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Let’s Talk About ‘Best Enemies’:
- In a 23 years ago prologue, a young couple celebrates the 2nd birthday of their missing child.
- Ben is sleepwalking and having recurring dreams about his childhood.
- D’Arcy has become the guest who won’t leave Dan and Asta’s house.
- Harry did not kill Peter, the Alien Tracker, but he is holding him hostage in the bunker under the cabin.
- Ben’s sleep deprivation is making him paranoid, believing everyone is against him.
- Harry reveals the existence of the baby to Peter, who may know where it is being held, and Harry hatches a plan to rescue him.
- Mike may not be going about dating Lena Torres in the best way, conducting a background check on her.
- Judy invites herself to stay with Dan, Asta and D’Arcy since D’Arcy isn’t leaving their house.
- Harry and Peter get into the military base, but can they get out?
In this week’s penultimate second season episode of Resident Alien, many of our characters realize they need to put their trust in others if they want to get the things they need or to build up their own self-confidence.
For Ben, this becomes especially difficult as he is growing more and more paranoid due to his sleepwalking, recurring childhood dreams, and a lack of sleep altogether. Kate finds Ben on the porch one morning, and he’s not even aware of how he got there. He blames the sheets Kate just bought for giving him the nightmares, but she says they are $200 Egyptian cotton sheets so they are not the problem. Ben says now that he knows how much they cost, it’s enough to give him nightmares. But he’s finding it difficult to function during the day, falling asleep at his desk where Mike finds him, asking Ben not to give him the details of his ‘Etch-a-Sketch nipple play’ with his wife. Yeah, Ben doesn’t want to hear that out loud either. Mike’s helpful advice to Ben is that sleep is a state of mind. You’re welcome. But Ben is becoming so paranoid that he even thinks Debra, the nicest lady in the office, is out to get him, bringing him a lukewarm cup of coffee. Mike sticks his finger in it and says it’s hot, and a good cup of coffee. Well, not anymore!
Later, Kate and Kayla are celebrating the temporary restraining order they got agains the resort, and Liv joins them while waiting for her husband. Liv has her own worries at the moment regarding Peter’s disappearance, her feeling of helplessness, and Kate says she feels the same way with Ben. Liv surprises Kate with knowledge of Ben’s sleepwalking, something she’s known about since they were kids. He wrote a paper about it for their English class. One night he had gotten locked out of his house and spent the night on the porch snuggled up to the neighbor’s cat. That cat, Liv’s cat, was never the same. But while Ben is driving home that night, he falls asleep at the wheel and drives off the highway. Word gets around town when Ben is brought to the clinic, luckily with just a few minor scrapes, and Nurse Ellen has provided a ‘cover story’ that he wasn’t drinking, he hit an ice patch. Ben says he wasn’t drinking. Exactly! Kate arrives and tells him they need to deal with his sleep issues. He says the dreams he’s having about his childhood was about a sense of abandonment from his family, and Kate takes that to mean he feels abandoned by her because they are at odds over the resort. She promises him she will drop her opposition and take his side, but he doesn’t want her to give up something she believes in. What Ben does remember about the accident was that his life flashed before his eyes and all the good things he saw were all in Patience with the people he loves. He’s been trying so hard to make the town perfect, but it already is. He’s just tired of trying to make everyone like him. Kate says everyone loves him, but Ben thinks he’s just the mayor to everyone, but he know Kate loves him and that’s all that matters. But Ben soon finds out he is loved as we see his closest friends and others from Patience streaming into the clinic.
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D’Arcy, on the other hand, knows she has the love and support of Asta and Dan. So much so that, even while she has gone through her detox period from the pills, she’s become a bit too comfortable in their home. Dan’s happy because she’s cooking, and Asta wonders — out loud — how anyone could be happy cooking all day. Dan tells her to ask the roof over her head. Oops. Asta suggests to D’Arcy that maybe it’s time to go back to work, and while she’s over the hump with her dependency on the pills, that hump is still a little too big for her to go back to work. Asta tells Dan it’s time for D’Arcy to leave, and he says he will talk to her. When Asta comes home later, D’Arcy is still there. Dan said he talked to her, she left … and came back with her Playstation. Then Judy shows up with snacks, expecting D’Arcy to go home with her but D’Arcy is not leaving … so Judy will stay there too! This is not how Asta expected things to go. When Dan and Asta go to the kitchen to get more snacks, Judy tells D’Arcy that Ellott was a jerk for breaking up with her and now she’s probably worried that he’s banging chicks left and right. She wasn’t until now. Asta wants to know why he didn’t kick D’Arcy out, and he said she just seemed a little raw after her AA meeting and it didn’t seem right to push her out in the world. Asta loves Dan’s compassion but they can’t keep indulging her. If they don’t force her to live her life, they are just enabling her. Dan agrees and tells Asta it’s time for her to move out. She’s not a child, he loves her too much to enable her, so consider this a push. Well, that didn’t go the way Asta thought it would.
As she lays in bed staring at the glow-in-the-dark stars on the ceiling, D’Arcy joins Asta, remembering how they used to stare at those stars as kids … and really high teenagers. They talk about the future, which D’Arcy says she would inevitably screw up, but Asta says she was under a lot of pressure in that ski tournament. D’Arcy reminds her that others were as well, but they didn’t get hooked on pills and have to hole up at their friend’s house. She just needs to get her shit together. Asta says she isn’t a fan of being alone, but she hasn’t lived on her own in forever. D’Arcy says they should move in together, get a cabin by the lake like her grandmother’s, with a little TV with rabbit ear antennas even though the picture was fuzzy and her grandfather had to hold them so her grandma could watch her shows. D’Arcy says that fuzziness is her life in a nutshell, and Asta was the one holding her antenna. Asta says she’d hold D’Arcy’s antenna any time, to which D’Arcy replies, ‘Gross.’ They have a laugh as the phone rings, Nurse Ellen calling about Ben’s accident.
Being an alien, Harry really only has trust in one human — Asta. He’s certainly not going to trust Peter Bach, whom he didn’t kill but has tied up in the bunker. But he has to deal with Asta when she shows up because he hasn’t been answering his phone. He said he knew she was calling to tell him to come to work. Asta tells him that Liv said the Alien Tracker had left town. Harry brushes it off and fakes an illness to stay home, but Asta begins hearing a voice. Harry pretends he’s practicing ventriloquism but she spots a baby monitor and on screen she sees Peter tied up. Rushing down to the bunker to help him, and apologizing for Harry’s unfamiliarity with being human, Peter tells her about how Harry ‘ripped’ the alien tracking device from his neck (Harry disputes that account of ‘ripping’ but is appalled by the scar on Peter’s neck, suggesting he didn’t take very good care of the wound). He tells Asta how his unborn child was taken from his wife’s womb while they were on a bus. Harry says that is unlikely. Every year, the aliens would take either him or his wife, but they stopped taking him after the chip was removed. A prologue to the episode showed the young Bachs celebrating what should have been the 2nd birthday of their daughter, but in a flash his wife vanished and reappeared. The candles had completely burned down to the cake, and she is hysterical because she saw … their son. Harry prefers to ignore Peter’s story and says he’s only kept him alive to get more information about The Grays. And to torture him a little more. Peter says he would work with Harry if he’d untie him. Harry laughs, but Asta begins to untie him. Peter swears he won’t hurt Harry if Harry won’t hurt him.
Now Harry is obligated to prepare a meal for Peter since all he fed him was unflavored instant oat meal for three days. But it was heart healthy! While slicing an onion, Harry denies it is making him cry, instead he says he’s thinking about a video he saw of a dog playing with a bird. Peter tells him that video was fake. It was not! Harry then wipes his eyes with his oniony hands and makes everything worse. After he soothes his eyes, Peter asks Harry if his intel on the Grays is accurate. Harry maybe over-shares and tells him he got the information implanted in his baby but he only got half of it and then the government took it. Peter says he knows the baby is being held at a military facility, a secret base in Wyoming, possibly not even funded by the government. It’s like Fort Knox. He tried contacting a general there once and then had to go into hiding when they came after him. Harry says maybe they will let Peter in if he has something they want … an alien. He leaves a note for Asta letting her know they are going to break into a military base, and if they don’t come back they are dead. But not to worry because she will soon be dead too. In the meantime, she can watch his TV.
I don’t know how long it took Peter to drive from Colorado to Wyoming, but they are at the base and he’s asking a guard to see General McAllister. The guard says there is no one there by that name. Peter asks if he can show the guard something and they walk to the back of the van. Inside a cage is … an alien. The guard calls for the general. When she arrives, it’s General Wright (if that’s her real name), and she wants to know where he got the alien. He will only talk to her inside. She says he’s not going to dictate what to do, but he says he’s the one with the alien so he can dictate what they do. She gives him 20 minutes, but by the time they wheel Harry in and get him locked in a room, Peter has about 8 minutes to talk. He wants information they have about aliens, and she tells him to stop listening to the loons at his ridiculous conventions. He says she seems to know a lot about him, and she says she likes to know who the threats are. He says he’s not a threat, and then warning sirens go off as Harry breaks out of his cage and escapes, possibly killing two guards. While the general is distracted, Peter manages to cuff her to the table. She asks if this was his plan all along, working with an alien and Peter says he’d never work with an alien … as they both see Harry grinning at a security camera giving two thumbs up and laughing.
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While Harry tries to evade the guards, he enters the room where all of the unconscious, unmoving soldiers are being kept. He remembers those assholes, they were the ones he blasted with his orb when they were trying to keep his ship from taking off at the end of Season 1. They are comatose but he kept them alive because he knew they might come in handy one day. This is that day. He grabs the ankle of one and they all sit bolt upright. Harry walks back out into the corridor and attracts the attention of the guards, gives them the middle finger and runs. Before they can catch up to him, the other soldiers walk out of the room much to the surprise of their friends but they are now fighting to keep them away from Harry. Meanwhile, Peter is releasing all of the prisoners, and Harry encounters Giorgio A. Tsoukalos, who was a guest at Peter’s UFO convention back in Season 1 Episode 9. The guy is in awe of Harry, saying he always knew they were real and then gives him a big hug. Harry says he’s really not a hugger and that the guy should run. The exit os down the hall to the left, past all the dead bodies.
Harry then finds the baby, and after they chatter, the baby leaps onto his head, restarting the message. Peter is still with the general, downloading all of the information from the computer. She tells him those he released are dangerous, any one of them could be an alien. He reminds her that he’s an expert on aliens, he is the Alien Tracker. She asks him how many aliens, besides the one he’s working with, has he actually captured. He asks if one isn’t enough. She says anyone can catch one alien. Okay, so does she have one? She won’t answer so he takes that as a no. Wait, does she have an alien? (Did Peter forget they were there in part to retrieve Harry’s baby?) Harry now has the full message, and tells the baby he is no longer needed. He can go now and finds some goats to eat. But the baby stops Harry in his tracks when he says ‘daddy’, and Harry wonders if this is the connection between a parent and child humans talk about. Harry now needs to hold the baby, telling him ‘I am your father and you are my … spawn. I will protect you.’ The soundtrack cues up Neil Diamond’s E.T.-inspired ‘Turn On Your Heartlight’ as the two enjoy a montage of bonding, until Harry tosses the baby in the air just a little too high, banging his head on a light fixture. Oops.
While Peter was scanning the security cameras in the prisoner cells, he spotted a drawing that resembled the photo of his and his wife when she was pregnant. That prisoner is his son. He’s also the prisoner we saw previously who could hear the alien guard communicate with his mind. The general is surprised by the man’s identity and asks to be uncuffed so she could help. Peter doesn’t believe her. Peter runs into the melee of guards and sees his son, calling out to him. The young man stops but then he hears a voice in his head, calling him Robert, telling him that he belongs to them. Robert goes to his father and the guard says he made the wrong choice, pulling a gun on him. Peter sees and jumps in front of Robert, taking a bullet to the chest. Before the guard can fire again at Robert, Harry grabs him by the throat and lifts him off the ground. He and his baby discuss their next course of action, and Harry drops the man, letting the guards under his control handle the matter. Harry goes to Peter who says, ‘You found your baby.’ ‘So did you,’ replies Harry. Peter says it’s too late for him, but please save Robert. He gives Harry the hard drive of stolen information and dies. They make their way back to the control room, but the general has freed herself. She points a gun at them, saying they cannot take the baby. The baby leaps at her and knocks the gun from her hand, and Harry lifts her off the floor. But he puts her down and leaves with the baby and Robert while someone calls out Robert’s name.
As Harry drives a military vehicle through the gates, the general knows she still has the alien orb … but she doesn’t. It’s gone, the back of the safe torn open. In the truck, the baby vomits up the ball, which makes Harry very happy. In voice over, Harry muses about how Peter was committed to finding his child, but it wasn’t just commitment, it was love too. The word commitment becomes something different when you add love to it. Humans call it devotion. But this devotion isn’t just for families, if there is enough love anyone will feel it. Harry was surprised by the feeling of love when he saw the baby, but he is new to Earth so that is understandable. But why does love surprise humans? Love is like air. Even if you cannot see it, you have to know that it is there.
And now with one episode left this season, we have to wonder where this leaves Harry and his baby with the people of Patience.
New episodes of Resident Alien air Wednesdays at 10:00 PM on Syfy.
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