Harry’s humanity is showing on Resident Alien Season 3 Episode 4 when he falls in love for the first time in his human form.
We all know what it’s like to fall in love.
The feeling is almost euphoric, and nothing else in your life seems even remotely important anymore.
When tasked with saving the world, that lapse in your attention span can be problematic.
Luckily, everyone in Harry’s orbit just talked right over his need to talk about nothing but love.
Resident Alien has so much to say about humanity and its oddities, but we had no idea if we’d ever get to explore love. Harry has been singularly focused on two things: Earth and feeling his way around his human form.
Harry Vanderspeigel wants to right his wrongs by saving Earth and the humans he’s come to cherish, and he wants to do it while enjoying every piece of pizza and pie put before him and revisiting every episode of Law & Order.
It sounds a little bit like your average couch potato with a penchant for recycling.
Falling in love, though, buckled Harry’s knees and rocked his world.
She is perfect in every way. I have a strange desire to smell her. That would be weird. I bet she smells like a feather pillow locked in a hot car.
Harry [inner voice]
Harry was like a teenage girl, utterly unable to concentrate on anything but his feelings for Heather, and he reverted to that place by asking Max to deliver a note to her with a “circle yes or no” that she likes him, too. Ahhh. Awful memories.
It was brilliant how Harry fell to his knees every time he got excited at the prospect of Heather beside him. When he touched her, when she whispered to him, his knees literally buckled like they did in an old-time romance novel.
Asta: What the hell were you doing?
Harry: I don’t know. My knees are weak and my palms are sweating. I know what this is. I have seen this in human movies. I am in love!
Asta: What? No. You have just met her.
Harry: I luh love her! I cannot help it. I feel luuhhh love for her. It’s like how I feel love for you, Asta, but it is different. It is not just in my head or in my heart, but it is in my pants. Is that why they call it in love? Because it is in your pants?
Weak in the knees, as a phrase, has gone out of fashion, but the feeling where your whole body begins to collapse under the weight of the attention you receive is a part of our human experience.
We can’t control when it happens, but as we’ve lived our whole lives as humans, we know how to stop the effects. The feeling was fresh enough for Harry that even if he felt it coming, he was powerless against it.
Edi Patterson is an exceptional addition to the show. I know her work from The Righteous Gemstones, and her talent perfectly matches Alan Tudyk’s.
My heart sweats. Words, heat, remains in my chest. You are a light in the blackout. I’d like to touch you where the eggs pop out. It’s titled. Bird Boner.
Harry
But how long will she remain on the show?
Despite Harry’s longing, Heather was eager to return home through the portal. Then she realized he’d changed. Will love keep her around even if the portal is fixed?
I do have a question about the portal. Did the repairman have to come through a portal to fix another? Do we suddenly have aliens living all around?
As far back as Resident Alien Season 1, I got the impression that intergalactic travel wasn’t easy peasy. It was just during Resident Alien Season 2 that Harry sent Bridget back home via a rocket. Harry had a spaceship.
There are ships everywhere. But why? Why would anyone travel with a spaceship when they could rip a hole through space and walk through it?
Yes, many questions, all of which lead me back to Heather.
I have no choice but to leave earth. We have been brainstorming all morning, the storm has stopped, and now there is just mud.
Harry
Even if she can leave, with a portal, she can pop right into Harry’s living room at any time, which means an inter-species romance across galaxies can continue playing out in real time.
I’m so here for more of their adventures.
If Harry’s “Avian Flu” was played for laughs, Kate’s struggle to discover what’s keeping her awake at night was not.
Kate and Ben Hawthorne often lead the charge comedically, but even the idea of what Kate has suffered at the hands of the Greys can make you sick to your stomach.
To have given birth again and again only to have it ripped out of your loving arms would be bad enough. Uncovering those feelings of betrayal and discovering aliens are behind them might be too much to handle.
At least we saw Max with his parents for a chance, even if Ben quickly dismissed his entry into the conversation.
When Max connected owls and alien abductions, Kate was alarmed. She’s more interested in digging out what’s buried deep inside her than Ben is with his own thoughts. He can brush them aside easily. Maybe that’s because, as a mother, Kate carried lives that she can still sense.
On Resident Alien Season 3 Episode 2, Ben remembered under hypnosis that his baby was with him in a spaceship. It suggests he will know an entirely different side to what Kate recalls.
As a family, how would they get through such a revelation? The only thing I can imagine is that when their memories burst into the present, they’ll be closer to discovering Harry is an alien.
When will the others get in on that secret?
Mike and Liv have bumbled their way to another one of the alien hunter’s diaries. At least, that’s what it appeared to be. It was a strange find inside such a large section of the van; a little disappointing, actually.
Mike: Now why would a well-respected military chemist end up living way out here like some kind of creepy ass fairytale witch?
Liv: They say she kind of lost it after she saw her husband die in a lab accident.
Mike: Lab accident? You sayin’ we could be facin’ a supervillain?
But if it contains information about Harry, then it could bring Mike and Liv closer to the secret, too.
For a while, I worried that if too many people learned about Harry’s identity, it could ruin the show’s flow.
But adding the general and Heather proves that there are plenty of tricks up the writers’ sleeves, and even if some of our favorite characters stop working against Harry, the show will still work.
D’Arcy is proof of how quickly a dynamic can change for the better.
Her interactions allow Harry to continue growing as a character.
Asta would have never asked his opinion about her love life as D’Arcy did, and she would have never told Harry that talking to him is easy because he can’t judge her.
Of course, we know that the more human feelings Harry gets, the more judgy he will be, but you get the point.
if you do something special and nobody knows about it, are you still special?
D’Arcy
D’Arcy realized how special love is and how easy it is to muck it up the same time Harry was falling in love for the first time, opening a conversational door that, without her knowledge of the secret, would have been closed.
Liv is one of the few people in town who believes in aliens without persuasion. And although they aren’t the best investigators, Liv and Mike get things done. They could be helpful in saving the Earth.
I can’t be the only person who imagines the first conversation between Harry, Liv, and Mike would be one for the ages!
Speaking of dialogue, don’t forget to visit our Resident Alien quotes for some of the episode’s best lines.
How are you enjoying the season so far? Does your heart break for Kate? Do you remember going weak in the knees over your first love?
Hit the comments and share your thoughts about Resident Alien.
Carissa Pavlica is the managing editor and a staff writer and critic for TV Fanatic. She’s a member of the Critic’s Choice Association, enjoys mentoring writers, conversing with cats, and passionately discussing the nuances of television and film with anyone who will listen. Follow her on X and email her here at TV Fanatic.