Life, Writing, Weirdness

Or episode 18 if you count the pilot as Episode 0 like IMDB does.

Most folks who are even aware of the franchise are probably a lot more familiar with the James Caan, Mandy Patinkin alien buddy copy movie. Some folks will know, but probably haven’t seen, that there was a series that recast the primaries and fleshed out the cast to include George Fancisco’s family. With that addition, and TV-level budgets, the series picks up right after the movie. Every major character, and most of the secondaries, has an arc through the series, sometimes more than one, and there’s a lot that can be said around and about the show. The most frequent comparison I’ve run across is that it’s sort of In the Heat of the Night but set in LA and with aliens.

It’s not a bad comparison. Good SF often puts a thin veneer over social issues and ideas by holding up a mirror to our own society and then replacing some part of things with remarkably human-like non-humans. That said, for my viewing, while most of the story arcs are both interesting and entertaining, and some of them can make you think about what you believe, the overall purpose of the show is allow Matthew Sikes (the human main character and George’s partner) to deconstruct and fix the casual and unconscious racism built into his original character. The Sikes of the movie learned to like his Newcomer partner because of who he was and not what he was. The Sikes of the series learns to become an actually conscious sapient being who can enjoy both differences and commonalities with other sapient beings.

Sadly, it only ran 22 episodes (with five follow up TV movies starting a couple of years later) and was canceled by Fox to make way for sitcoms that failed in less than a year. Someone eventually admitted that canceling it was a mistake and there are apparently a few scripts floating around for season 2.

By this point in the series, Sikes has pretty much fully made the mental transition. All the bigoted bits of his character have been peeled away and while he’s certainly still got some issues, being partnered with George and getting to know his family and a few other Newcomers and being able to open his mind to potentially new things pushed him to through the adaptation and understanding, although it took a lot of persistence and perseverance on the part of George, his family, and Sikes’ neighbour Kathy.

I’m not going to do a whole drawn out plot synopsis, but just say that in this particular episode, we get Sikes having a near-death experience at the hands of a brawny Newcomer which morphs for a while into an emotional and spiritual experience eventually leading to the viewer getting the truth about the relationship Sikes had with his “dead” father and Sikes having to deal with that. There’s some great acting surrounding the emotions involved. We also get George learning to coach little league baseball as a B-plot, which has some funny moments.

Something that almost gets lost about this show is that it’s not just about racism. While critical and colouring most of what’s going on, it’s also only the surface of things. Alien Nation is about relationships, particularly the one between George and Matt but also across the board between all the characters. Newcomers don’t have the same concepts, reactions, and explanations of gender, masculinity and femininity, and relationships in general that humans of 1989-90 (when the show aired) did, or that a lot of humans do now. Long before the phrase “toxic masculinity” was coined, Alien Nation stomped all over the need for a man to always be as manly as possible, but it did so by holding up a distorted mirror and mostly using alien men to draw attention to things. George’s reactions to Matt’s death and sudden revival show very clear how his character is able to express emotions beyond the traditional half dozen human (at least western, and we’re supposed to assume American) men are allowed. Going by so quick that you almost miss it, though, is Matt expressing affection and gratitude to his Newcomer neighbour Cathy (with whom there’s been significant romantic tension for most of the season) using a very distinct contact gesture we’ve only seen between Newcomers until now.

Is it a stand-out episode in the series? That might depend on the viewer. It’s solid and worth the watch, and there are other episodes that I definitely think are stronger, but that one quick interaction between Matt and Cathy is almost worth tears and it’s played perfectly by both of them.

Be well, everyone.

Start at about 24:22 and watch the next 30 seconds or so.