Resident Alien's Cast, Creator Unpack Harry & Heather, D'arcy's Backslide & More
The cast and Chris Sheridan talk about hitting emotional highs and lows in "Truth Hurts."
This story contains spoilers for Resident Alien Season 4, Episode 4, "Truth Hurts."
Brawk! Say it isn't so?
Resident Alien goes straight for our hearts in this week's new episode, "Truth Hurts," which puts the residents of Patience, Colorado (and us!) on that crazy roller coaster of life and love.
In particular, Harry's (Alan Tudyk) loss of powers permanently ends his relationship with Heather (Edi Patterson), the Blue Avian alien. And Sheriff Mike (Corey Reynolds) can't deny seeing an alien with his own peepers anymore after a trip to the woods with Deputy Liv (Elizabeth Bowen), which leads him to spill some truths to his girlfriend, Detective Lena Torres (Nicola Correia-Damude).
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In our exclusive USA Insider post-mortem for “Truth Hurts,” showrunner Chris Sheridan and Tudyk walk us through Harry and Heather's brutal goodbye, while Reynolds talks about how Sheriff Mike's regrets lead him to express love. Lastly, Alice Wetterlund addresses D’arcy's disappointing return to the bottle.
Harry + Heather: "It makes me laugh and breaks my heart at the same time"
The strange love affair between Harry and Heather comes to an end in "Truth Hurts." Because Harry is powerless and not really an alien anymore, he knows asking Heather (and their brood of bird babies) to give up their alien lives to stay on Earth with him is not fair or sustainable. And so Harry must experience another human emotion: true heartbreak.
"One of the things that Alan can do, that I don't think any other actor could ever do, is find the subtleties and performance that he would need, like he still knows about being an alien this year, but he doesn't have it in him," Sheridan said of Tudyk's navigation of Harry feeling so adrift this season. "There's a loss in [Harry] with that. And [Alan] becomes 2 percent more human in how he interacts with people, which is a very subtle acting here, too.
"But most of it is watching what it means to maybe feel more empathetic now, feel the emotions more now than ever before," he continued, citing the breakup scene.
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Tudyk said he loved being able to play all the beats of their weird romance, which culminates in that tearful/comedic scene in the cabin.
"I think that this kind of comedy with drama, simultaneously, is my favorite thing to do," the actor said. "The scene with Heather, it's a hard goodbye. Edi Patterson plays Heather, and she makes me laugh and breaks my heart at the same time.
"And that is so hard!" he added with admiration.
"To create a space for that kind of storytelling is really hard to do," he said of what Resident Alien does so well. "I feel like, if you set out to do it...good luck, because I've read a lot of scripts where they've tried, and it's easy to miss. It's easy to go one way, or the other. And so, that's what I'm going to remember, just the playground that Chris built for all of us."
Sheriff Mike regrets living in denial... and does something about it
"Truth Hurts" also deals with the aftermath of Sheriff Mike witnessing the Mantid in the woods with his own eyes. Regrets? Yeah, Mike has a few....
"I think he feels bad in many ways with how he didn't believe Deputy Liv, and how he felt like he maybe let her down in that sense," Reynolds said of what his character is wrestling with now.
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Mike gets a taste of his own medicine when he tries to convince his girlfriend Lena that he saw an alien and she laughs at him.
"I think he gets a sense of what it was like for [Liv] when he's trying to convince Lena. There's nothing like sympathy to create connection. Now they've both been in that same boat," he said.
But recognizing his long-term mistake helps him get more honest, and he tells Lena that he loves her, which is a huge step for Mike.
"I think that aspect of the relationship with Lena, it's good for him because he wants to love," Reynolds pondered. "He does. He's just afraid, which many of us are."
What does D'arcy's backslide back to drinking mean for her future?
Listen, we get it. D'arcy has had a terrible run of it: losing her boyfriend, her career, and having to hand over the alien baby she helped rescue from the moon. All of it has been a blow to her self esteem and worth, so it's not surprising that she's returned to drinking this season. But it breaks our hearts all the same.
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In playing out that storyline this season, Wetterlund explained, "I really wanted to show someone going through the arc of many, many, many bad decisions and then facing the consequences of those decisions. But for D'arcy, that process happens internally. There are some really big screw ups that she has to face in Season 4, but there's also an unraveling internally that's happening. She's at an impasse. She really can't go on the way she's been going."
Season 4 of Resident Alien drops new episodes on Fridays on USA Network and SYFY. All episodes will be available to stream exclusively on Peacock one week after they air.
