“Trillions of dollars of research and development just landed in our laps!”
(SPOILER WARNING!)
Looks like my initial impression of what Alien: Earth was going to be was wrong. I’d assumed, based on the first two episodes, that what we were going to get was one of those stories that takes place over a short timeline, entirely set around the “search and rescue” operation of the crashed spaceship and the apartment block it had crashed into. Instead, it became clear this week that the story is wider and more ambitious than that, moving to new settings and later days.
I’m actually glad about that. I enjoyed the first two eps, sure, but in essence, they were little more than a retread of the first two movies. Sure, that could have carried on, but it would have meant basically an eight episode version of things we’d seen before. This ep confounds that expectation by having the Alien killed in the first quarter of an hour, then moving the settings to the city of ‘New Siam’ (actually Thailand) and the Prodigy R&D base on an isolated island in South East Asia. An isolated island, eh? Where you’ve taken all the alien beasties from the crashed Maginot to do a bit of experimentation? I’m sure that will all be just fine.
This ep introduces more aspects of the already-established Alien lore that the previous two hadn’t shown. Namely, that the Xenomorphs bleed highly corrosive acid, and that, beyond considering them an obstacle, they have no interest in non-organic synths. That’s handy for Prodigy, considering that synths seem to make up most of their staff – it means that they can poke and prod the Xenomorph eggs to their hearts’ content, as no facehugger will be interested in them.
The eggs raise an interesting question – who laid them? Cameron’s Aliens introduced the idea of having an insect like Queen, whose sole purpose was to propagate the hive. But then, Ridley Scott’s Director’s Cut of the original Alien reinserted the previously cut footage of the cocooned, impregnated Nostromo crew, suggesting that any Alien could lay eggs. So is there a Queen lurking somewhere, or did the solitary successful hatchling lay them?
There’s also some more detail about the creatures’ reproductive cycle that had previously been implied but never actually shown. Having successfully removed a supine facehugger from one of the eggs, Kirsh dissects it (while it’s presumably still alive) and extracts the tiny Xenomorph embryo that it presumably implants into its host. Fortunately, they have a handy, recently-extracted human lung into which they can insert it. Just to see what happens, you know. What could possibly go wrong?
The lung’s previous owner, field medic Joe, is out of the picture this week, along with his synth-resurrected sister Marcy/Wendy, having been seriously injured in the action-packed first 15 minutes of the ep. If this were a traditional Alien movie, that first quarter of the ep would have been its climax, as Wendy searches for Joe in the building’s underground carpark, leading to a violent, acid-infused action sequence that leaves the Alien dead, her unconscious and leaking white fluid, and him perforated by the Alien’s signature impale-them-with-its-spiky-tail move.
The temporary removal of the apparent main characters allows Dana Gonzales’ script to focus more on the other characters, particularly the childlike synths, which expands the story potential well. They’re still basically ten-year-olds in adult bodies, as Morrow observes seeing Slightly (Adarsh Gourav) and Smee (Jonathan Ajayi) rough housing like kids in the egg chamber. These two have clearly bonded as friends in the way ten-year-old boys will, and their comic interaction is a nice touch of humour in a franchise that tends towards the grim and dour.
There’s some debate about Prodigy’s decision to rename them all after characters in Peter Pan (another property which Disney handily owns the rights to). Apart from the obvious need for secrecy, it’s obviously a bit of a fetish for Prodigy CEO Boy Kavalier, who’s also collectively named them the Lost Boys, and his research island Neverland – the implication being that he is Peter Pan.
That’s an interesting insight into his character, a child prodigy who’s become the world’s richest man, and clearly never wants to grow up. Samuel Blenkin continues to be marvellously insufferable in the role, convinced of his own intellectual superiority and never shy about reminding the other characters of it.
Fortunately, Kirsh is having none of this, patiently shepherding his goggle-eyed boss away from a Xenomorph egg before he can become facehugger breakfast. Timothy Olyphant as Kirsh is a standout character, presumably intentionally styled to resemble Blade Runner’s Roy Batty, and similarly coldly dismissive of his human creators.
It’s part of the show’s continuing existential exploration of what it would be like to be an artificially intelligent machine, following in the footsteps of many a Philip K Dick or Isaac Asimov story. Indeed, Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics get an explicit mention this week, as one of the synths is asked whether they’d ever harm anybody, or allow anybody to be harmed.
Morrow too is interested in the existential questions, suspiciously asking the too-gullible Slightly how a machine can have parents. Babou Ceesay gives a world-weary, cynical performance as the Weyland-Yutani cyborg, who demonstrates more of his abilities this week. Not only can he download massive amounts of proprietary data straight into his brain, he has the handy capability to extrude a big knife from his knuckles, Wolverine-style. We’ve yet to see him do anything with it, but I’m guessing we will by the end of the season; Chekhov’s gun and all that.
Escaping into the city with all that invaluable data, Morrow is the only representative on the ground of Weyland-Yutani, the Company from the original movie. Being their spaceship and all, Weyland-Yutani is keen to get all the stuff in it back, so Morrow contacts Ms Yutani herself – it’s an interesting variation on the previously seen CEOs, who were all Weylands.
This does lead to another interesting question, as he’s informed that the Ms Yutani he’s speaking to is actually the granddaughter of the one he knew, because he’s been in space for 65 years. And yet this is apparently only two years before the events of the original Alien, where Ripley was expecting to get back for her daughter’s birthday, suggesting a much shorter trip. Did the Maginot go out much further than the Nostromo? Or did the Company miss a much nearer source of Xenomorphs?
I’m expecting the show to go into this a little deeper as it goes on. Along with, perhaps, the never-followed-up-on implication in Aliens that the creatures are a lot smarter than they first appear. “How could they cut the power, man? They’re animals!” wails Hudson in that movie, which also sees the Aliens gathering all their victims together in the one place in the colony where heavy weapons couldn’t be used without causing its destruction. That suggests that they not only understand human technology, but also the inevitable military response to them, and are more than capable of strategizing themselves.
These hints about the creatures’ intelligence are never followed up in any of the later movies, but it looks like they could be here. Indeed, the intercutting of the facehugger dissection with what appears to be some kind of mental seizure for the recovering Wendy suggests that they may even have some kind of telepathic ability. Which can even connect to artificial lifeforms – but perhaps only those with originally human consciousnesses. That would be an interesting way to tie in all the themes the show seems to be developing.
So many questions – which is perhaps inevitable in a prequel to an established franchise. This is only the third episode, but its expansion of the story is welcome, more directly involving characters who were previously only seen at a distance, like Boy Kavalier and Adrian Edmondson’s mysterious (and oddly named) Atom Eins. It’s a surprise that the two apparent main characters are very much in the background this week, but Wendy’s just about back on her feet, and I’m expecting Alex Lawther’s world-weary Joe to be up and about again soon too. And, of course, that bringing all those dangerous alien lifeforms to an isolated island may turn out not to have been the wisest idea.
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