Review: Resident Alien season 1, episode 6 – “Sexy Beast”

On this week’s Resident Alien, Linda Hamilton makes her debut. If that alone isn’t enough to garner your interest, let’s dive a bit further. The episode opens up in the early ’60s with a girl and her dad watching Lost in Space, only for a storm to knock out their power. It turns out they live in a lighthouse and in a rush to turn on the light, the little girl and her father witness an alien spaceship overhead.

Flash forward back to the present.

Harry (Alan Tudyk), after a montage of time spent with his wife, gets her drunk so she passes out and he can continue his mission. The next morning we find that Harry has finally been replaced by Dr. Ethan Stone, played by the greatest villain in the history of the O.C., Michael Cassidy. Cassidy is a Dudley Do-Right type, saying all the right things, charming all the right people. It feels a bit inauthentic by design, like how he talks about his time with Doctors Without Borders, but we don’t quite know what his game is. Harry’s departure from the clinic allows his wife to suggest they move back to New York while at the local bar, The 59, for lunch. Ethan arrives with Asta and the Mayor, which prompts Harry to become jealous, challenging Ethan to an arm-wrestling contest, and subsequently dislocating Ethan’s shoulder in the process.

Harry spends the rest of the episode drugging his wife so he can go and do his alien-work. D’Aarcy, who’s apart of some local search and rescue team, inadvertently finds Harry out on a nearby glacier and has to fly him back. Harry had been there looking for and just found a piece to his ship when D’Arcy discovers him.

This discovery then sees Harry return to where he originally landed his ship.

The other major arc in this week’s episode follows David Logan, a character we’ve seen on the show before, and how he came to be tracking aliens. Apparently, Logan worked for military intelligence, under General McCallister (Linda Hamilton). One day he discovered a UFO that we’d find out belongs to Harry. McCallister dismisses this but eventually sends him undercover on an off-the-books, black-op mission to find the spaceship.

He and his crazy partner follows the ship’s course and eventually discover it in an empty quarry of sorts. When they bring the ship back to their base, we find out the General (Hamilton) was the little girl from the start of the episode.

This is the point where Harry’s story and David’s story merge, as Harry arrived in the same place where David had found his ship. The episode closes with Harr about to be trapped by the U.S. Military.

The rest of the episode is filled with some minor notes. Like Sherrif “Big Black” Thompson finally giving Deputy Liv some praise when she comes up with a theory that Doctor Sam was murdered when someone poisoned his insulin. Asta tries to cover up any possible involvement her daughter Jay may have had with a drug pad going missing, and gets busted by Judy in the process. Asta then seems to shift the focus on the “who stole the pad” angle to her abusive ex-husband.

Overall it was a good episode that dragged at times. The running gag of Harry drugging his wife was fantastic but the scenes usually lasted too long. The development between Sheriff Thompson and his Deputy delivered, but seeing a bit more wouldn’t of hurt them. Harry becoming jealous wasn’t a bad idea either, but there could’ve been more time given to him and Ethan on their own.

The biggest issue with this episode was the lack of follow-up between Max and Harry from the previous episode. Max was mentioned, but it’s the dynamic that both are developing that really makes it a unique pairing.

Overall, a great episode of the series, that both pushes the narrative and leaves the viewer wanting more.