How SYFY’s Resident Alien Became One of TV’s Most Wholesome Comedies

The town of Patience, Colorado is full of misfits and outcasts of varying degrees, all trying to find their place in the world just as Harry himself is. From a sheriff trying to flee the ghosts of his own past to a wife who isn’t sure she made the right choice about giving up her career for her husband’s dreams, every character on Resident Alien is a glorious study in all the messiness that comes with life as a human being. But it’s the firmly established bond between town nurse Asta Twelvetrees and chaotic bartender D’Arcy Bloom that largely serves as the emotional linchpin around which the rest of the show turns.

Though Asta’s deepening relationship with Harry is obviously important to her, and to the larger story that Resident Alien is telling, it’s her longtime friendship with D’Arcy that grounds her character and helps provide the show with the sort of relatable, human stakes that make it all work. The two women are allowed to be angry, to make mistakes, to get jealous, to be deeply and fully imperfect in a way that we rarely get to see in female friendship on television, especially in sci-fi properties. Yet, the show doesn’t judge either of them for their various failings and stumbles, it simply shows us the pair working their way back to each other again, as they always have. Learning, apologizing, and loving one another anyway.

Best friends since high school, the two women have been helping each other navigate life’s ups and downs since long before an alien came to town, and though Harry comes to mean different things to each of them, his presence thankfully never truly threatens the foundation of their relationship in any real way. Yes, Asta is currently keeping a mountain of secrets from her BFF about everything about Harry’s true identity and the various extraterrestrial threats humanity is currently facing to the mystery surrounding Sam Hodges’s death, and D’Arcy will inevitably be incredibly hurt and angry when all that subterfuge comes to light. But it’s hard to imagine anything breaking these two women up for good, if only because they’ve already proven there’s basically nothing they won’t do for one another. 

There’s an old saying that friends help you move (though yours truly is currently trapped in this particular hell and can confirm it’s easier just to pay professionals), but real friends help you move bodies. This is perhaps the least poetic way to describe Asta and D’Arcy’s friendship, but as the season 2 midseason premiere “Autopsy” proves, it is absolutely the most accurate. On a different sort of show, D’Arcy discovering that Asta killed a man would be a game changer for their relationship, likely spinning it off into a dark place of recrimination, guilt, and mistrust. Instead, D’Arcy simply asks if Harry owns a wood chipper for her to chuck the dead body into because that’s the kind of ride-or-die BFF she is. (Relationship goals, is what I’m saying.) Her only concern is whether Asta might find herself in further danger or in jail, and she passes zero judgment on what her friend felt she had to do. 

D’Arcy and Asta’s friendship has survived a lot over the years, from the horrors of high school to the struggles of trying to date in a small town where everyone not only knows who you are, they already know the worst thing about you too. At different points in their lives, both women have tried to leave Patience behind them, but both ended up returning to their hometown—and to one another—when their respective dreams didn’t exactly work out the way they wanted them to. Even now, D’Arcy is still trying to figure out who she is if she can’t be the Olympic skier she trained to become. Asta must navigate her own recovery from an abusive relationship even as she tries to forge a new relationship with Jay, now that the younger woman knows she’s her biological mother. But Resident Alien is very clear about one thing: No matter what other problems or personal traumas the two are trying to navigate they always have each other to turn to.