Stranded on Earth

What happens when an alien comes to Earth alone—with no invasion fleet, no backup, and no easy way home? Bryce Zabel and Brent Friedman trace the evolution of the solitary extraterrestrial, from Superman, My Favorite Martian and The Cat from Outer Space to Steven Spielberg’s E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial. Bryce recalls seeing E.T. at an early screening in 1982, while Brent explores the film’s darker origins in Spielberg’s abandoned Night Skies project—and the provocative claim that E.T. may have been inspired by more than imagination.

The journey continues with two very different stranded visitors released in 1984. In Starman, Jeff Bridges becomes the image of a widow’s dead husband and races across America to reach his ride home, discovering that human beings may be at their best when circumstances are at their worst. In John Sayles’s The Brother from Another Planet, Joe Morton plays a silent extraterrestrial fugitive whose experience in Harlem becomes a story about race, immigration, slavery and belonging. Bryce also shares personal connections to both Morton and Karen Allen, while the conversation expands to K-PAX, Sugar, Under the Skin and Resident Alien—stories in which outsiders observe us, imitate us and sometimes become more human than the humans pursuing them.

These films and series turn the stranded alien into science fiction’s cleanest moral experiment: when there is only one of them and billions of us, who poses the greater danger? Bryce and Brent consider why lonely visitors so often repair broken families, develop compassion or curiosity, and force humanity to see itself through unfamiliar eyes. They also confront a deeper question beneath the entertainment: are these solitary beings simply extraterrestrials—or modern versions of angels, demons and messengers shaped by our changing beliefs about the universe?

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