Asta in Resident Alien: Sara Tomko and Alice Wetterlund

Asta in Resident Alien, explained: the friendship at the center

Resident Alien premiered on Syfy on January 27, 2021, and it works as a small-town mystery with a comic engine. Alan Tudyk plays Harry Vanderspeigle, an alien who crash-lands near Patience, Colorado, and takes the identity of a murdered doctor. Chris Sheridan created the series, which is based on the Dark Horse comic book by Peter Hogan and Steve Parkhouse.

Around Harry, the series builds a town of people who each get their own angle. Two of the most important are women. Sara Tomko plays Asta Twelvetrees, the assistant at the Patience health clinic, who is of Ute heritage and does a great deal of the practical work of keeping the place running. Alice Wetterlund plays D’arcy Bloom, the bartender at the town pub and a former Olympic-level skier whose career ended after a serious injury and who came home to Patience.

The two are best friends, and the show uses them to do something a lot of genre series skip: it lets two women be close without that closeness being a plot device. Asta is the steady one, and Harry treats her as the nearest thing he has to a friend, while D’arcy is just as curious about the newcomer. D’arcy is the funny, loose, unpredictable one, and her scenes are often where the show reveals what the other characters are actually like.

That is the setup behind the interview material the two actors have given about the series. Their remarks center on episode three, titled “Secrets,” first shown on February 10, 2021, because that is where the friendship is allowed to take up real space and the audience learns why each of them is in Patience at all.

Why each woman came back to Patience

Episode three shows that both women left home at different points to chase a dream and then returned. For D’arcy, that dream was skiing at an Olympic level, and an injury ended it. Asta had her own plans elsewhere. Neither path lasted, and both ended up back in the place they started.

Tomko says the friendship made that return bearable. In her telling, Asta felt comfortable coming home largely because D’arcy was there. Beyond Sam Hodges, the older figure she thought of as something like a father, D’arcy is nearly all she feels she has left.

What Wetterlund and Tomko say about the pairing

Wetterlund’s line is the one most people remember. She says D’arcy would not be alive without Asta, “and maybe vice versa,” and that is the friendship. Tomko responds that Harry’s arrival makes both women curious, though for different reasons, and that it gives Asta hope that she can belong to a group of people, even with the support of her own Native community.

The point Tomko stresses is that D’arcy keeps reminding Asta that she is there for her and that Asta is not alone. Both characters, she says, have moments when they stop believing in themselves, and each needs the other at those moments.

Wetterlund frames it from the actor’s side. She says she had always wanted to be on a show with that kind of female friendship, and she compares it to the bond between Christina and Meredith on Grey’s Anatomy, where each is the other’s person. For her, as an actor, the show is that relationship, and Asta is the center of D’arcy’s world.

A friendship that carries over off screen

Tomko adds that the pairing extends beyond the set. She describes Wetterlund as doing for her what D’arcy does for Asta: a calming presence who makes her laugh and reminds her of her strength. She credits the series, if nothing else, with a new friendship that she expects to last. Wetterlund answered by joking that the feeling was not mutual, so she had nothing in her eye.

The first season around them

The first season of Resident Alien ran for ten episodes on Syfy, from the “Pilot” on January 27, 2021, to “Heroes of Patience” on March 31, 2021. The run includes “Homesick,” “Secrets,” “Birds of a Feather,” “Love Language,” “Sexy Beast,” “The Green Glow,” “End of the World As We Know It” and “Welcome Aliens.” The series later moved to USA Network, which carried season 4 from June 6 to August 8, 2025.

Wetterlund came to the role from stand-up comedy and podcasting, and she is also known for playing Carla Walton on HBO’s Silicon Valley. D’arcy in the show carries a past of her own: after the skiing accident that ended her Olympic hopes, she returned to Patience and took a job behind the bar, where she hears everyone’s business. The writing uses that position well, since a bartender is a natural person to deliver the truth about the people around her.

The pairing also gets room to change over time. D’arcy’s romantic history with the town’s mayor, Ben Hawthorne, played by Levi Fiehler, becomes part of the story. The friendship stays the constant while the plots around it shift.

The characters at a glance

• Asta Twelvetrees (Sara Tomko). The nurse who works at, and in many ways runs, the Patience clinic. She is the show’s grounded center and Harry’s closest ally.
• D’arcy Bloom (Alice Wetterlund). The bartender, a former Olympic-level skier, and the funniest and most free-spirited of the town’s residents.
• Harry Vanderspeigle (Alan Tudyk). The alien who takes a human doctor’s identity and has to learn how to live among people.
• Sam Hodges. The figure Tomko says Asta thinks of as a father, and one reason D’arcy matters so much to her.

Why the Asta and D’arcy pairing works: a short review

A first season usually spends its early episodes finding its footing, but Resident Alien arrives with a supporting ensemble that is easy to like from the start. In this show, Asta and D’arcy are the clearest example. Their scenes together are funny, specific and believable, and they give the series an emotional register that the alien plot alone could not supply.

The strength of the pairing is that each woman has a flaw the other can see. Asta tends to put the needs of everyone else ahead of her own, and D’arcy tends to run from her own pain by making a joke of it. When they are together, those habits become visible, and the writing lets them be visible without turning every scene into a lesson.

The comparison Wetterlund draws to Grey’s Anatomy is a good one. Like that show’s central friendship, this one is not a subplot waiting to be resolved. It is the thing the characters return to when everything else gets complicated. Fans of Resident Alien who rewatch the early episodes will notice how often a scene is built around the two of them just talking.

There is also a practical reason the pair works on screen. Tomko plays Asta with restraint, so a small reaction carries a lot of weight, and Wetterlund plays D’arcy with the opposite energy, quick and loud and slightly unguarded. Put the two in a scene and each makes the other funnier. That is why a moment like Asta rolling her eyes at a D’arcy plan can say more about their history than a page of dialogue would.

It helps that the show gives them a place to be ordinary. A lot of genre television separates its female characters into different storylines and lets them meet only when the plot requires it. Here, the nurse and the bartender talk in kitchens, at the pub and in the clinic, and those conversations are allowed to wander. The alien comedy is entertaining, but these scenes are the ones that make Patience feel like a town where people have lived next to each other for years.

Seen across the season, the pairing also helps the show handle its tonal shifts. Resident Alien moves between murder mystery, alien farce and small-town drama, and the Asta and D’arcy scenes are the glue. When the plot needs a breather, the two of them sit down and talk. When the plot needs a human reaction to something absurd, one of them supplies it. That flexibility is rare in a first season, and it is a large part of why the actors speak about the relationship with such affection.

Viewers who want more should note that the show gives the pair plenty of room across the rest of the first season. The friendship is not a one-episode highlight. It returns in the pub, at the clinic and in the quieter moments between plot twists, and it grows more layered as the town’s secrets come out.

One last detail makes the chemistry easy to believe. The actors describe a friendship that continued after the cameras stopped, and it shows in the timing of the jokes. The audience does not have to be told that these two women care about each other. It is visible in how they look at each other when one of them says something hard.

The recommendation is straightforward. If the alien mystery is what draws you to the show, stay for the friendship, because it is the reason the town feels like a place worth protecting.

Sources

• Resident Alien (TV series), Wikipedia — cast and characters