What makes a being sentient? It’s an incredibly tricky question, one that has vexed philosophers (and science-fiction writers) for generations. And before Alien: Earth, it’s a question raised mainly just in passing in the Alien movies. There’s some idle speculation in the films about where the Xenomorphs sit on the evolutionary ladder, and nearly every Alien story at some point deals with the question of whether synthetic creations care about their makers. Ridley Scott’s divisive prequels, Prometheus and Alien: Covenant, also weigh the roles that killer aliens and godlike creators have played in humanity’s origin story.
Still, in Alien: Earth, Noah Hawley more explicitly explores some of the ideas that have just been hinted at in Alien before. You could contend (and I’d concede your point) that Hawley is too clumsy in the way that he raises Alien’s subtext to the surface. In this week’s episode, “The Fly,” there are times where the conversations aren’t just artlessly blunt but also sloppily wedged in, as though Hawley were rushing to clarify a few major themes before the season’s big finish.
And yet … those conversations are also entertainingly provocative, and they’re accompanied by some of the scariest and most disgusting scenes the series has delivered up to now. If nothing else, this show is really good at getting gross.
Kirsh sets the tone for the brainier side of this episode via two of this episode’s punchier scenes — ones where the dialectic dialogue really pops. In the first, Hermit tries to ask Kirsh what kind of maintenance Wendy might need in the unlikely event that he’s ever allowed to take her home. Kirsh replies, “That’s like an onion asking, ‘How do I take care of a star?’” then chastises Hermit for wanting to take something with “the potential to invent faster-than-light travel and explore the stars for thousands of years” and limit it to being merely a kid sister.
Later, Kirsh shares an elevator with Morrow, who taunts the android, asking, “What’s it like working for a company that’s made you obsolete?” Kirsh cuts at Morrow too, saying, “Look at you, the almost-human self-hating machine.” Kirsh drips with chilly, sneering contempt for the non-mechanical. Timothy Olyphant, again, sells the superiority well. He also cuts straight to the artificial heart of the matter. What makes a human a human, a robot a robot, and an alien an alien?
The elevator scene comes after this episode’s centerpiece: the arbitration that Prodigy and Weyland-Yutani endure under orders from “the governing collective known as the Five.” Throughout the meeting, while the latest Yutani family CEO stares icily and demands the return of her Maginot property, Boy Kavalier sits with his dirty feet on the conference table and an obnoxious smirk on his face, talking about the thousands of New Siamese killed and maimed by the Maginot crash and mentioning the dozens of intercorporate laws that Yutani violated by bringing deadly aliens to Earth. (Never mind that Kavalier himself was heavily involved with the ship’s sabotage.)
In the end, Yutani agrees to pay a pile of money to Prodigy, and Kavalier agrees to return the “proprietary specimens” … but not until the required six-week off-world quarantine is over. “It’s just not safe,” he shrugs. “For the planet.”
Kavalier also says something worth unpacking further when talking about who has the rights to the aliens. “They’re living creatures,” he says. “Technically, they don’t belong to anyone.” Which raises a question: Does Kavalier feel the same way about his hybrids? (I mean, he doesn’t really feel that way about the aliens. I’m asking for the sake of argument.)
This subject is very much on Wendy’s mind this week, coming up in separate conversations, each among the episode’s weaker scenes. Talking with her brother, she defends the aliens, comparing them to bees, which are harmful to humans but also intelligent, social animals. She then has a conversation with Nibs about her recent erratic behavior, like her claim to be pregnant, and is alarmed to hear that Nibs has been “reset” by Dame Sylvia and has no memory of the recent past. Wendy confronts the doctor, reminding her that Kavalier wants this to be “a ‘yes’ place, not a ‘no’ place.” Dame robbed Nibs of her “yes.”
I have a few qualms about these scenes, including wondering when Wendy found out about Nibs’s nonexistent baby. She could’ve been told about it offscreen, of course. Even if so, the groundwork for a close, sisterly relationship between these two hybrids hasn’t really been laid in previous episodes. Also, later on, Wendy’s questions for Dame feel clumsily blunt. When Dame talks about Neverland as a research facility, Wendy snaps, “Like you study us?” before directly asking, “Are we people or are we something else?”
The best exchange in the Wendy scenes comes when she tries to explain to Hermit Neverland’s positivity policy: that “No” is the first step to nothing. Her brother helpfully counters, “If someone tries to take advantage of you, tries to hurt you, then ‘no’ gives you power.” It’s a lesson these child-brained hybrids could stand to learn — especially Slightly.
Morrow’s efforts to recruit Slightly accelerate this week, exacerbated by the disastrous Prodigy arbitration. Yutani urges Morrow to either coerce his asset into procuring a Xenomorph or, at the very least, to “destabilize the facility and escalate the chaos.” Morrow aims for option one, perhaps knowing that option two will likely follow even if he fails. The chaos begins fairly benignly, with Slightly awkwardly trying to persuade Hermit to go to the lab, using the unconvincing arguments, “I want to show you something,” and “It’ll be fun.” Unfortunately for Slightly, Hermit’s squadron needs him on patrol. No lab — and no becoming a Xenomorph host — for Joe.
Around this same time, Tootles — a.k.a. Isaac — gets an order from the off-island Kirsh to tend to the aliens with Curly’s help. Isaac lies and says Curly isn’t around, then when he tries to handle the feeding and watering by himself like a mature grown-up, we get a repeat of something we saw in last week’s Maginot flashback, with the aliens working together to fell their prey. In a truly (gloriously) disturbing sequence, we watch the eyeball/sheep monster startle Isaac, getting the hybrid to lock himself accidentally into a pen with a flylike monster, which promptly spews acid all over Isaac, melting his face.
The final stage of the breakdown does, ultimately, involve Hermit and Slightly — and also, tragically, Arthur Sylvia. After refusing to take part in Nibs’s reprogramming, Arthur gets canned by Atom. But before Arthur can leave, he has a conversation with Hermit in which he quietly signals that Joe should take his sister and leave. Arthur also surreptitiously disables Wendy’s tracking device and in the process discovers Tootles is “not connected.” So he heads down to the lab, tailed by Slightly, who soon seizes the opportunity to manipulate Arthur into getting close enough to a Xenomorph egg to get face-hugged.
Two more notable incidents occur amid the calamity. One involves Kirsh, who watches the lab remotely via security cameras but never sounds any alarm. (When Kavalier asks him if everything’s okay, Kirsh stoically answers, “Affirmative.”) Then, at the end of the episode, Slightly pulls Arthur’s body into a ventilation shaft, in what could be a belated act of regret or an attempt to preserve a Xenomorph host body before any other aliens can eat it.
Either way, Slightly’s reactions and Kirsh’s reaction bring us back to Wendy’s question: Are these mechanical people … people? Slightly thinks so. He insists he had no choice but to be bad because Morrow “has my family.” But there’s an argument to be made that Slightly actually has no family. He has someone else’s memory of a family — a memory which, we now know, can be reprogrammed. Really, Slightly’s truer kin could be Kirsh, who continues to roll his eyes at the hybrid’s human aspirations.
At one point, Hermit’s buddies ask, “Is that really your sister in that machine?” He replies, “She is to me.” That’s a lovely thought. But it’s all just wishful thinking on the part of both Joe and his sister. How long would their bond really hold if Wendy went haywire?
Screaming, Hearing, Etc.
• Before the series ends, I intend to write more about the pros and cons of Hawley’s decision to have adult actors playing, essentially, children. Mostly it works, but sometimes there are scenes in which it feels more like actors doing drama-class exercises rather than fully being kids. Examples in this episode include when Smee grumbles, “Being grown-up sucks,” because all his friends are busy, and when he attempts to connect with Slightly by throwing his arm around him, “giving you a grown-up hug.” It all feels self-conscious and forced. (Better: When Smee tries to explain his annoyed feelings and can’t articulate them, settling on, “Can’t we just … I dunno?”)
• I noticed for the first time this week that Arthur’s whole fashion sense is right out of a 1970s or ’80s science-fiction movie, like Close Encounters or The Thing (or, um, Alien). This connection is underscored when he’s packing up his things and picks up an old-fashioned photo cube.
• A teaser for future story developments? One of the reasons why Nibs gets reset is because Atom wants her to be “calm and charming” before “the information architects of the Five,” which suggests that there’s some kind of public rollout of the hybrids coming before season’s end. Also of note: the Sylvias mention that Nibs had “trauma in her past” and that they knew when she was chosen that this could be a problem.
