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What is Tellurium? Alan Tudyk dishes on Resident Alien's mysterious mineral
Break out those Granny Smith apples, folks! Dr. Harry Vanderspeigle of SYFY's Resident Alien has now got his hands on some Grade-A Tellurium, but just what the heck is it?
"Tellurium is a mineral that finds in a mine in Patience," the show's star, Alan Tudyk, explains to SYFY WIRE. "They always talk about 'The 59!' It's this bar, and it's about the 59 miners [who died to save one]. So in that mine, he finds Tellurium ... he mixes it up, he heats it, he gets some rust, he gets all sorts of stuff, and then he puts it together and that is what makes his spaceship fly. I'm getting pretty technical here, so I don't want to lose you. It's got 'fly-y' properties, and that's what it is."
While we're not entirely sure what the scheming alien plans to do with the mineral right now (is it to repair his ship or part of his mission to kill everyone?), we do know that the secret of Tellurium is now out in the open. Unbeknownst to Harry, Lisa Casper (Mandell Maughan) and David Logan (Alex Barima) — government operatives working for Linda Hamilton's General McCallister — discover a dead hiker floating in the mountains.
We ask Mr. Tudyk what he'd do with Tellurium if he had some in real life and his answer is predictably hilarious.
"I would probably [make] some kind of Iron Man suit," he says. "If I could make it fly. It also molds and manipulates. It doesn't act like other metals that we know. It isn't really a metal, so yeah, I'd probably make an Iron Man-type suit. I'd go full on superhero and solve crime by flying. All flight crime, I would be right at the forefront of solving flight crime."
The first two episodes of Resident Alien are currently free to stream on the SYFY YouTube channel until Wednesday, Feb. 17. The third episode (titled "Homesick") is now free to watch over at SYFY.com, on the SYFY App, or on VOD for 30 days through Friday, March 5. Episode 3's official network premiere is set for Wednesday, Feb. 10 at 10 p.m. EST. If you have a cable subscription, you can watch the first three installments via On Demand, OneApp, Apple TV, or Roku.
For SYFY WIRE's recaps of Episodes 1-2, click here and here.
