Resident Alien's Creator Delves Into the Shocking Season 2 Finale

The following contains spoilers for Resident Alien Season 2, Episode 16, "I Believe in Aliens," which aired Sept. 28 on SyFy.

The hit Syfy show Resident Alien, based on the Dark Horse Comics series by Peter Hogan and Steve Parkhouse, has upped the extraterrestrial ante considerably throughout its second season. Disguised alien Harry Vanderspeigle learned that there was another extraterrestrial presence on Earth, bearing the nickname Goliath, only to find out that Goliath had fathered an infant alien son. As Harry brought the child back to his home in Patience, Colorado, he discovered that Goliath was an older version of himself, effectively making him the child's father. As the citizens of Patience face their own unresolved traumas and personal hang-ups, the Grey aliens, headed by the enigmatic Joseph, come to town with apocalyptic plans of their own.

In an exclusive interview with CBR, series creator and showrunner Chris Sheridan explained why Season 2 doubled down on hard science fiction with additional aliens and time travel. He also reflected on several major character arcs across the season and teased what fans can expect from the upcoming Resident Alien Season 3.

CBR: With the Season 2 finale, you've got this really unique storytelling device, with talking head interviews of people talking about their own alien encounters to ground the proceedings a bit. What made you want to close out the season this way?

Chris Sheridan: [The Season 2 finale] is one of my favorite ones we've done so far, and a big reason for that is being able to pull off those interviews. Those are all real people that we interviewed who [director and executive producer] Robert McNeill was able to find. [They] had actual experiences, and we interviewed them in a documentary format. I knew in that storyline that I wanted to have each of the characters wrap up this season, and Deputy Liv's wrap-up, for me, was finally, after all this time to find this inner strength to tell her truth. Even though it's something that other people might think she's crazy about, believing in aliens, she's finally got enough self-confidence to say that truth because she believes in herself, and that was a strong place for her to end.

I knew I wanted to do a piece of that with her interview because we set it up in [Season 2, Episode 14] with the alien tracker telling her his friend was producing this thing and asking her if she wanted to do it, and she says she can't do a documentary. This is her move. She finds out Sheriff Mike believes in her and finally has the strength to tell her truth. I wanted to do just that scene where she's being interviewed and tells her truth, but then I got the idea of how cool it would be if we recorded actual people telling their stories and made that part of the documentary. I felt like if we could interview real people for the documentary and end with Liv as one of these real people with the similar chyrons, it would help ground her story and make her story feel more real if it is part of this grouping of real stories.

I was incredibly happy with how it came out and even more happy that Mike Richardson -- the CEO of Dark Horse and one of the executive producers on Resident Alien - was willing to come on and tell his story as well. He had emailed me about a year before to tell me this story of this thing that happened to him when he was a kid, and I never forgot it. When I was coming up with the idea for these interviews, I reached out to him to see if he was willing to tell his story, and he was, so I was thrilled with how that came out.

The season starts with Harry shielding Max when they crashed down to Earth, and the season ends with Harry letting his actual son go back to space. What was it about book-ending this season with that father/son dynamic?

One of the big themes through the whole season is family, parenting, and for Harry specifically, not only being a parent but the father/son dynamic. That was around with Max, and it took on even more weight when this other alien child comes into his life and took on an even greater weight in [Season 2, Episode 12], where he finds out he is actually the father to this baby. It doesn't mean anything right away because he doesn't know what this means until he's in the room in Episode 15 and realizes there's a real connection here when the kid calls him "daddy." Even though he's in alien form, he just can't escape the humanity in him.

What that does to you as an adult -- even if it's not your kid, but especially if it is your kid -- with someone helpless looking up at you, saying "daddy" just melts you, and it melted him. Those bookends are the two strongest pieces of parenting and the love that comes with it. With Max, it's putting yourself in harm's way to protect those that you love. We end the season with something that is even more difficult, which is that sometimes you have to let go of that child, friend, or loved one because you love them enough to make sure they're safe. Sometimes making sure they're safe isn't the best thing for you, but it's the best thing for them. Harry let go of his baby, knowing that that baby would be safer on his planet as opposed to here on Earth with what was going to come up. It's a great thing for Harry to do and an example of how much he loves this kid, that he was willing to let go of his baby in order to protect it.

The last time we spoke, you mentioned you moved up your plans to include new aliens in the story. Now that the season is done, what made you want to move those plans up and incorporate time travel elements with Future Harry?

That stuff just sort of comes about when you're doing the storytelling. The reason I wanted to move up the aliens is because I just ran out of story. There's a big difference between doing 16 episodes and doing 10 episodes. I think if Season 2 was just 10 episodes, we probably could've told the story that we started in [Season 2, Episode 1] with now Harry's people are coming, and he has to stop them from coming to protect the Earth. We got to about Episode 6 or 7 in story-breaking Season 2 and realized that we're never going to make another 10 episodes talking about this; it felt like the same story over and over again. You have to pivot because the worst thing these days with 559 scripted television shows on the air is to tread water or be boring because there are so many other things people can watch.

The way you get around that is the second as a writer that you feel you're not moving forward, you've got to find something else to do. We realized early on in Season 2 that there were great things I wanted to do that I couldn't hold off to make me comfortable about what to do in the future. You've got to steal those things to make sure that this episode is going to work. You just have to have the confidence that something else will come along to help the next episode work. We moved some of those things up, and when you move things up, it takes on a life of its own and takes you in a certain direction. One of those directions ended up being the search for Goliath, who is this alien presence that Harry is trying to figure out who [he] is and where he's from, and it turns out he's from his planet.

In the process of breaking that story, we came up with the idea of what if Goliath was Harry. We spent a lot of time in the writers' room making that work because these days, with Reddit and a lot of people savvy about sci-fi and time-travel, we knew that all the points of that had to make sense. We spent dozens of hours talking about time travel and what timeline this was on and figuring it all out and then finding a way to boil it all down so you can present that information to the audience where they can maybe follow what's going on.

I was a little nervous going into Episode 12 that the audience wasn't going to get what we were doing, but it helps visually that the editing and directing was great, and we were able to tell the story in Episode 12 in a way that people understood it. The real power of that choice to make him Goliath is it really fed into the parenting theme that we were doing as one of the themes this season because you ultimately realize that Harry is the father of this alien baby, and that changes everything for him.

It is such a powerful thing for a parent that it really does everything we need to do with him as a character which is, every step of the way, try to push him towards humanity more and more and see him fight against that. It ended up working really well, and the reason we moved up a lot of the alien stuff from where I wanted it to be was mostly because it just felt like it was time. These things are organic and always changing, and you just want to make sure that you're staying on top of it and you're telling interesting stories.

Resident Alien revealed Harry is Goliath thanks to a time-travel portal

One of the big human character arcs in the back half of this season is Ben Hawthorne, and I thought you were going to pull a Henry Blake and kill him off. What was it about taking Patience's greatest cheerleader and giving him a new outlook as a changed man?

With Ben, he's a guy who has spent his whole life being afraid. The journey he's been on since the beginning, being the mayor of this town and married to Kate, he's on his journey to find his strength and voice as well. Learning how to be strong and tell his truth with the person he loves the most in the world, which is his wife, is what gives him the strength to be able to eventually be a better mayor, a better person, and a stronger human. What I like the most about what we do with him this season and his arc from being a character who wants everyone to like him to gaining some strength, we go to the core of it, of why he is so afraid and what is the origin. For him, we start peeling back those layers on what the origin was for him and his fear.

What we find out in Episode 16 and moving forward into Season 3 is that this is a guy who, since he was a kid, was abducted by aliens. It's no wonder that he's been living his life afraid, not really trusting anyone, being worried and afraid that he wasn't protected. It's because, when you're a kid being pulled out of your bed and the people in your life who were supposed to protect you can't do anything about it because they're aliens, you're going to live your life pretty afraid. What's so scary about his story is that this is a real thing that people go through. People may not believe people are abducted by aliens, but a lot of people do believe it. There are a lot of stories about people who, through hypnosis or other memories, start this process of remembering being abducted as children and how that's affected their lives.

Whitley Strieber, who wrote Communion, was well into his writing career before he had this experience that he wrote Communion about, about being abducted from this cabin in New York. Through this experience, he goes through this process of hypnosis and remembers being abducted his whole life. Looking back at his whole writing career, spending his whole [time] writing about monsters made a lot of sense. He didn't remember outwardly that he was being abducted, but part of him inside knew it and had to process it. This is something that happens to a lot of people, and it happened to Ben. Ben doesn't remember being abducted as a kid, but the residual problems that come with that have stayed with him for his whole life, which is that he's sometimes afraid of being in his own skin.

The other human story that surprised me this season was D'Arcy. We've seen bouts of vulnerability from D'Arcy since Season 1, but it goes to another level here, particularly in regard to substance abuse. What was so compelling about putting D'Arcy through her paces this season?

The great thing about D'Arcy and the way that Alice Wetterlund plays her is [she's] such an absolutely broken, lovable character. She's absolutely someone that you root for, and you root for her because, as confident as she is, she's a bit of an underdog because you know how hurt and lost she is. This is someone who had her whole life planned out in the Olympics as a teenager, and she crashed and burned, didn't win the gold, and is now bartending in a town. I think there's something relatable about that to everybody. People have dreams in their life of what they want to be, and a lot of people don't reach those dreams and feel like failures, and that's certainly her.

What has compounded that for her in the show, going back to the pilot, as bad as things were for her, her best friend Asta -- the one person who tethers her and makes her feel real -- has been lying to her for a year and a half, and she knows it and doesn't know why. Of course, Asta is lying to her because she met an alien and can't [tell] D'Arcy that. All D'Arcy feels is a disconnect from Asta, that Asta has been lying to her, and maybe she doesn't love her anymore. Because Asta is the only thing holding D'Arcy to this Earth, D'Arcy is feeling herself floating away.

D'Arcy, in the past year and a half, has been desperate to reclaim who she is. She thought maybe she could just ski, and she is so desperate to ski again and find out who she is, she starts taking these pain pills to try to help her through it. She thinks maybe a boyfriend will fix it and latches on to Elliott. What she really needs to do is work on herself, but she just can't do that because she doesn't like what she sees.

One of the great things, to me, going into Episode 16, now that she finally knows the truth, the bigger truth is that she finally knows what Asta was hiding from her and why. When she realizes this is what it is and understands it, I think we're going to see D'Arcy coming into Season 3 with a little bit more strength and confidence because that thing that has disconnected from the Earth in the first two seasons, Asta lying to her, has now been solved and healed in a way. I think D'Arcy can go into Season 3, living with Asta in an apartment together, feeling stronger and more confident than she did in the first two seasons.

Coming out of Season 2, we're seeing Harry team up with General McCallister against a mutual enemy while Joseph comes to Patience. In addition to more Linda Hamilton and Enver Gjokaj, what can you tease about Season 3?

I can't say too much. We're about a month into breaking Season 3, figuring out what the storylines are, and we have a bunch of stuff figured out. Harry is going to be working with McCallister, and the first thing they have to figure out is what the Greys are up to. When Harry discovers that Joseph, his now arch-enemy, is living in town to keep an eye on him, Harry's first move is going to be trying to use Joseph to figure out what the Greys are up to. Meanwhile, Joseph is trying to figure out what Harry's up to. Joseph is in town because Harry was supposed to leave town with his kid in that pod, and he didn't, and Joseph doesn't know why. What's [interesting] to me are these two characters. Enver is great, and, of course, Alan Tudyk is great.

I think the scene with them in Episode 16 is so funny and great. These two aliens squaring off in this town is going to play out very funny. It's the highest stakes, with the survival of the world at stake, and the two people in charge of it are battling it out like two neighbors who are angry at each other and just throwing bags of dogshit on each other's lawn. It's the highest stakes in the world, but the way Joseph gets to Harry as deputy is just writing him a lot of parking tickets, and Harry is annoyed. To me, that's the funniest thing. In that scene in Episode 16, the stakes are incredibly high, with Joseph freezing people, but they're still talking about the minutiae of how he got his number. I think that stuff is hysterical, and we'll do more of that in Season 3. There's going to be a lot of fun, both with Enver and Linda Hamilton in Season 3.

Created by Chris Sheridan, the first two seasons of Resident Alien are available to stream on Peacock. The series has been renewed for a third season by Syfy.