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Resident Alien Showrunner Chris Sheridan Breaks Down Season 3's Cliffhanger-Palooza Finale
After the third season's finale, Resident Alien showrunner Chris Sheridan walks us through the list of cliffhangers we're losing our minds over!
Spoilers for the Resident Alien Season 3 finale!
As the insanity of the latest Resident Alien finale, "Homecoming," sinks in with audiences, viewers have been assured a fun time pondering the potential outcomes of every major character who had their life blown up this episode. Yes, Resident Alien showrunner Chris Sheridan and his writers left quite the trail of messes for alien Harry and everyone else in Patience, Colorado, to have to clean up.
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In an exclusive postmortem interview with SYFY WIRE, Sheridan touched on the origin and reason for (almost) every cliffhanger stuffed into the hilarious and surprising finale.
Harry and Bridget are in trouble on the Moon
The last shot of the episode reveals that real alien Harry (Alan Tudyk) and his baby Bridget have been imprisoned on the Moon by the vile Greys. On Earth, the escaped Mantid (voiced by Clancy Brown) is now posing as Harry, sizing up Patience's residents for his next meal. Kind of a big threat to the future health and safety of the town, right, Mr. Sheridan?
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Sheridan agreed. "Having a Mantid in Patience — who can become anybody — is exciting from a storytelling standpoint because it just seems like mayhem is gonna break out," the showrunner said with obvious glee. "While [Harry] is up on this spaceship, it's a great opportunity for stunt casting, possibly, as [the Mantid] turns into someone else. A murderous, alien cannibal loose in Patience, Colorado, is exciting. Plus, Mike and Liv need more murders to solve. I think they're gonna be busy."
Sheriff Mike...alien believer?
Maybe one of the biggest jaw-droppers this episode was having perennial curmudgeon and conspiracy acceptor Sheriff Mike (Corey Reynolds) see a Grey with his own eyes. After denying Deputy Liv's (Elizabeth Bowen) alien experiences, will this be the moment that finally opens his eyes?
"Well, he believes that Bigfoot lives in Seattle, but no, not aliens. That's crazy," Sheridan said with a laugh about Mike's consistently inconsistent beliefs. "But, yeah. I think it's gonna blow up his worldview a little bit. And I think it might be one of these things where something is so crazy and so outside of your belief system that even when you're staring at it, you're not sure it's true."
Robo Terry O'Quinn FTW!
If you thought alien tracker Peter Bach (Terry O'Quinn) was dead and out of the show, raise your hand. OK, that's a lot of you. Now, how many guessed he would return as General Eleanor McCallister's (Linda Hamilton) cyborg lab experiment? We thought so.
As a much-beloved face in genre television, O'Quinn has done a lot of sci-fi stints — but pulling a RoboCop is a first in his career. So how did Sheridan pitch it to the actor? "I talked to him about it ahead of time and said here's our plan," the showrunner said. "And he was like, "OK...." And I said, 'I know it seems crazy but I think it'll work.'"
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Sheridan even put O'Quinn in a practical suit! "We had originally built a practical uniform for what we call the 'robo tracker' for Terry," he confirmed. "But on camera it just did not look exciting in any way. In post production, we ended up having our incredible VFX team at COSA build a CGI suit for him, which looks incredible."
The new iteration of the character ran off into the woods, which is a good sign that he'll be back. Sheridan said they all love the character and can't wait to tell more of his story.
"General McCallister had the right idea, but clearly didn't effectively handle it well enough that he wouldn't get his consciousness back," he said. "So now you just have a pi--ed-off alien tracker who remembers that he has a kid out there somewhere and is angry at people for cutting his arms off and putting on like metal appendages. He's going to be out for blood, which is exciting."
Into the portal, General McCallister!
Speaking of McCallister, she stepped into an alien portal to get some answers. But where did it put her?
"We have a very specific idea of where she's going, which I don't want to reveal," Sheridan teased. "But I think there's a certain level of frustration with her. She spent her whole life searching for these aliens and has now found Harry to prove that they exist. But she can't kill him because he's useful to her. I think she's becoming so frustrated with being last in the whole process that she's really searching for answers now... we want to explore her as a little bit lost and making not-so-good decisions. And just looking for some fun stuff for Linda to play."
Ring the bell, D'arcy!
After a season of personal setbacks and losses, D'arcy (Alice Wetterlund) gave up her last-minute self-sacrifice path and instead helped Asta (Sara Tomko) and Kate (Meredith Garretson) escape the Grey spaceship with their lives...including Kate's kidnapped Grey infant. In her last moment of the season, she has the baby in hand outside Ben and Kate's door ... but will she ring their doorbell?
"When she's standing there holding the baby, looking outside the door, I think for the first time, she's feeling good about herself," Sheridan said of that moment. "For the first time, she has realized that the only way you can feel happiness and peace and love for yourself is from within and not from outside. She's proud of herself for doing what she did for a friend.
"Now...we all in life take one step forward and two steps back," he continued ominously. "So, it's not like she's fixed. It's a very important step towards her end goal. So maybe she knocks on the door and hands the baby to Kate and Ben and all is well. But that seems like that'd be too simple."
Patience, Colorado ... Alien Capital of the World?
By the finale's end, a lot more residents are seeing the light about the reality of aliens on Earth.
"The characters have almost fallen into three different factions, where you have Asta, D'arcy, and Harry, who know about Harry's stuff and are a little bit all-knowing in other stuff," Sheridan assessed. "But then you have Mike and Liv, who now believe that aliens exist. You have Ben and Kate, who now believe that aliens exist. So now you're waiting for, 'Are they gonna team up?'
"I think that's going to be fun to explore... Maybe we'll even get into two camps, where you have the camp that knows about Greys but doesn't know that Harry is an alien," he added, laughing. "And then the Harry group that knows kind of everything...while a Mantid is running amok eating people in town."
