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Warning: Spoilers for the series follow.
Well, here we are, at the final two episodes of the first season Alien: Earth. This series has definitely set the bar high when it comes to science fiction on television, and while it doesn’t hit every single story beat, it nevertheless kept me captivated from beginning to end. It manages to be thrilling, terrifying, unsettling, and thought-provoking. It’s the type of show that, week after week, really makes you sit with the discomfort of not knowing nearly as much about the nature of the human soul–and perhaps the nature of humanity itself–as you might like to think.
In the final two episodes, various pieces finally move into place. Wendy, by now thoroughly disenchanted with the person that Kavalier has shown himself to be, turns against him, managing to hack into the central system of his island and essentially take over everything (including Atom, Kavalier’s right-hand man, revealed to be a synthetic himself). Combined with her strange connection with the Xenomorph,this essentially gives her the power over life and death and, while she spares her brother, Joe, everyone else is either killed or imprisoned. By the time the finale comes to a close the various powers-that-be, including Boy Kavalier himself, have been imprisoned, simply waiting to see what exactly Wendy means by her statement that it’s now their turn to rule.
Wendy being able to communicate–and, to an extent, control–the Xenomorph is obviously one of the major plot and character developments of the season. Up to this point in the franchise the Xenomorph has always been this terrifying presence that remains almost completely other, a being of relentless and unstoppable appetite. It remains unclear, however, just how far Wendy’s relationship with this being goes, and whether this is a bond of convenience or something else. Comments from Hawley suggest that the bond the two share may not be quite as stable as Wendy seems to think, and I’m genuinely looking forward to seeing just how this plans out in a (presumed) second season. (For that matter, it’s quite terrifying to hear Xenomorph sounds coming out of the mouth of someone who at least appears to be human).
Nor is Wendy the only one showing her power., and Nibs in particular demonstrates that she is someone to be feared. Of course, she has always been one of the most volatile of the hybrids, and this continues right up to the moment in which she manages to take down the various soldiers who try to keep them from escaping from the island. As the finale makes clear, all of these children-in-the-bodies-of-gods are ticking time bombs just waiting to go off. The adults in their lives have made the dreadful mistake of thinking that they are there just to be manipulated and, as so often in sci-fi, it’s precisely this hubris that leads to their downfall. Had any of them, from Boy Kavalier on down, ever taken a moment to really think about the powerful beings in their midst, they might have avoided their fate.
But then, it’s not surprising that none of them were able to exercise even this bare minimum of self-reflection. By now it’s become clear that Kavalier really doesn’t care very much about human life, either in an abstract or specific sense. This is a man, after all, who’s willing to throw someone in the path of the Ocellus just to see what will happen (and so that he can have a conversation with something that he views as equal to himself). He is, as Wendy so powerfully reminds him, a mean and spiteful little man, and this is both his greatest strength–it’s easy to rule over your own kingdom when you have no human morals or scruples–and also his greatest weakness.
Now, I will say that I found the finale to be a bit underwhelming, as there’s nothing really resolved. All of the conflicts that have been brewing throughout the season are still…brewing. Sure, Kavalier and his enablers and underlings are now captured–a neat inversion of how circumstances stood at the beginning of the episode–but it remains to be seen just what’s going to happen to them. For my money, a far more satisfying conclusion would have seen Kavalier devoured by either the Xenomorph or the Ocellus, but alas, it’s poor dead Arthur who gets his body possessed by the latter. Perhaps next season!
More importantly, it sure does seem as if Wendy has become something of a Mary Sue, since she somehow manages to seize control of the central network on the island, essentially becoming all-powerful. While we’ve been seeing her powers and abilities grow throughout the season, I would have liked at least some diegetic explanation as to why she’s now basically a demigod, someone capable of raining down death and judgment on anyone she sees fit. I’m not saying that there’s not a compelling reason why this should be the case, just that it would have helped immensely if the show had actually given it to us rather than just letting it happen without any kind of diegetic explanation. As it is, we’re essentially just supposed to assume that it’s because of her coming into her powers, but I’m going to need more from that if the show goes into a second season (which it almost certainly will).
That said, I do love the ambiguity of the episode title, which leaves us with the pressing question: just who are the real monsters, anyway? Is it the aliens who, as Joe says to Wendy, are just predators who view all humans as food? Is it the corporations and people like Kavalier, who view everything through the lens of exploitation? Is it the synthetics, who have gained such power that they are essentially unstoppable, their moral compasses twisted and thwarted by the fact that they are, at the end of the day, children in the bodies of superheroes? Or is it, instead, figures like Dame Sylvia, who remains complicit right up to the end, refusing to acknowledge that she is as much to blame for what’s happened and that, in fact, she helped create the monsters that are now roaming free with almost limitless power? The fact that the show never really answers this show is what makes it such great sci-fi storytelling.
I want to conclude by noting that the finale, for all that it was a bit lackluster, nevertheless had what I think is my favorite scene in the entire season. As poor Arthur’s rotting corpse is picked over by crabs, one of the tiny crustaceans manages to face down the adult Xenomorph, who looms over the body, clearly considering feasting on its remains. It’s a meeting of two strange beings, each of them totally foreign to the other. It’s in precisely this strangeness, this encounter with the utterly other, that Alien: Earth presents us with its most potent challenge.