There’s a moment in the second episode of Alien: Earth where everything changes in an instant. The show you think you are watching, about a crashed ship and some weird hybrids, becomes the show you’ve always wanted to see. One of the most iconic creatures in film history makes its debut on your TV screen, it’s slow-motion, and it’s glorious. From there, things only get more interesting, more disgusting, and more awesome. It’s off to the races.
The first two episodes of Noah Hawley’s Alien: Earth premiered this week, and we’re going to be here with you all season to break it down. The show’s arrival is the culmination of years of curiosity and anxiety, especially for fans of the Alien franchise. Alien on Earth? How would that work? Would the show feel like an Alien movie? How can we care without Ripley? Well, in the show’s first episode, Hawley erases all of that by giving you a ton of fascinating context and potential. Then, in the second episode, he blends those with the wild, horror-driven chaos Alien fans know and crave. By the end, we’re left gasping for air, dying to see where it all goes next. Let’s recap, shall we?
From the first moments of “Neverland,” the premiere episode of Alien: Earth, you know you’re in good hands. The slow, methodical title reveal, directly inspired by the original films, shows both a reverence for the material as well as an ability to evolve with it. We meet the crew of USCSS Maginot, a deep-space research vessel owned by Weyland-Yutani, and in a very familiar scene of groggy space-travelers crowding around a dinner table, are hit with a ton of exposition about the world of the show. Paramount among these revelations is that five companies control the entire planet, with Weyland-Yutani only being one, and that this mission was about acquiring specimens. A mission that cost many, many lives. Then, to illustrate that, we enter another room in the ship, lovingly referred to as “The Zoo,” and we see not just Facehuggers and eggs from the other movies, but all sorts of new, weird, creepy, crawly things.
So the show basically starts as an Alien movie. People wake up on a ship, they talk, and there are creatures. This is comfortable. This is good. But the episode is called “Neverland,” and we quickly pivot to something completely different, a remote research facility of another of those companies, Prodigy. It’s run by a young trillionaire named Boy Kavalier (Samuel Blenkin), and we pick things up right as he’s about to make history. He’s about to transfer a human consciousness into a synthetic body, basically defeating death. That human is a young girl named Marcy, who we see to be kind, sweet, and empathetic. She’s sick, though, and in her new body, sickness won’t be a thing. She chooses a new name for herself, Wendy, as per Boy’s obsession with Peter Pan.
Wendy (Sydney Chandler) is still Marcy on the inside, but not the outside. On the outside, she’s fast, strong, and potentially immortal. She discusses some of that with Kirsh (Timothy Olyphant), a fellow synthetic being, and Dame Sylvia (Essie Davis), one of the scientists responsible for the procedure. Wendy then learns more kids are coming to join her, and she’s to act as their big sister, easing them into the obviously terrifying notion of leaving their mortal bodies. Here, Hawley is setting up a whole new world for us, ripe with philosophical implications. Are these beings human? What is their potential? What are their limits? And what are the larger implications of life if there is no more death?
All questions for another moment because things need to get going. Hawley channels David Fincher’s camerawork from Alien 3 to let us know that some terrible things have happened on the Maginot. People are dead, creatures are out, and the ship’s security officer, a cyborg named Morrow (Babou Ceesay), relays this information to Weyland-Yutani. Even as he dooms one of his shipmates by not allowing her access to his secure cabin, the only priority for Morrow is getting the specimens to the company. That final shipmate subsequently gets torn apart by the now fully grown xenomorph, which then almost gets Morrow too before he hides in a special compartment.
As the Maginot zooms towards Earth, we meet the show’s other main character, Joe (Alex Lawther). Joe is Wendy’s older brother, and she, through some mysterious power no one at Prodigy can figure out, has been accessing and manipulating cameras to spy on him. Whether or not that attachment to her brother is a good thing is up for debate among the powers that be. Joe is a medic working in the military of Prodigy, and after he tells his friends that a request for transfer has been denied, the Maginot crashes into the city. Joe and the team immediately jump into action, gearing up and heading to help survivors.
Wendy sees this on her screens and has a wild idea. Prodigy should send her and her fellow multi-billion-dollar immortal children to the crash site to help. This moment seems wildly out of place and forced for many reasons, but the biggest one is they’re kids. What do they know about military movements or rescue missions? And the other characters all tell Boy this over and over. Wendy only wants to go because her brother is in peril. Even so, the trillionaire agrees to her plan. He wants to see what his new toys can do.
Back at the crash site, we watch multiple teams go deeper and deeper into the ship. We see how it has smashed through a skyscraper to create a deep hole of danger. Morrow escapes his hatch and reports back to Weyland-Yutani that he’s going to try and secure the cargo despite the soldiers boarding the ship. Joe’s group and a few others walk around too. Each finds signs that some very, very bad things happened, including one cryochamber where a guy has a hole in his chest. (“Uh-oh,” thinks every Alien fan.) Two others enter a lab that has lots of creatures still in containment, but not all of them. Two massive insect-looking creatures slip into their clothes, later emerging to suck the blood out of their bodies, killing them.
As the episode comes to an end, Kirsh talks to Wendy about the differences between humanity and their kind. But Wendy doesn’t want to hear any of it. She tells Kirsh that, no matter what she has to do, her brother will survive. She’s cheated death; she now wants to do the same for him.
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