Resident Alien: Asta Twelvetrees' Sara Tomko digs into Season 1 & explains her high hopes for Season 2

In Season 1 of SYFY's Resident Alien, viewers came for Alan Tudyk's Harry Vanderspeigle and stayed for the quirky, heartwarming cast of characters inhabiting the town of Patience, Colorado. Perhaps the most beloved of these characters is Sara Tomko's Asta Twelvetrees, who learned the hard way that befriending an alien isn't all spaceships and pizza. In Season 2, premiering in January 2022, fans, just like Harry, will undoubtedly only grow to love her more.

"It's one thing I think to have to deal with an alien, it's another to have to deal with an alien with an attitude," Tomko told SYFY. "What's great though about Asta is that she doesn't take any shit. She's gonna tell it how it is, and she's also gonna call you out and so I think she's really good for Harry."

Upon coming to Earth, Harry is convinced humans will be frail both mentally and physically. So when he's confronted with no-BS Asta, who challenges him at every turn and ultimately finds bemused appreciation for his idiosyncrasies, Harry is forced to rethink everything he "knows" about humans and himself.

"Asta is just forceful," Tomko continues. "[Harry] loves her anger, he loves how she just cracks back so quick. So I feel like, right off the bat, he's getting a great interpretation of a human being because she's so messy and flawed, but she's also really loving and tender, too."

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By the end of Season 1, the pair come to an understanding and have developed a friendship that results in Harry abandoning his mission to destroy Earth. He even asks her to return with him to his home planet, but A) that's a lot and B) Asta has too much unfinished business to attend to on Earth — even if Harry, by Tomko's description, made her feel "alive" for the first time in years.

Instead of a cross-universe road trip aboard Harry's ship, Asta chooses to remain with her family and friends in Patience. It's the right choice, but it also comes with its own set of complications.

The most obvious complication is her relationship with her sorta-kinda-estranged daughter Jay (Kaylayla Raine). Throughout Season 1, we learn more about teenage Asta's choice to give her daughter up, and by the season finale, Jay has learned the truth and is struggling with the knowledge that the woman she thought of as her friend and mentor is actually her mother. When the credits roll, they've reached a tentative truce, but it's going to take more from Asta's end before they can both begin to heal.

"At the end of the day, we all want to know where we come from, we all want to feel like we fit in and we want to know who we are and why we are who we are," Tomko says in explaining how she empathizes with Jay's reaction. 

"I'm really looking forward to seeing how that relationship unfolds in Season 2," she continues. "I think it would be really important for Asta to take on a little bit more of a responsible mother role in her life."

Credit: SYFY

The stage is set for Asta's long-time friend D'Arcy (Alice Wetterlund) to take Jay under her wing when Asta can't, but it's still not the same thing. "It would be nice to see some mother-daughter things happening there," Tomko says. "I hope we get to have a mother-daughter date. I hope we get to have some sort of softness between us, but we'll see.

"[Asta's] still just walking around, hanging her head in shame," she adds with a laugh. "But also she's just really grateful to be in her daughter's life."

Tomko's especially interested in how Asta will "oscillate between 'I am your birth mother, but I didn't raise you,'" and just how much Jay will allow her birth mother to be there for her now that she knows the truth.

In addition to biological mother-daughter complications, Asta found herself serving as Harry's mother figure in Season 1. That will likely not be changing anytime soon. "In some ways, I think it's almost like a do-over for her," Tomko muses. "I think that's a theme that we didn't really talk about in Season 1, but is starting to kind of come forward as a theme that I feel like Asta is going to be jumping into with Season 2."

So how does a mother figure ground her grown alien child for almost blowing up the planet? It's a heavy responsibility, Tomko says, but so is parenting. "It's another way for audiences to relate to her because she will be parenting not only for her human, blood-related child — as much as she can and is allowed to — but she's also going to be parenting this otherworldly child who maybe throws tantrums sometimes, and those happen to be a lot more extreme than she's even able to deal with," Tomko says, laughing. "I think that's going to be really fun for the audience to watch."

For our full Season 2 interview with Sara Tomko, watch the above video. And be on the lookout for Resident Alien Season 2 when it premieres on SYFY in January 2022.