Resident Alien Stars on Mike's New-Found Belief: "Really Hard For Him to Admit He Got it Wrong"
It's not easy for a person like Sheriff Mike Thompson to forfeit a position he's been defending for three seasons.
This story contains spoilers for Resident Alien Season 4, Episode 3, "Ties That Bind."
For three entire seasons, Resident Alien's Sheriff Mike Thompson (played by actor Corey Reynolds), the chief law-keeper of Patience, Colorado, has stubbornly insisted that aliens and UFOs do not exist, much to the chagrin of his more open-minded deputy, Liv Baker (Elizabeth Bowen).
Even after punching out a literal Grey extra-terrestrial in the Season 3 finale, Mike continued to reiterate his skepticism of life beyond this planet at the beginning of Season 4 (stream the premiere for free here). That is, until he received a proverbial wake-up call from the cave-dwelling cyborg, Peter Bach (Terry O'Quinn), in last week's episode. With the evidence too obvious to ignore, the sheriff finally came to grips with reality in tonight's entry — "Ties That Bind" — by conceding that he was wrong and Liv was right.
Resident Alien stars talk Sheriff Mike finally admitting aliens are real in Season 4
"Mike comes to accept that he got it wrong, which is a huge step for him," Reynolds told USA Insider. "And there’s nothing like shared life experience to create connection, empathy, and sympathy. So I think that has furthered and strengthened their bond, now that he has a greater understanding of what her experience was like. And I also think he feels really bad."
He continued: "Mike doesn’t like getting it wrong. Everything he does is this effort to never have to get it wrong because he wants to always be right. But I [also] think he always wants to be right because he got it right. And this time, he got it wrong. It’s kind of like putting two magnets [with the same magnetic field] together. It’s really hard for him to admit he got it wrong. But he cares about Deputy Liv and their relationship is important to him. I think he feels bad about getting it wrong for so long."
Bowen, meanwhile, is delighted that the two characters are finally seeing eye-to-eye on the matter after Liv has practically been gaslit by her superior for three seasons straight.
"I know how he feels about my alien theory [and belief] that they’re real," she explained. "But it’s so nice because they’ve always been a team, even if the dynamics weren’t equal, or it was off, or there was conflict, or whatever. But now they’re equals who are on the exact same page, and that was really fun."
Season 4 of Resident Alien drops new episodes on Fridays on USA Network and SYFY. All episodes will be available to stream exclusively on Peacock one week after they air.
