Where Does Resident Alien Take Place? All About the "Real" Patience
The small Colorado town feels like a living, breathing place teeming with character.
One of the oldest and most celebrated tropes within the alien invasion genre is that of a small American town rocked by vast and unimaginable cosmic occurrences.
Resident Alien (now airing its fourth season on USA Network and SYFY) is no exception, with much of the show's plot unfolding against the backdrop of a "quiet mountain town," if we can be so bold as to quote the South Park movie.
Where does Resident Alien take place?
Resident Alien is set in Patience, a small Colorado town situated in the shadow of snowy mountains off in the distance.
It's a sleepy, picturesque slice of the Western United States. Well, things are sleepy until the alien we now know as Harry Vanderspeigle (Alan Tudyk) shows up, steals the identity of a local physician, and plans to wipe humanity off the face of the cosmos. Thankfully, Harry ends up changing his mind, but his sudden appearance on Earth kicks off a chaotic chain of events that places Patience within the context of a vast and dangerous universe far beyond human imagination.
Abductions and head-eating monsters are simply par for the course in Patience.
Is Patience, Colorado, a real place?
No, it is not. But while the town is fictional, it still feels like a living, breathing place teeming with character.
You've got such memorable citizens as Mayor Ben Hawthorne (Levi Fiehler), who isn't the brightest bulb in the box, but what the politician lacks in street smarts, he makes up for with plenty of heart. Then there's Sheriff Mike Thompson (Corey Reynolds) and Deputy Liv Baker (Elizabeth Bowen), the town's hilariously mismatched law-keepers, who can sometimes be found singing karaoke together at the local bar. And speaking of the local watering hole, the thirsty people of Patience are known to frequent The 59, which is named after 59 deceased coal miners killed in an accident decades before.
Where is Resident Alien filmed?
Despite the fact that it takes place in America, Resident Alien is actually shot up in Canada — in the town of Ladysmith on Vancouver Island to be exact.
The island, which is only accessible by ferry (à la Martha's Vineyard and Catalina Island here in the States), was the perfect stand-in for a quaint U.S. hamlet.
"It’s like going to summer camp," series production designer Michael Joy told SYFY WIRE. "We pack everything up. We've done it a bunch of times. We dress three blocks of the town. It's extremely well-organized ... We dress the whole thing, shoot for three days, shooting bits of all the different episodes ... The town is beautiful. And it really was a mining town, so it fits the story really well."
“Early on, the directive was, ‘You need to have a small town set in the mountains, kind of remote-ish,’” explained location manager Ken Brooker. “It still needed to have enough infrastructure, it couldn’t be a sleepy little backwater, necessarily. It had to have some sense of character and a real sense of place. A lot of that came out through Ladysmith.”
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He continued: “One of the main things is the fact that our three big anchor locations — our town hall, our town’s clinic, and this bar called ‘The 59’ — all had to be visually linked and they had to be within sight of each other. Talk about finding a needle in a haystack. You need to have the perfect locations individually for each of those things, but then they all have to be in geographic proximity, so we were very fortunate. Ladysmith was a real good find for us, and it played well. It looks great on camera, and the people there were very welcoming."
Most, if not all, of the interiors, however, are soundstages located on the mainland, while the lakeside exterior of Harry's cabin is just outside of Vancouver.
"We searched everywhere looking for Harry's cabin, but the big scene in the pilot was a fight with an eight-foot-high alien," Joy explained. "Everybody realized pretty quickly that we were gonna have to build this as a set. We found this beautiful location outside of Vancouver that looks like it's on a lake, but it's not really on a lake. It’s on the ocean. We built the exterior of the cabin, and then the interior of the cabin was built on a soundstage in Vancouver."
New episodes of Resident Alien premiere on USA Network and SYFY every Friday, with each episode available to stream on Peacock a week after air. The first three seasons are now available to watch right here!
