ALF (TV series)/Tear Jerker

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


ALF managed a few surprisingly effective dramatic moments over its run.

  • The episode where ALF finds out that Willie was a train hopper in his youth, and ropes him into hopping another one. Alone in the car, they end up discussing ALF's lonely existence as possibly the last of his kind. They both make a wish on a shooting star, and afterwards ALF says "I wished I had my planet back."
  • When a woman who claims to have an alien in her house turns out to be a scam artist. Willie tries to comfort the devastated ALF by saying lots of people feel like they're all alone at some point, and ALF replies "Feeling alone and being alone are two very different things."
  • Alf's Special Christmas. Dear God, Alf's Special Christmas. After destroying the Tanner's best laid Christmas plans (par for the course for Alf), he befriends Tiffany (who is an eight year old in the hospital with a terminal illness who "won't live to see another Christmas"), delivers a child (and talks the mother into naming her newborn daughter after Tiffany), and stops the hospital Santa from committing suicide. To top it all off, Tiffany is based on (and named after) an actual child who died that year and the episode is dedicated to her. For an Alf story, it is surprisingly dark.
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