Summary
Alien: Earth really doubles down on its themes in Episode 6. The corporate hellscape is impossible to leave, and the mounting body count only reiterates the point that life — human, alien, or otherwise — doesn’t matter when there’s money to be made.
Earlier in this season, I said half-jokingly that the Xenomorphs were the good guys in Alien: Earth, but frankly, I’m starting to believe it more and more. Episode 6, “The Fly”, which continues the momentum of last week’s stellar recreation of the original movie, is a deeply callous and oppressive hour in which the technological fantasia of Prodigy is depicted as an inescapable prison, and the only currency worth bartering over for people with all the money in the world is life, human or otherwise.
All Alien movies invariably kill most of the cast, and that process begins in earnest here, with two key deaths, one by acid-blooded fat mosquito parasite and one by traditional facehugger, but typically in Alien movies, you’re rooting against the aliens. Not so here, at least not for me. The pending Xenomorph massacre feels like a welcome catharsis, the long overdue comeuppance for Boy Kavalier and his stinky bare feet. I’m rooting for the Xeno. And so is Wendy, weirdly enough.
Throughout “The Fly”, Wendy continues to dote on the growing Xenomorph she’s now somehow connected to. This shouldn’t come as too much of a surprise, since she’s also still a child, at least mentally. She thinks she has a pet. Of course, she doesn’t see it as an apex predator. It’s her friend. This is the utility of Boy using kids as his technologically advanced gophers; he can convince them of anything.
Hermit is less convinced, but what power does he have here? He doesn’t even own his own lungs, let alone the mind of his sister, not now that it has been transplanted into the property of Prodigy. And his idyllic family fantasy is naive anyway. Kirsh’s mockery of the idea that Wendy could ever just live a normal life and be someone’s family again is harsh, but probably accurate. She’s an immortal superpowered android with a pet alien and the mind of a naive child. What’s the best he can realistically hope for?
He has no real allies, either. Boy’s power is so all-consuming that even people who seemed to have a magnetised moral compass have a limit to their potential empathy. You can see this when Atom demands that Dame Sylvia and her husband, Arthur, erase all of Nibs’ memories to hopefully fix whatever issue her experiences in New Saigon caused in her programming. There’s a Lost Boy product launch to think about, and Nibs claiming to be pregnant undermines that. Arthur argues that soft-rebooting a human consciousness is a bit unethical, but Dame Sylvia overrules him. The juice isn’t worth the squeeze. There’s probably a decent explanation for this, but it isn’t given in Alien: Earth Episode 6, and Arthur gets saddled with a facehugger before he can have a chat with his wife about it either way.
All this and there’s still a genuine possibility that Nibs might be pregnant. That’s how Xenomorphs tend to roll, and if Prodigy’s tech is as advanced as they’re advertising, it isn’t outside the realm of possibility that a Lost Boy body can gestate an alien. You’d think, given how much attention Prodigy is paying to their experiments, that they might have considered this, but Boy’s enthusiasm for possessing the Xenos is more a child-like need to “own” something that someone else wants. There’s an extended sequence of him and Yutani arguing over who gets to keep the contents of the crashed Maginot, and for how long, that is really good stuff from a drama perspective, but is infuriating in its accuracy. People who already have everything always want more, and when money is meaningless, life becomes currency.
All we have to rely on are the wildcards. Hermit might constitute one, but he’s so entrenched in Prodigy at the moment and so emotionally dependent on Wendy’s well-being that there’s a limit to how much damage he can cause. Morrow, who is still working on manipulating Slightly to create enough chaos in the facility for Yutani to snatch her aliens back, is a good bet for causing problems. But the real outlier might be Kirsh, who can see what’s going on under Boy’s nose and clearly has his own mutinous agenda. It’s Tootles who pays the price in this episode, but everyone else will be fair game in the next few. Either way, Boy’s time in charge is coming to an end, hopefully sooner rather than later. I’m rooting for the aliens more than ever.
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