Summary
Alien: Earth provides oodles of demented fun in Episode 7, with truly awful stuff happening all over the place.
In many ways, we’ve all been waiting for the Lost Boys to turn on Boy Kavalier and Prodigy and facilitate some kind of escape, possibly aided by Kirsh for bonus catharsis points. The first season of Alien: Earth has largely been built around the anticipation of this event. Episode 7, the penultimate instalment, mostly delivers it, but it delivers it in such a determinedly demented way that I’m not even sure what to make of it. Alien-eyed sheep stomping out arithmetic? A fully-grown pet Xenomorph playing hide-and-follow with its superpowered synthetic “mother”? A traumatised child’s mind in a robot’s body, carrying a teddy around one minute and then pulling a person’s jaw out of their face the next? “Emergence” is a fever dream of an episode. And I absolutely loved it.
It feels a bit like this is what Alien: Earth has been consistently building towards, even in that painfully slow and empty-feeling outing that was intended to really lay out the Prodigy status quo and bed in the Lost Boys. I’ve been saying for weeks that the Xenomorphs are, if not the good guys, then at the very least an antidote to the worse guys. That’s holding true. With Isaac dead thanks to Kirsh and Arthur facehugged thanks to Slightly, you can see the Lost Boys really being consumed by their child-like fear and confusion at the same time Boy keeps seeing opportunities to make some money back. He’s awful, truly; one of the most detestable antagonists in recent TV memory for me. Upon seeing Tootles’ melted visage, he just moans that the billions spent to bring him to life – or keep him alive, perspective depending – didn’t bring a return on investment.
Maybe the tentacled eye currently living in the sheep will. What I like about this show is that it frequently gives me cause to combine words like “tentacled”, “eye”, and “sheep”, as though that’s a normal thing to do. The sheep can now do rapid-fire mathematics by dilating its parasite eye, stamping its hooves, and shitting itself, the latter I think partially out of resentment for being questioned. See? Even the alien sheep monster can’t be bothered with Boy’s nonsense.
The emotional core of “Emergence” is found in Slightly and Smee’s side quest to deliver Arthur, still wearing a facehugger, to the beach, as per Morrow’s instructions. Smee’s accidental inclusion in this is genius, since he has consistently provided the most authentically child-like physical performance, and that’s exactly what this sequence needs to make it more eerily idiosyncratic. There’s just something oddly perverse about it all; the facehugger’s rhythmic panting, Slightly and Smee trying to carry Arthur, neither of them quite understanding the implications of what’s happening, both of them terrified. It feels exactly like what two ten-year-olds carrying a body with an alien attached to it should feel like.
The tension of this also lives in the minds of long-time Alien fans, since we know what a facehugger does. The Lost Boys don’t. So, when Arthur spontaneously wakes up – Slightly stamping on the facehugger is a hilarious, ridiculous note of physical comedy – we know that means his death is imminent, but the kids think he’s saved. What underpins all of Alien: Earth, and comes through especially strongly here in Episode 7, is the idea of a child’s innocence being sacrificed on the altar of corporatism. Slightly and Smee believing they have killed Arthur, then saved him, then killed him again, all in the span of a few minutes, is a particularly cruel illustration of the price the Lost Boys have had to pay for being Boy’s playthings. It’s a price even that two-stepping sheep couldn’t calculate.
Alex Lawther, Sydney Chandler, and Lily Newmark in Alien: Earth | Image via FX/Hulu
By the time Slightly and Smee deliver Arthur’s body to Morrow and his assault team, who prepare to breach the Prodigy facility, the chestburster has burrowed out of Arthur’s chest cavity and slithered off into the bushes. It’s promptly caught, though, and delivered to Kirsh, who knew all about the coming raid and helped Smee and Slightly escape to entrap Morrow and his team. I’m still not totally sure what Kirsh’s agenda is, but I’m still fervently holding out hope that he’ll be the one to bring down Prodigy from within.
Elsewhere, Wendy finally comes around to Hermit’s escape plan after seeing how unceremoniously Isaac’s death was dealt with. Hermit having disabled the Lost Boys’ trackers with Arthur’s help means that they can all slip away without being noticed, and Wendy takes that pretty literally. She wants to take all of the Lost Boys with her. Of course, Slightly and Smee are elsewhere, but Nibs, who is still reeling from having her memory wiped, is willing to tag along. Only Curly decides to remain behind. Wendy makes her promise not to rat them out, which means she almost certainly does. We don’t see it, but Curly later goes sobbing to Dame Sylvia, and Prodigy Corporation Security personnel are waiting for Wendy, Hermit, and Nibs when they try to make their getaway on a boat, so the implication is pretty clear.
The novelty of the escape attempt is that Wendy is now completely psychically linked to the Xenomorph in Prodigy’s lab, which she frees on the way out. This is another treat for franchise fans who know how significant it is to let a fully-grown Xeno loose on unsuspecting humans. To Wendy, she’s basically bringing her pet along. But it’s the equivalent of dropping a nuclear bomb in the middle of the facility. The Xeno kills everyone, and later butchers a bunch more security personnel at Wendy’s urging. Sure, Wendy gets the idea that the Xeno will kill anyone who threatens her, and she doesn’t seem especially dismayed by that – Nibs, meanwhile, seems positively excited by it – but she also strokes the Xeno’s head like she’s petting a dog, so the lines are a bit blurred.
Even with Xenomorph intervention, the escape attempt still goes belly-up, with Wendy, Hermit, and Nibs finding themselves cornered by Siberian and co., the Xeno stranded on the opposite shore. Hermit prevents Wendy from summoning the alien, but Nibs goes postal when her teddy gets dunked and starts ripping people apart with her bare hands. Hermit has no choice but to intervene, but his intervention involves shooting Nibs to protect Siberian. To Wendy, it’s a profound betrayal. And there might not be any coming back from it.
RELATED:
