One of the chief reasons that I was so excited about a television series set within the Alien franchise is that such a longer format would require whomever tackled it to take the eponymous extraterrestrial into bold new territory. Oh, they’d still have to make sure that there’s all the gloomy corridoors and crusty slime that gave the series its trademark ambiance, buy sooner or later, they’d have to do something with the Xenomorph that we’ve never seen before.
It’s always a risky business adding new wrinkles to established lore (just remember the grumbles concerning all those new Force powers in the Disney Star Wars movies), but Noah Hawley is just the kind of lunatic to finally take the alien and do funky new things with it that hopefully fits nicely within the established (if ephemeral) lore. So take a deep breath and get ready to witness Alien: Earth’s boldest swing yet – you’ve heard of loving the alien, but are you ready to talk to one?
It seems that my initial thoughts about Kirsh’s use for Hermit’s damaged lung were a little premature. While the android has removed a Xenomorph embryo from a dissected facehugger and did, in fact, insert it into the separated, human organ, the offending lung thankfully wasn’t placed back inside Hermit’s body and instead is being used as an incubator. However, this seems to be the only good news that’s swirling around the Progeny research lab as many of Boy Kavalier’s Lost Boy Hybrids seems to be crumbling under various pressures. The strange sounds that’s been causing Wendy such distress has been identified as the Xenomorph language as it uses a bunch of chitinous clicks to communicate in a way that only her hearing can pick up. Even more facinating is the fact that Wendy can use her inhuman speech capabilities to duplicate the sounds which means that she could conceivably talk back.
Elsewhere, other members of the cast seem to find themselves between a rock and a hard place as leverage is applied to various weak links in the chain. The main issue is that Wayland-Yutani Cyborg Mr. Morrow has doubled down on the pressure he’s placing on the gullible Slightly to score back the “stolen” alien specimens for his employers by locating his real family and demanding a terrible plan – lure someone to the facehugger eggs and secretly impregnate a random victim in order to smuggle them out. Also bending under the pressure is Nibs who, after her traumatic experience with Trypanohyncha Ocellys (or Eyeball Alien to the rest of us) seems to now be operating under the delusion that her android body is pregnant and reacts violently when it’s suggested otherwise by Dame Sylvia. However, at least Wendy’s attempt to communicate with the Xenomorph prove to be successful when Hermit’s lungbuster comes of age, but now that Boy has a way to verbal soothe the universe’s most vicious killing machine, surely it can’t end in any other way than utter disaster.
To be honest, after three episodes of more typical alien action, the fourth episode of Alien: Earth takes the form of being a setup installment that lines up numerous plot points into some admittedly intriguing territory. Essentially an episode that sees numerous instances of manipulation, we find that the tenuous relationships of the Lost Boys and the people who have created them start to fracture in various different ways. In fact, you’d be hard pressed to find any major character who isn’t either imposing their will on someone else or is finding themselves led astray due to some horrific lack of awareness. As a result, all the rather niave house rules set up by the unfathomably egotistical Boy Kavalier is starting to have foundations based in sand. The most noticable is that Mr. Morrow’s grooming of Slightly has now fully turned into threats on the life of his family, which in turn causes him to resent the fact that Wendy is allowed to have her brother present. However, Hermit himself is the victim of someone else’s will as he now is officially a direct employee of Kavalier to both stay close to his Hybrid sister and pay off his sizable medical bill – fake lungs aren’t cheap you know.
However, the creepiest thread proves to be one that actually has nothing to do with alien species or corporate manipulation and it’s the breakdown that Nibs seems to be suffering. Some have bemoaned the fact that Alien: Earth has frequently stepped into Blade Runner territory, but in the absence of a full-grown Xenomorph, her therapy session proves to be genuinely threatening, especially as her divorce with reality almost turns violent. However, while I’m enjoying the rapid rotting of the Lost Boys from within, and the fact that Kirsh seems to be fully aware of most of it, the majority of the episode does move the various alien species to the side in favour of synthetic melodrama.
However, when attention does swing back to the the otherworldly supporting characters, Alien: Earth still proves to be consistently facinating. On paper, the concept of having someone suddenly learning to speak Alien sounds disastrous, or at least silly despite the Dark Horse comics sometimes treating into similar territory, however, here it mercifully proves to add another angle to the classic monster.
Watching the infant Xenomorph explode from it’s lung incubator is cool enough as we get a real good look at it (not to mention that we’ve never seen a chestburster have to actually “act” before), but watching Wendy calm it down by cooing at it in its language is just the sort of trippy sci-fi shit I signed up for right from the start. Will we actually get to see a tamed Xenomorph on screen? Do we actually want to? And will this somehow merge with whatever heinous act that Slightly is being drawn to as his panicked/jealous eye is blatently locked on Hermit – could you imagine Wendy being forced to communicate with an alien gestating in her brother’s chest to stop it hatching?
However, with all the Hybrid and Xenomorph stuff filling up the runtime, it’s actually nice that Observation takes some time to properly focus on the most freakish member of the other alien species – the Eyeball alien. If you thought that the earlier scene of it possessing a cat by lodging itself in its eye socket was disturbing, wait until you see it to the same to a sheep. However, as genuinely unnerving as it is to get the stink-eye from a sheep that’s been taken over by an eyeball-shaped parasite, the fact that it increases brain activity in its host proves that it displays a worryingly high level of intelligence. Given the chance, this little blinky fucker could rival even the Xenomorph when it comes to a life cycle that’s utterly ghastly, but to do that, we’d have to cut back on the android angst.
The positioning of the aliens to the background in favour of witnessing the Lost Boys slowly start to come apart ends up on arguably the least of the episodes so far; but that doesn’t mean that it doesn’t have multiple moviing parts that will soon each have a have vital pay off. However, it’s clear that Alien: Earth is at full strength whenever the Xenomorph, Timothy Olyphant’s Kirsh, or that creepy-ass eyeball is taking centre stage…
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