Resident Alien, second season, with spoilers, plus seasons of other things

The first season of RESIDENT ALIEN ended with Harry (Alan Tudyk) flying home, knowing his people will eventually destroy humanity, only to discover Max (Judah Prehn) in his back seat. At the start of the second season Harry returns to Patience, Colorado and sets out to ensure that his friend Asta (Sarah Tomko) survives. She, however, pushes him to do more — can’t he convince his people to call off the apocalypse?Things get much more complicated when Harry makes contact with another alien from his world and learns the invasion has been called off: another race has laid claim to the Earth and his people don’t want to fight for it. It turns out the Greys have infiltrated human society via human/alien hybrids (shades of the X-Files) including General McAlister’s (Linda Hamilton) X-files-type black ops project. At the end, Harry’s joined forces with McAlister to fight for the Earth but can they succeed?

There’s a lot going on in the middle of all this: Max’s parents fight over plans for a new Patience resort, Darcy (Alice Wetterlund) getting back into skiing and getting hooked on pain meds, Asta’s relationship with the kid she gave up for adoption, Harry adopting an alien baby and more. If anything, the show got a little overstuffed on subplots, with some of them giving the actors something to do for a couple of episodes, then wrapping up way too quickly — though one subplot, involving Kate’s (Meredith Garretson) pregnancy, took a surprising twist.

The cast is great and Tudyk, as in S1, is amazing as the egocentric, selfish, but not unredeemable extraterrestrial. However the shift to a serious alien invasion plot (somehow when it was Harry’s people it was still more comedy than horror) doesn’t work for me, and I’m not sure they can pull it off, though the sitcom People of Earth managed it. I may not be alone in that: ratings dropped in the second half of the season and SyFy has cut the S3 order from 12 to eight. But if I’m wrong and S3 is awesome, I’ll be delighted.

The third season of MCMILLAN AND WIFE, by contrast, stuck true to form. Mac and Sally (Rock Hudson, Susan St. James) visit the McMillan ancestral home in Scotland (Death of a Monster .. Birth of a Legend), deal with a Satanic cult The Devil You Say), investigate a murder involving Mac’s old espionage team (The Man Without a Face), try to figure out how a man can jump out a skyscraper window and disappear (Free Fall to Terror) and in the season’s final episode have Mac impersonate the gigolo who impersonated him the previous season (Cross and Double Cross). The cast is enjoyable — seeing Mac and Mildred (Nancy Walker) dance the tango in Cross and Double Cross is a classic scene — and the mysteries are fun though often straining credulity (and the Satanic cult is about as cliched as you could ask for). On to S4!

I never caught the 1984-6 ROBIN OF SHERWOOD when it aired on cable here but since it’s on Britbox, I tried the first season. Michael Praed plays a Saxon whose village was butchered by the Normans; years later, the spirit Herne the Hunter summons him to become a champion of his people. In the two-part first episode, Robin pits himself against a sorcerer with very nasty plans for Marian (Judi Trott) but most episodes pit him against the conniving, cunning sheriff (Nickolas Grace) and the much less intelligent bullying knight Guy of Gisborne (Robert Addie. Praed’s good as Robin and the show has a scruffier, more down to Earth tone than Errol Flynn’s classic swashbuckler. On the downside, I watched it anticipating a sword-and-sorcery fantasy but despite Herne’s presence it’s mostly mundane episodes. However I did like the ending episode with John Rhys Davies’ Richard the Lionheart proving just as flawed a king as John, in contrast to the usual swashbuckler cliche that restoring the rightful king will fix everything.