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Let’s Talk About ‘The Ghost of Bobby Smallwood’:
- A prologue taking place 81 years ago sets up an important storyline later in the episode.
- Asta is unusually happy after Harry erased her memory, but she hasn’t just forgotten the shooting.
- Harry turns in his autopsy report but Mayor Ben does not want to accept the results.
- A man seeks emergency medical treatment after suffering a bite wound.
- D’Arcy and Kate exchange apologies after their harsh words at Harry’s party.
- Ben finally admits to Sheriff Mike why he wants the murder investigation handled by the Jessup police.
- Harry follows the baby to the old mine but is met with the ghostly howls of the miners who died there.
- Asta bumps into a very angry Jay in town and begins to wonder if Harry did something to her.
- Sahar sees a ghost.
- D’Arcy finds herself getting closer to Elliott but will those feelings cause her to run?
- Det. Torres ID’s the men in the van and Judy confirms the identities.
- Ben admits he’s afraid of Kate, so will their marriage survive?
- Asta realizes that Harry tried to help her to help himself deal with the trauma of nearly being killed.
This episode of Resident Alien had so much going on, running through a wide gamut of emotions and really delving into the relationships of several of our key characters. It also packed a major gut-punch of emotions as Harry and Asta deal with the concept of their own mortality. That could have made for a really sappy moment, but the sensitive writing and performances from Alan Tudyk and Sara Tomko made the tears from the viewers well-earned.
The writing and construction of this episode was so well done because it managed to look at the relationships of Harry & Asta, Ben & Kate, D’Arcy & Elliott, and even gave us a bit of a relationship triangle between Mike, Liv and Lena Torres, all the while forwarding the storyline. It’s nice that we can get to know these characters more in their own worlds while they all still play roles in the greater story overall. I’ve seen too many shows with too many characters who generally have their own separate storylines, but even when they are separate here, they are still part of a unit.
Case in point: D’Arcy and Kate. D’Arcy has always seemed like a B-character, Asta’s friend who she can go to for advice or vice versa, a friend who is willing to dispose of a body if need be, but she is Asta’s rock. Her closeness with Asta, and Harry, also makes us care about her as well. D’Arcy already has a compelling backstory relating to her injury that took her out of competitive sports that has continued to haunt her into the present manifesting in some bad behavior. She could have been the type of character who became a caricature, but her growth over the season has really made her a key figure in the story, and even when she’s off in her own storyline — such as finally committing to dating Elliott and not running away after spending the night with him — we still care about her and it doesn’t feel like some padding to drag out the episode to 42 minutes. And now we have to wonder while visiting a construction site that unearthed some Native artifacts how this is going to tie into Harry’s story. I don’t think the writers do anything by accident, and D’Arcy moving a backhoe that may be covering ancient foundations may be a move that uncovers more than anyone expected.
Kate really hasn’t had much interaction within the main plot, but her relationships with her husband Ben, and now D’Arcy, also helps drive things outside of their little bubble. Her and Ben’s relationship is really a key factor in Ben’s behavior regarding the murder, and we find out why this week. As we saw in the previous episode, Ben and Kate have a terrible communication issue, and when Ben admits to Mike that he wants Jessup to handle the murder because a developer has made an offer to build that resort in Patience so another murder on the books would scuttle that deal, Mike begins to see through Ben’s subterfuge, especially when Ben says he just needs something to go right. Mike quickly points out that when a married man says he needs something to right, he means things are not going right at home. Mike also says 100% of his job is being a therapist, which Ben thinks sounds a bit high but Mike says it’s too low … but anyway Mike tells Ben he can’t run away from his problems at home. He needs to face them head on … but in a public place to ensure she doesn’t kill him. So he does just that, taking Kate to the diner and blurting out that he’s basically afraid of her. She is taken aback and realizes that they are in public for insurance, but she also says it’s the most honest thing he’s ever said to her. Not that it makes it any easier, so before she does cause a scene, she excuses herself and goes home. Ben finally goes home as well and says he didn’t mean to imply he was afraid of her, but she admits she makes it hard for him to talk to her. They recall how when they first met they used to talk on the phone for hours about nothing, but they’ve been together for a long time and things change. Regardless, they do love each other, they have a great kid and another one on the way, but this is what they are now. Kate goes into the kitchen and her phone rings. It’s Ben in the living room, calling her as if they had just met for the first time. They ended up talking for three hours, one room apart, with Ben comically asking her what time it was where she is. I think these two are going to be okay. This is another case of a B-storyline that could have just been padding, but the writing and acting makes us invested in these characters. And on top of all that, Kate and D’Arcy have also reconciled with D’Arcy admitting she should have told Kate about kissing Ben — while Kate says Ben should have told her himself — and they bond over their athletic trophies gathering dust.
In the case of Deputy Liv, we’ve always been on her side when it comes to Mike. Yes, she’s married and there isn’t anything romantic between the two of them, but she does see Mike as her ‘work husband’ and she really hates being seen as inferior to him. Is it because she’s a woman? Is Mike a complete chauvinist, or is it just that he has a massive ego? Liv’s working relationship with Mike is really being put to the test now as Mike seems to have taken a fancy to Det. Lena Torres. Despite all of Liv’s expertise in cracking cases — which Mike seems to always take credit for — Mike seems to be turned on by Lena’s skills. First she shows up on the scene with IDs for the two men in the van, the ones who went missing on the lake. While Liv tries to determine where the men were from based on her skill at differentiating between New York and New Jersey accents — pinpointing New Jersey, but Torres already knew they were from New Jersey because of the license plates on the van. She also called in some favors from the NYPD where she used to work, and she and Mike bond even further over being former big city cops now in these little backwater towns. Feeling that he can work with Torres to crack this case, he completely ignores Liv and her attempts to wedge herself between them. Poor Liv.
We even got a little bit of the relationship between Sahar and Max this week as she makes a shocking discovery. While walking her dog in the park, Sahar sees a young boy, the same boy we saw from the prologue set 81 years earlier. This is the boy who went into the old mine while hunting for food for his family but he never returned. When Sahar sees the boy, and older woman also sees him (so he’s not an actual ghost) and immediately calls him Bobby. She was his sister and the little girl who was also in the prologue. The woman with her (daughter?) says Bobby died 80 years ago so it could not be him, but the woman insists she knows her brother. The boy hisses at her and runs away, and Sahar immediately recognizes that hiss from the time she and Max encountered the baby alien. Later she calls Max to meet her at the RV, and shows her what she found — the long lost Bobby Smallwood (Max sees an alien in overalls). But, even while being condescending to Max, has come to the conclusion that the alien baby must have gone into the mine and found the boy’s remains and assumed his human form. She tells Max they cannot tell Harry they have the baby, now in 10-year-old form, because she believes Harry is breeding the baby to be evil, so she’s going to teach him to be good. And by demonstration, when the boy picks up a piece of watermelon he wasn’t supposed to touch, she squirts him with some water. Bad alien!
All of these relationships, while enmeshed in the greater story, still orbit around Harry and Asta. Harry likes this new, smiley Asta, even when she shows up at his cabin unexpectedly to make him coffee … which she also seems to have forgotten how to do. She’s also forgotten that the alien egg hatched and wants to go check on it, but Harry tells her it is fine and the baby inside gave him a telepathic message that his people are not coming to destroy the planet. Asta is maybe a bit too thrilled to know they all aren’t going to die now, but Harry has omitted the part about the other aliens already on Earth. Harry also turns in his autopsy report — Ben refuses to accept that it was a shooting, maybe it was a firecracker — and D’Arcy comes to the office looking for Asta. Harry tells her Asta is in denial and to not mention ‘the incident’ to her, but D’Arcy warns her if he’s dragged her friend into something she might have to kill him herself. But the conversation is interrupted by a man who is seeking emergency medical treatment. Something on his dairy farm bit him … he thinks maybe it was a chupacabra, he calls it a monster, and Harry knows it was the baby. He leaves the man in the care of Nurse Cho while he heads to the farm, because the baby will want all that milk. Harry muses to himself that humans could live on a plant-based diet and doesn’t understand why they don’t because he loves cows. He also loves milk because his face is covered in it. He spots the baby but before he can capture it, the farmer returns and scares it away. Harry follows it to the mine, but he can’t go inside because the ghostly screams of the miners who died inside overpower him at the entrance.
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Asta pops in to the bar to spread her joy and asks D’Arcy how things are going with Elliott. D’Arcy is confused because Asta knew she had a date with him, and she notices something is a bit off with her friend. Judy and another friend are playing pool, and the sound of the balls hitting sounds like a gunshot, which triggers something in Asta. When she leaves the bar, she runs into Jay on the street and is confused as to why Jay is mad at her, not having any knowledge that they were supposed to have lunch together for Jay’s birthday. Asta is now concerned that Harry did something so she goes straight to the cabin to confront him. He admits he erased her memory of the night of the party, but in his defense he says she asked him to (she really didn’t though). He says he did it because she was sad, but she doesn’t know what she was sad about. But that just triggers her memory and she relives the shooting, which we now see from her perspective, and now she is sad again for killing that man.
Not only is she sad but she’s angry because that was her grief to deal with, not his. But he says she was happy and smiling when he did, and he even saw her teeth which he didn’t know she had. She tells Harry life is not just about smiling, it’s about pain and guilt and fear, and you have those feelings for a reason. Harry doesn’t like thosee feelings and to make himself forget them he always thinks about Law & Order Season 5. But Asta wants to focus on that night, focus on Harry’s own fear of dying that night. Harry just wants to get his L&O DVDs out now. Asta saw the fear in his eyes and tell him he is the one in denial because he was scared of dying. She tells him he is just burying his feelings like all humans do — and we all know how Harry feels about being human — and tells him to stay out of her head.
Later, Asta realizes she may have been a bit harsh with Harry and tracks him down at the diner, eating his feelings with all the comfort food they had. He’s upset they would not deep fry the pie though. He does apologize for erasing her memory and causing her to miss her lunch with Jay. Asta has remembered the alien baby did hatch and is on the loose, but tells Harry he has to deal with his fear of dying. She tells him she knows she will die one day, they all will, but she can’t spend her life worrying about it. They need the bad things in order to truly live and if she can get through all of the bad then so can he. Those are some deep words. This brings up a patient of Harry’s, Gerard, who he’s been quite blunt with about his impending death (at one point telling the man if he loves Christmas to celebrate it in June). Harry seems to realize his bluntness with Gerard was his way of dealing with death. To him, he was holding the patient at arm’s length to not deal with it, while he found Harry’s bluntness refreshing.
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So after his chat with Asta, Harry visits Gerard at his home. Harry admits to him that he wanted to avoid him because he’s dying, but Gerard tells him to not be afraid of death. He told Harry that his life actually got better when he learned he was dying because he began to appreciate every little moment. (Someone pass me a tissue.) Harry likens that to when you know there’s only one slice of pie left, which makes it taste even better. Exactly. And then Harry performs the greatest act of compassion he could for Gerard, facing death head-on himself, administering an injection to help Gerard pass away peacefully (another tissue or two please). Harry returns to the diner and has that last slice of delicious pie.
And Asta goes home and writes Jay a letter, apologizing for missing her 18th birthday, and teling her how sorry she was how Jay learned that she was her mother, but also grateful now that she knows. She finishes the letter and puts it into an envelope and writes ‘Jay 18’ on it … and then puts it in a box with every other letter she’s written to Jay on her birthday. (Now I need that whole box of Kleenex!)
Man, that was an emotional punch to the gut but it was all constructed so well that it never felt inauthentic. The emotions here are earned by some insightful writing and sensitive performances that will maybe make us all think about living our lives to the fullest. I have to admit that I’ve been dealing with a death in the family, perhaps I’ve choked down my own feelings about it, and I’m facing a milestone birthday in a couple of weeks that also has me contemplating my own mortality, so all of this hit me in the feels especially hard. But everything that was said is something we should all take to heart. It is certainly a powerful message about living our lives to the fullest, and it continues to show that Resident Alien is much more than it may appear to be on the surface. Good job all around.
New episodes of Resident Alien air Wednesdays at 10:00 PM on Syfy.
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