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Phone home: 'Resident Alien' used an old E.T. toy as a stand-in for the baby alien in Season 2
Very fitting, given that the show is produced by Steven Spielberg's Amblin banner.
Forget the stupid elephant — we need to address the newborn baby alien in the room. Like now! SYFY's Resident Alien closed out the first half of its second season with the hatching of Goliath's progeny, which is hungry enough to devour a wild raccoon in a matter of seconds. If that's what it can do to a simple trash panda, just imagine what'll happen when it acquires a taste for human flesh over in Patience. We shiver at the thought.
Luckily, killer alien babies don't exist (as far as we know)...until you bring a VFX house on board, that is. In an extra look behind-the-scenes of Season 2, showrunner/executive producer Chris Sheridan explains how the cosmic child was birthed with computers.
"It wasn't there on the day when we were shooting," he tells Jackie Jennings and Juan Cadavid (co-hosts of the official Resident Alien After-Show) in the video below. "We did have Brian Fisher, who is our amazing VFX coordinator, from CoSA and he had this little E.T. that he would put where the alien was gonna be, so the actors could at least look at this little E.T."
A very fitting stand-in, given that the show is produced by the television arm of Steven Spielberg's Amblin banner.
Taking another page out of the Spielbergian playbook, Episode 8 keeps the alien baby out of sight for most of the runtime (just like the ravenous shark in Jaws). "[It] was quick blurs and things moving and the sound of it without really seeing it," Sheridan adds. "To me, the better horror movies...the less you see, the creepier it is. It helps us in another way, too — it's very expensive to see a fully-generated CGI alien. So less is certainly more as far as money is concerned. But even as far as telling the story, it's better that you don't really see it until it pokes its head out at Asta. If you haven't seen it up to that point, that moment where she first sees it in the toilet is gonna be much more jarring for you and then you're sort of in her point-of-view and you react as well."
The first half (eight episodes) of Resident Alien Season 2 is now streaming on the SYFY app and Peacock. Be sure to check back in with SYFY WIRE every Tuesday and Wednesday afternoon for more bonus content that takes you behind the show's sophomore outing!
SYFY, Peacock & SYFY WIRE are all owned by NBCUniversal
