The Cutprice Guignol

I will be honest with you, dear readers: the name of the final episode of season one of Alien: Earth didn’t exactly fill me with confidence As I was typing in the title, I had dry heaves reminiscent of rereading my only attempt at poetry from when I was a teenager. Come on, Noah! The Real bloody Monsters? It sounds like a parody title someone would give to an episode of an Alien show that was distinctly too pretentious and self-absorbed for its own good. Which, unsurprisingly, is pretty much what we got. I had middling hopes for this episode, after things actually happening last week – I was hoping for scares, peril, slightly more than ten seconds of Essie Davis – but all I got was confirmation that Alien: Earth is a dud.

The fact that the synthetics, led by Wendy, are the main characters – not the humans who are supporting and not the Xenomorphs who have been relegated to the opposite of their function – just doesn’t hit the same way in 2025 as it might have before, especially when we’ve got a whole ongoing franchise focused on the matter of humanity vs the machine. Speaking of Blade Runner: K from Blade Runner 2049 was sympathetic, even Roy Batty from the original was going through a relatable existential crisis about just being alive, and plenty of other genre outsiders, even when they took on a more villainous role, at least made sense from a motivation standpoint.

I am not saying that Wendy and the Lost Boys don’t. They do, even if it’s poorly communicated through these thin-and-yet-somehow-overwrought scripts. The problem is what they are. Throughout the writing of this article I’ve been fighting off A.I. prompts while trying to get background information. Now, I’m not saying anything about Skynet, but the idea of robot children thinking they are going to rule doesn’t fill me with glee when we are training A.I. to take over more and more of our work and daily lives. Maybe we are meant to be afraid of Wendy, but the show hasn’t given me a good enough reason to.

Wendy, or Marcy, or she doesn’t know, feels this way about humans. She and her chosen family were created, used, underestimated, mind-wiped, and allowed to be threatened by monsters like Morrow (at least, a monster from their perspective). When she is looking for a clear and human adult worldview, her big brother, instead of explaining that he only hurt Nibs (yeah, it was a Westworld death) because she was about to kill his friend, says the worst words of all produced scripts of the last decade and half: it’s complicated. It is a stock phrase used by screenwriters when they either don’t know what a character wants to say, a way of building to and then delaying a reaction, or if they still haven’t figured out what they want to write – or if they’re holding things over for a coming season, which we’ll get to with regards to Alien: Earth soon enough.

The Synthetics triumph, and I felt nothing. Even with the Xenomorph going wild, and Boy, Kirsch, Dame, Morrow et al getting what they deserve, when it came down to it – on one side of the cage, we had a bunch of poorly explored children in synthetic bodies that Hawley doesn’t feel the need to use that much, on the other, adults, tied up so the kids can go wild. Seeing them all in the same space together made me realize how weak these inter-character relationships have been – aside from some good scenes with Morrow and Kirsch, all these characters have done is have clipped, slow, boring conversations designed to beat us over the head with Meaning and Metaphor that never really built to anything. Except Boy, who did the same, but shouting. I mean if this is what humanity has to offer – a lying mother figure, a boy genius who is really just an adult monster, and Hermit who can’t explain even the most obvious of motivations, then, go for it, Wendy, take over the world.

So much of this episode, too, feels like its holding off for a coming season – Mrs Eyeball piloting a corpse, the approaching Yutani ships, even the synths taking over the facility feel like set-up rather than the pay-off we deserve after a full eight episode. Noah Hawley is already talking his next moves in the franchise, but frankly, after this leaden first season, it’s hard to find much reason to get excited about it.

Alien: Earth started so well. The first few episodes were both exciting and intriguing but then fell into first gear and never left it. The pace was too slow; the story was dull and the Xenomorph was turned into an attack dog. Maybe Yutani should just nuke the island from the air and put us all out of our misery.

If you’d like to catch up on the reviews for the rest of this season, check them out here!

By Kevin Boyle

(header image via Variety)