Resident Alien’s Best Episode Of the Latter Half of Season 2 Is The Alien Within, Filled With Laughs And Shocking Revelations

I know last week I was lamenting how The Weight wasn’t as funny or focused as I’d wanted. That all changes in this week’s Resident Alien, called The Alien Within. This was a truly fantastic episode providing what I expected from this show and significantly more. So though I don’t normally do this, I’m gonna issue a quick warning. If you don’t want any spoilers, stop reading now. Because there’s a ridiculously huge spoiler that changes the course of the entire season, if not the series itself. If you’re still reading, then here we go!

The Alien Within got my attention right out of the gate with a vision of a far future Harry. He’s now an old man, and is talking about how everything changed one day and that Asta died decades ago. Meanwhile, in the present, Harry is busily trying to find the baby and is perplexed that it formed an attachment so quickly with Sahar. His species doesn’t do that, and of course, he suffers a bit of an identity crisis. He thinks his human skin is making him too emotional and weak, so he vows to be the cold alien he is on the inside.

Mike and Liv spend some time testing water from Hawthorne Creek, and find it’s highly toxic. Worse, there’s evidence of a coverup from the Galvin Powell Group, who have been hiding a mining leak that infiltrated the body of water. Then Mike gets dangerously close to paying deputy Liv a compliment and screws it up as expected.

Halloween is just around the corner in this episode, and Harry loves the holiday, just for the wrong reasons. He thinks it’s hilarious imagining how humans died and loves the macabre skeletons strewn everywhere. He and Asta then talk about alien species, and it quickly becomes clear how hard it might be to identify the one hiding on Earth. He’s also really attracted to bird-faced aliens, which is weird, but also totally in line with Harry’s oddball personality.

Sahar is desperate to find baby Goliath and starts talking with Max about it. She then immediately zeroes in on the new lunch lady Agnes, who is the General in disguise. Sahar notices her military watch, and worries the lunch lady may have slipped Max some tracker in his lunch food. So the only solution is for him to poop it out, which he heroically agrees to do. After all, he only poops after breakfast or at the book store, so it’ll take some work on Max’s part.

Back with Mike and Liv, they begin to suspect Sam Hodges discovered the toxic leak and was silenced to cover it up. They pass it along to the FBI, meaning it’s time for Torres to leave. She clearly has (somehow) developed feelings for Mike, and Liv tries to encourage him to act on them. To nobody’s surprise, he gets awkward and shuts Torres out, and when Liv gives him a hard time about it, he shocks her by saying he’s thinking about leaving Patience and moving back to Washington DC.

As for D’Arcy, she splits her time in this episode by having Harry look at her bruised knee and torturing Ben (for good reason). To my pleasant surprise, despite Harry’s assertions about how inhuman he is, he clearly empathizes with D’Arcy’s need to prove herself in the field she excels in and prescribes her pain medication. He then ruins it by being instantly horrified that he cares about more than one human, and decides to go on a walkabout in his alien skin.

Mayor Ben gives a big presentation trying to sell the town on his resort idea, and Asta, D’Arcy, and company crash it. D’Arcy especially loves torturing him with hard questions, and it’s clear the people of Patience worry the resort will ruin the town, take money from small businesses, and destroy the sense of camaraderie that exists. So the new plan the girls come up with is to bring Ben’s wife Kate to their way of thinking. It takes some effort, but they finally help Kate realize what’s special about the town, and by the end of the episode she agrees to help.

Harry’s walkabout goes wrong very quickly, and he realizes how hungry he is standing out in the cold. So he tries to do his human routine in the cabin, just in his alien form. He crashes his towering frame into the ceiling repeatedly, breaks things, and generally is miserable. He finally decides the only logical course of action isn’t to stay in alien form to increase his odds of finding baby Goliath, but to kidnap Sahar and have her capture the baby.

The final arc of the episode starts when David spies on Max and Sahar in school and gets actual footage of the baby arriving. Max tries his best to keep the baby in one place (while he’s dressed up as Frankenstein’s monster), but the baby escapes. Harry goes to kidnap Sahar and is super creepy and overly excited about the prospect. But the young woman turns it around on him and says she’s adult-napping him, which takes all his fun out of the equation.

By the time Harry and Sahar get to the RV, the General’s people have already lured the baby with a recording of Sahar’s voice and dragged the RV into the sky. Harry tries to fight his human emotions, but eventually comforts a heartbroken Sahar. But none of that was why I truly loved the episode. That comes next in the huge twist.

We get another flash to the future, and it’s revealed that Harry finds a portal to the past. He uses it to escape an utterly devastated Earth, and it’s thus revealed that he travels back in time and became Goliath! This is amazing and totally shocking since I did not expect a time travel twist in Resident Alien. But somehow it works, and I’m excited to see where the rest of Season 2 takes us.