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.
Since FX gave us two episodes to start things off, instead of breaking things down after episode one, let’s dive right into episode two and save the minutiae for after. Episode two of Alien: Earth is called “Mr. October,” both a direct reference to the episode’s inclusion of baseball Hall of Famer Reggie Jackson, and a broader scope term for a hero stepping up to the challenge when it’s most needed. Both Wendy and Joe fit that bill in the episode, which makes sense, because the term was taught to them by their father, who we meet in several flashbacks and yes, is played by series creator Noah Hawley himself.
Also, the beginning of “Mr. October” establishes something very cool about the series. Instead of some kind of “Previously on Alien: Earth” montage, the show replays those moments during the slow, methodical title reveal. It’s a fun way to both suck us right back into the show and give us a few brief reminders of what to remember as the story moves forward.
As Joe and his team dive deeper into the crash site, learning more and more about the horrors that befell the crew, Boy and Sylvia have a discussion back at Prodigy. He explains that he didn’t create Wendy and the other hybrids to cheat death and sell immortality. That’s certainly a benefit, but not the main reason. He’s an unparalleled genius and simply wants to meet someone who blows his mind. Someone who is smarter than him. And, he hopes, by mixing a human being with a supercomputer, maybe he’ll achieve that. Sylvia seems skeptical about the claim, but the conversation is ripe with foreshadowing, not just of why he let the kids go to the crash site, but of what Wendy and his new family might become.
That’s especially true in light of what we see later. A day before the crash, we learn that Wendy was spying on her brother remotely as always. He was at an office and asked a government robot for an early exit from his military job so he could go to college on Mars. But, fearing she’d lose him, Wendy manipulates the code of the robot from thousands of miles away, denying his claim. She even makes it retort with an inside joke she and he shared from an Ice Age movie, which confuses him amid the disappointment. The Prodigy scientists are blown away by this because they have no idea how she did it. The next day, when he’s forced to deal with the crash, Wendy feels guilty about it. She kept her brother in his job and caused him to be in this dangerous situation. This informs not just her seemingly random request to go to the crash, but Boy Kavalier’s even more surprising agreement with her. He saw her do something he’s never seen before, and he wants to see what else she’s capable of.
Which brings us all the way back to 1,500 words ago and the first paragraph of this piece. The moment it all changes. Joe and his friends continue to search the crash when he senses something above him. Slowly, out of the dark, emerges the xenomorph, and it chases Joe across the giant pit at the center of the structure. It’s here when, after all the thoughts of crashes, hybrid beings, and humanity, we were reminded this is an Alien show. And Alien is awesome.
It’s a sentiment that continues through the rest of the episode as the creature chases Joe up and down the building. At one point, it gleefully massacres a costume party. The next, it obliterates a group of soldiers. In both instances, the xenomorph leaves gallons of blood, guts, and exploded body parts everywhere. In a show that seemed so quiet and introspective at the start, it was wholly surprising and awesome to get some real, gross, Alien carnage. We absolutely loved it.
When Wendy and the kids reach the crash site, she immediately starts hearing something. Something no one else hears. When she then abandons her team to go find her brother, it only intensifies. As Wendy and Slightly (Adarsh Gourav) go after Joe, Kirsh and the rest of the group dive deeper into the ship. They discover numerous other alien species, including an incredibly creepy eyeball octopus that jumps on your face, sucks out your eye, and then takes over your body. Or, at least that’s what it appeared to do to the cat it had infected and what it tried to do to Nibs (Lily Newmark), another of Wendy’s siblings.
After a second encounter with the xenomorph, including a very cinematic slow-motion jump over a gaudy chandelier, Joe is about to die. But, he’s saved by Morrow, who has finally caught up to one of the specimens he and his crew found in space, and he is supposed to reacquire for the company. We even get a glimpse of how he and those soldiers were probably able to neutralize these creatures, by using electricity to freeze them and then a weird, organic net gun to trap them. The net doesn’t hold, of course, as the xeno escapes and kills a bunch of other soldiers, but Joe survives and Wendy finally finds him.
Kirsh wants Wendy and Slightly to head to the front of the ship, where they’ve discovered there are a bunch of eggs in storage (“Uh-oh,” thinks every Alien fan), so Wendy convinces Joe to go with them. On the way, Slightly lets it slip that she is his sister, which Joe doesn’t understand. He buried his sister. But, we learn, her dad agreed to donate her to Prodigy to save her life. It just had to be kept a secret. Joe is scared and skeptical, but after asking a few hyper-specific questions only his little sister would know, he gives in. We’ve only been with these characters for two episodes, but it was still an incredibly touching, heartfelt moment. A moment that’s very quickly taken from them when the xeno returns and seemingly smashes Joe down into the building. Wendy decides she’ll go after him and that’s the episode.
The first two episodes of Alien: Earth are incredibly dense but also very entertaining. Each is filled with interesting ideas and possibilities, plus lots of gross, creature horror. We also begin to see how this is all going to weave together. Corporations fighting over these creatures. Wendy and the hybrids exploring themselves and these other creatures. Creatures that, like themselves, are not of this world. Plus, a brother and sister reunite under impossible circumstances. Sign us the heck up for six more weeks of Alien: Earth.
Assorted Musings
Here’s where we’re going to mention a few things that didn’t quite fit into the flow of the story above but were worth noting.
We love all the winks back to the original Alien movies. Clearly, the whole Magniot scenario is Ridley Scott’s original, but Joe and the Prodigy team being transported to the crash site was very James Cameron, and the show goes full Alien 3 a few times to show the POV of the xenomorph. It felt like just the right level of homage without being in your face.
Will we get to see what happened on the Magniot? The show obviously leaves it to the imagination but even without all the killer aliens and stuff, they set up some weird dynamics between the characters, especially with that other cyborg character, Mr. Tang.
Who else was creeped out by the long, lingering shot of the “See no evil, speak no evil, hear no evil” sculpture on the wall at Prodigy? Clearly, we’re supposed to be very, very skeptical of the ethics happening at this place.
Did you catch that Joe kept that Reggie Jackson ball? It was a subtle thing, but we think, speaks to his character. He’s a good guy, clearly, but not infallible. If the owner of a huge piece of baseball history has just been cut in half by a killer alien, sure, he’s taking it.
Both episodes this week had a single shot of a man, in a full hazmat suit, powerwashing a wall at Prodigy. It is not connected to anything else so far but was obviously put in there for some reason. What could it be?
We loved the scene between Boy Kavalier and Yutani (Sandra Yi Sencindiver). Just two trillionaires, trying to outsmart one another, completely oblivious to the actual implications of what they’re doing. It’s going to be fun to see how that corporate battle surrounding the crash and creatures plays out. Plus, do we think we learn how Yutani knew about the xenos?
What the hell is up with the giant pod creature hanging from the ceiling? It started to reveal itself, but then Tootles (Kit Young) left. We can’t wait to find out.
Morrow mentioned that the xenomorph can sense fear. Is the true? How would he know that? That feels like a very interesting thread that could be explored.
Why is Marcy/Wendy special? Boy tells her she’s special, and not just because she’s the first human to be transferred. There are other reasons too, which is why he went and took her from her family. She must have something about her that made her an ideal candidate for this. What could it be?
What did you think of the premiere of Alien: Earth? Let us know below.