Northern Exposure. It stars Alan Tudyk as an alien who crash lands in the tiny town of Patience, Colorado. His mission? To wipe out all of humanity.
The story goes, he’s trying to find his way back to his own planet. Oh, and kill all (or most) humans. But at first, he just wants to blend in. But that’s where things go wildly wrong—the alien is pretending to be a doctor named Harry. But he doesn’t even know how to be human, let alone a doctor.
Then Harry the alien starts to like our strange species. His growing love for pizza (and his new friends) make him wonder if killing everyone is the right thing to do.
Credit: James Dittinger / SYFY
Some folks might recognize Tudyk from Firefly and Rogue One. He is a gifted comedian. The trials he goes through trying to fake being human are totally hilarious.
And of course, Harry falls in love. His love interest, Asta Twelvetrees, is played by Sara Tomko, who was in Sneaky Pete and Once Upon a Time.
Although most of the show is filmed in Vancouver, many of the outdoor scenes are filmed on VanIsle. When the actors are outside, they aren’t in Colorado, they’re in Ladysmith.
“We essentially filmed it at about three or four historical blocks of downtown. The architecture came from the early 1900s,” assistant location manager Kevin McLean told Syfy Wire.
Because they needed so much of downtown, they had to work together with local businesses to come up with a plan.
“To me, it was very similar to how we film in other blocks in Vancouver, but on a larger scale. We had to talk to the town’s council to get our traffic plan approved and we had to work with many little businesses for weeks in advance of the filming,” said McLean.
Season one ended with Harry sneaking away from a secret military agency, escaping Earth, and abandoning his plan to kill all humans.
When season two begins, Harry has crash-landed his ship back on Earth. Only he wakes up in the hospital with no memory. By the time Asta shows up, Harry’s completely off his rocker. He has no clue who he is or what his mission was.
Harry only snaps out of it when he meets up with his telepathic octopus relative at the local ramen place to remind him.
Harry and other aliens will be appearing weekly on VanIsle through for a full season on Syfy. Stay tuned every Wednesday for the latest alien invasion.
