Body and Soul
Airing in 1995, the second Alien Nation made-for-TV movie finds Detectives Sikes and Francisco at the heart of an investigation involving a possible human-Tenctonese hybrid. The mysterious being, a frail and silent young female, comes into police custody just before a large and brutish Tenctonese male is arrested for causing a disturbance at the police station. While Dr. Cathy Frankel (Terri Treas), Sikes’ Tenctonese girlfriend and a friend of the Franciscos, struggles to verify the girl’s origin, Sikes and Francisco begin to realize that she and the brutish male may both be the product of genetic experiments conducted in a sector of the Tenctonese slave-ship thought to have been destroyed in the crash. Moreover, a government cover-up may be allowing such experiments to continue, and Sikes and Francisco set out to uncover the truth and bring those responsible for these experiments to justice.
As with its predecessor, Body and Soul delivers an adequately intriguing and eventful plot, but it is more notable for its social commentary, which focuses on a narrower range of issues than that of Dark Horizon does. Of course, underlying the commentary is still some of the expected tension between the clashing human and alien cultures, but the social commentary of Body and Soul emphasizes the ever-popular topic of sex. And while I found the few sex scenes included to be a bit extraneous, the movie, overall, treats the topic appropriately.
When it leaks to local media that the police have a possible human-Tenctonese hybrid in custody, many outraged citizens, both human and Tenctonese, begin demonstrating outside the police station and local inter-species sex clinics, protesting inter-species relationships. And while the series often depicts Newcomers as more tolerant than humans, the portrayal of human and Tenctonese groups as equally upset and even violent makes the commentary particularly poignant.
Naturally, with the commentary of Body and Soul, the series’ creators extend the motif of tolerance for different cultures in order to address the sometimes-controversial topic of inter-racial relationships, using the inter-species relationship between Matt and Cathy to demonstrate the pressures that inter-racial couples often experience. Moreover, the intolerance of George’s son, Buck (Sean Six), for the Sikes-Frankel relationship also gives the series’ creators a medium through which they can address multiple facets of the issue. For example, Buck’s fear that the Tenctonese species might be diluted through crossbreeding provides a parallel to the legitimate fear that certain cultural traditions and customs might be lost or marginalized in inter-racial relationships.
However, the movie’s commentary does not address inter-racial relationships exclusively, as much of the commentary broaches more general issues related to sexuality and intimacy. For example, although the Sikes-Frankel relationship provides an appropriate example of an inter-species couple, the two must also deal with concerns about sexual intimacy that face every couple. So while the average couple does not need to attend an intimacy class because one of the partners could injure or even kill the other if their bodies are not in sync (in this case, the Tenctonese female can exert lethal force on her partner, whether he be Tenctonese or human, if he is uneducated about Tenctonese intimacy), the message that both partners should be well-informed in all areas of sexuality and that each should be extremely comfortable with and responsive to the other before engaging in sexual intimacy still holds true even in human relationships.
Finally, the movie even provides a little parenting advice in its commentary, encouraging parents to be open with their children and willing to honestly discuss sexuality with them, just as the Tenctonese (who do not have the same unease regarding sex as humans) traditionally do with their children.