Resident Alien

Five episodes in, I can't watch Resident Alien. I've been trying but for the life of me just cannot get through more than half a scene at a time. Like presumably many old browncoats I gave it a chance just to see what Alan Tudyk's up to these days. In that respect it plays cleverly on his old SF cred with stiff, awkward mannerisms opposed to Wash's gregarious excitability, and he acquits himself well.

 

Unfortunately the show as a whole invests mercilessly in cringe comedy the likes of which has always turned my stomach, with all characters (especially the lead) feebly struggling to withstand one humiliation after another and failing. It got me thinking on how this setup of an alien among humans has changed over the decades, because it's a very, very old gimmick.

 

I never watched My Favorite Martian or Mork and Mindy but do vaguely recall the old Coneheads sketches from SNL, or ALF or 3rd Rock from the Sun or similar takes from the '80s and '90s. While cultural mishaps are always played up for their comedy of errors sitcom value, more often than not sitcom aliens used to be either innocently unaware of their own weirdness (in the spirit of the Addams Family) and either casually accommodating once made aware or consciously (albeit haphazardly) managing their own acclimation. Or they were at least not obliged to hate themselves.

 

Resident Alien makes a big point of politically correct posturing, starting with a violent ex-boyfriend then rapidly piling on with Native Americans, a little Muslim girl, etc. Yet here every mis-step is not only a crisis but an opportunity for the advanced super-straw-man life form to be dragged down time and again, with the overall message being the usual glorification of primitive emotion over denigrated intellect. Three episodes in he's already lauding tribal ape codependence and being taken over by his new form's emotions, setting up his eventual promotion of human superiority over his own species, 'cuz feels.

 

Whatever happened to acceptance?

 

It's a fitting measure of snowflake hypocrisy that in the same breath as all their performative multiculturalism, they revel so much more viciously and sadistically in actively hounding and humiliating any designated safe target. You're wallowing. The modern love of cringe displays all the parochial mockery and abuse and "othering" from forty years ago taken up to 11 under the hollow pretense of overcoming exactly such tendencies.