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Let’s Talk About ‘Radio Harry’:
- A young man has a therapy session which hints at possibly alien abduction. After the session, the doctor makes a call and the man is picked up by the ‘Men in Black’ and taken to a government holding facility.
- It turns out Dr. Ethan Stone, who seemed to mysteriously disappear into the night, is also being held at the facility (a flashback reminds us that he was taken after being asked if he was the town’s doctor in Patience).
- Harry confronts Max and Sahar about the return of his silver ball, and not even a threat to make ice cream with the worst flavor imaginable from her eyeballs scares the girl. She tells Harry her father is using it as a golf ball, and then graphically demonstrates what she’ll do to Harry (in a hilariously silent shot from outside the diner window), leading him to call the children ‘monsters’.
- Harry intercepts a softball in the hopes of ending a game so he can cultivate the newly sprouted alien flowers from where his ship crashed for use in his radio.
- Kate convinces Ben to visit neighboring rival town Jessup as a ‘fact finding’ mission to see how he can improve Patience, assuring him the mayor there is probably a nice guy. At a restaurant that serves pretentious spring water, the mayor actually turns out to be a jerk … and Kate has no problem letting him have it.
- Rival softball team member Elliott manages to set up a dessert date with D’Arcy, with some help from Liv. But D’Arcy also has to deal with her visiting parents, who love Liv more than they do their own daughter.
- Barclay Hope, who plays Clifford Blossom on Riverdale, plays D’Arcy’s father Gerald Bloom. Was that intentional casting because of the two characters’ last names?!
- Town kook Judy is trying to not so subtly let Sheriff Mike know she’s interested in him, writing down her phone number for him … on her own hand. But Mike does end up on a date with someone else, which does not go well after she asks how he ended up in Patience.
- Harry receives a message in his language — a phone number, from New York City.
- Liv tries to remember how she completely forget taking a dress to the dry cleaners
There was a lot going on in this week’s Resident Alien, with the bulk of the story focused on Harry’s attempts to get to the right spot with the right elevation to send his radio signal to his people to stop them from coming to kill everyone. His first obstacle is getting to the flowers that have sprung up on the softball field where he turned his ship into a big puddle of water. He needs those alien petals for the radio. But after an earlier encounter with Max and Sahar at the diner, Harry has a bigger issue to deal with after Sahar planted the suggestion in Asta’s head that Harry isn’t building a radio, he’s building a bomb. After all, he tried that once before so who’s to say he isn’t doing it again? He’s not really going to call his people, he’s going to kill everyone. Asta took the bait, insisting on going to Harry’s cabin to see the device.
But she really has no clue what she’s looking at and has to take Harry’s word for it that it is a radio. The way she keeps looking at him causes Harry to think he has a booger on the end of his nose. Even when asking her father if he trusts Harry, he asks her and she says she does, sort of, and he said good … because he doesn’t. So that only put further doubt in her mind that her friend the alien was simply going to try and kill everyone again. Telling Asta where he needs to go to send the signal, she insists on coming along with him … but first another family gathering because cousin Drew is back in town for a visit. Harry attends for the delicious food, but Drew senses that Harry doesn’t belong there. And when the subject of an early morning hike comes up, Kayla invites herself to join Asta, Dan and Harry, and drew gets dragged into it as well. When Kayla wants to hang out at the river and fish, Drew interprets Asta’s insistence that she and Harry want to go on their hike as something more, offering to stay with Kayla to fish which makes her happy. It also grosses out Asta that Drew thinks she’s trying to go off and screw Harry.
With the clock ticking, they finally get to the right elevation and the right spot (there is also some mineral running through their land that Harry needs to tap in to), Asta is still worried that Harry’s device is a bomb. But as the seconds tick down so Harry can send the signal, which will actually travel to their Mars station (which makes Asta even more suspicious because as far as humans know there’s nothing on Mars … but humans know nothing, according to Harry) and then be beamed to his people, a bright yellow beam is emitted from the device and … it doesn’t explode. Asta is relieved and Harry is happy that the radio worked and now his people will not come to Earth and kill all of the humans … for fifty years. Asta will be dead by then so he won’t have to worry about her being killed now, but Asta is appalled because what about D’Arcy, and her family. Well, D’Arcy will be dead long before Asta, Harry says, which doesn’t help the situation. Asta dives for the radio and knocks it over before the transmission is complete. A furious Harry tells her they would have had fifty years to figure out their next move, and now they might have fifty days or minutes thanks to her actions.
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But before they can air all of their grievances, Asta gets a call that a baby is about to be born back at home and they need to get there ASAP. Furious still with Harry, Asta won’t let him near her cousin, but when complications arise and their grandmother tells Asta to let the doctor help, she has no choice but to let Harry step in. Luckily he’s been watching YouTube videos on human births and knows exactly what to do, helping with the delivery of the baby and learning a bit more about humanity in the process. Between this and his dream of a White Buffalo, which is a sign of hope and good times to come, Harry knows he needs to come up with a real plan to stop his people from coming. But he may be taken a little off track by a message he’s received in his own language — a phone number from New York City.
Elsewhere, the mayor and his wife have a terrible visit to the neighboring rival town of Jessup, confirming Ben’s belief that the mayor is a jerk. So how will this help his campaign to counter the smear ads the mayor of Jessup has been producing? D’Arcy is wooed by rival softball player Elliott, and with Liv’s help she agrees to go on a date with him, for dessert because she has to have dinner with her parents, whom she refers to as ‘The Munsters’. Liv accompanies her on the dinner date, and they show her more attention than they do D’Arcy. Their constant nagging at her causes D’Arcy to relive a moment in her childhood when she did the ‘pulling the tablecloth off the fully set table’ trick, but this time she was not successful, purposely. The whole incident made her skip out on her date with Elliott, even though she saw him inside the diner waiting for her.
Liv also saw Sheriff Mike on a date with someone. Unable to hear the conversation, she saw Mike storm out and tried to go after him but he took off before she could reach him. His date kept asking how he ended up in Patience and he finally told her that his actions as a police officer in DC led to the death of his partner, so he packed up his sick dad and came to the shithole town of Patience where people don’t know when to leave well enough alone. Ouch. But Liv has a problem of her own — when Mike comes to the office he brings her dress from the dry cleaners, the dress Liv has been looking for but has no recollection of taking to the cleaners. How could she forgot such a thing? Listening to the radio after dinner with the Blooms, she realizes she may have been the victim of an alien abduction because of her missing time.
And we finally know what happened to Dr. Ethan after he’d been visited by a couple of shady types in Season 1 and just vanished from the town. He’s been held in a government facility by General Wright, but what she doesn’t know is that this is a case of mistaken identity. Suspecting the town doctor of being the alien she’s been looking for, her people took Dr. Ethan. She tries to entice him with a fancy dinner to admit the truth about himself, and then stabs his hand with a fork thinking it would make him show her his real form. He says this is his real form but she’s still not buying it. Will she realize her mistake, and will Dr. Ethan actually make it out of this situation alive? Stay tuned.
What did you think of this episode? Start a conversation in the comments section below.
Resident Alien airs Wednesdays at 9:00 PM on Syfy.
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