‘Alien: Earth’ Episode 2 Recap – (Chest-)Bursting With Xenomorph Goodness

I get that it’d be a stretch to say the Xenomorphs are the good guys in Alien: Earth, but it’s a possibility we should probably consider. The upside of relocating this franchise to terra firma is that it provides a much broader sample buffet of extraterrestrial entrées. Instead of a small, woebegone crew of humans, at least one cyborg, and the odd pet, the corporate nightmare established by the premiere offers up a smorgasbord of victims whose comeuppance counts as an upside. I’m still waiting for the true villains, the filthy-rich, unfeeling CEOs, to meet their end, but Episode 2, “Mr. October”, offers us the next best thing in the meantime – a party full of hoity-toity posh people who belong to the same club as Boy Kavalier and are wearing makeup and powdered wigs. Watching the Xenomorph slice them to bits is something of a pleasure.

To be totally accurate, we don’t get to see much of it. This is one of two slightly off-screen alien massacres in this episode, and it’s mostly the aftermath that clues us in on how brutal the assault must have been. But this all skirts a fine line between establishing how dangerous the Xenomorphs are and having a little too much fun showing it. But I’m easy either way.

Before all this, “Mr. October” indulges in a steady drip-feed of tension that is really expertly done. Joe and his team creep through the upended Maginot while stumbling across eerie signs of its previous occupation, including supposedly suffocated crewmen with blood trickling from their eyes, and others on surgical tables with their stomachs wide open. Before long, the Xenomorph has made its presence felt, and Joe is isolated from the search-and-rescue team. But allow me to interrupt briefly with a thought.

What we see from the Xenomorph in Episode 2 of Alien: Earth is largely it acting according to its own ingrained natural behaviours. But aside from Joe, almost nobody else we see in the show is playing by nature’s rules. Boy’s whole shtick is trying to use his Lost Boys to outpace AI’s race to a humanity-consuming technological singularity by stuffing the minds of children into robot bodies. All the characters we see interact, from Kirsh to Wendy, are just a vaguely child-like consciousness rattling around inside a machine, or they’re all machine, and everyone’s motivations are personal gain or programming. Kirsh constantly reiterates to the Lost Boys that they’re not animals. The Xenomorph is the only lifeform in the show performing as advertised.

Some of this kind of infiltrates the character dynamics as well. The most essential relationship in the show is shaping up to be Wendy and Joe, especially since the two reunite in “Mr. October”, but there’s a creepy, unnatural vibe to it all. In flashbacks, we see how Wendy used her technological aptitude to ensure that Joe couldn’t leave Earth for Mars, and her whole presence on the mission is built around getting back in touch with him, endangering all of the other Lost Boys along the way. Similarly, Kirsh has a secret mandate to retrieve any specimens he can aboard the Maginot wreckage, since Boy naturally wants to possess whatever was on there in the manner of the kind of rich kid who joins video calls while holding his tablet in the air with his bare feet like some sort of demented baboon.

Timothy Olyphant in Alien: Earth | Image via FX/Hulu

I’ll say this for “Mr. October” – it has some really great sci-fi horror stuff in it. There’s a gooey hanging plant which is pretty tame, lots of little bug things, a tentacled eyeball that bursts from the head of a zombie cat, and the Xenomorph itself, which is as great a design as ever and allowed to roam totally rampant here, butchering people indiscriminately and diving through windows in slow motion. Again, we’re not supposed to be rooting for the alien, but it is kind of cool, no?

I should mention Morrow, who’s still on his own mission in Episode 2 of Alien: Earth. He clearly knows more about the Xeno than he let on to anyone, since he has a bunch of tools for subduing it, including a stun gun and a Spider-Man-style web shooter that allows him to pack it up and drag its unconscious form around like luggage. I’m not sure how much sense this makes since the Xeno breaks out really easily, but notably, Morrow makes a point of saying that it can sense fear, and the trepidation of the security team that ambushes him sets it off. After, the Xeno gets very close to Morrow but doesn’t kill him, either because he’s a cyborg or because he isn’t exhibiting any fear. Perhaps by definition, non-humans can’t feel fear, and thus are sort of safe from the Xenomorph, which ties into the whole natural vs unnatural vibe I was talking about earlier.

This is perhaps why, shortly after Wendy and Joe’s reunion, a Xenomorph appears and grabs him, separating them again. I’m pleasantly surprised by how much this whole thing wasn’t dragged out, with Slightly – another of the Lost Boys – giving away Wendy’s identity immediately, and Wendy able to convince Joe in record time that she’s really his sister, despite the radical change in age and appearance. The relationship is still a little odd, but that’s to be expected, isn’t it; for the same reason, all the interactions within the Lost Boys, and particularly between the Lost Boys and Kirsh, have the same sense of unsettling unreality.

Either way, “Mr. October” slaps. It’s bursting with trademark Alien goodness, interesting details and mysteries, and semi-relevant themes. They might have only been explored superficially for now, but Hawley has clearly approached the series with a lot of ambition and a fair few things to say about its subject. Hopefully, after two episodes that have spent the majority of their runtime in the bowels of spaceships, we might get to see a bit more of Earth itself.

Read More: Alien: Earth Episode 3 Recap