Alien: Earth
Commentary
Season 1
Episode 4
Editor’s Score
3 stars
***
The Prodigy workers is beginning to surprise if placing kids in grownup robotic our bodies was a good suggestion in any case.
Picture: Patrick Brown/FX
After three straight episodes of pretty relentless science-fiction/horror motion — interspersed with a number of quieter, quirkier moments of kid-lit fantasy — Alien: Earth slows down significantly for episode 4. “Commentary” is extra purposeful than enjoyable, seemingly geared toward establishing the again half of season one whereas additionally filling in some gaps within the characters’ backstories. There’s lots concerning the Prodigy workers and their revolutionary hybrids that the Alien: Earth creator, Noah Hawley, didn’t really feel the necessity to clarify when he began this story. Right here on the season’s midway level, he takes a beat to make clear a number of issues.
Take Dame Sylvia. She’s been a relentless presence via the primary three episodes, but I’ve barely had trigger to say her earlier than. And till this second, I had but to say her husband, Arthur Sylvia (David Rysdahl), one of many chief architects of Prodigy’s hybrid program. The Sylvias have expressed some reservations about how cavalier Boy Kavalier has been towards the hybrids’ psychological and bodily well being. The Maginot mission has left Arthur furious. He has little respect for Kavalier’s risk-taking, as a result of to him it’s “not science.” (“If we did this fallacious, finest case we’ve got a bunch of AIs working round considering that they’re human. Worst case? We killed six youngsters.”)
Dame, alternatively, is extra of a nurturer by nature, to each Kavalier and the hybrids. However even she has considerations about how these kids are adjusting to having immature minds dropped into high-tech, adult-shaped our bodies. In one in every of this episode’s finest scenes, Dame tries to determine what’s fallacious with Nibs, who has been spooked since encountering the scary aliens on the Maginot crash website. The Sylvias grow to be alarmed when Nibs claims to be pregnant. When Dame tries to clarify that being pregnant is a organic course of past Nibs’s mechanical skills, the teen at first waves off the intercourse discuss — “I grew up on a farm,” she huffs — however then cites the counterexample of Jesus. (“His mommy didn’t try this, and he was born.”)
Then the dialog takes a darker flip, as Dame tries to get Nibs to confess that her new physique is completely different. All Nibs will enable is, “It’s large,” after which when Dame tries to point out her an precise diagram, Nibs kicks it angrily out of her hand. Dame then asks precisely what occurred to her in New Siam, which prompts Nibs to leap at her and pin her to the bottom. The sequence is extremely disturbing, underlining the carelessness with which Prodigy has been treating these overgrown kids.
Elsewhere on Neverland Island, Wendy reclaims her place as probably the most particular of the hybrids by revealing the distinctive reward we’ve seen from her throughout the previous two episodes: a capability to listen to and perceive the Xenomorphs’ language. Whereas the Sylvias once more are involved about what this may occasionally imply — particularly given Wendy’s different surprising energy, to control expertise by touching it — Kavalier is happy to see the place it’d lead. He reminds Dame that she isn’t Wendy’s mom. (That is “an IT problem, not a gab session,” he warns.) Then he takes a shot on the Wendy-bashing Curly, asking her if she will be able to hear the Xenomorphs. (“Perhaps,” she lies.)
As a part of the “attending to know the characters somewhat higher” route of “Commentary,” we get a number of scenes with Kavalier this week, all emphasizing how he thrives on “transfer quick and break stuff” tech-bro power — mixed, quirkily, along with his Peter Pan obsession. When Wendy comes to speak to Kavalier, he factors along with his foot towards an empty seat for her, then proceeds to pepper her with questions on her Maginot expertise, questioning whether or not combating the Xenomorph was extra like combating pirates or Indians … or perhaps a crocodile? (“You fought the crocodile and now you possibly can hear the clock!”) He additionally needs to know what she hears from the Xenomorphs and is unmoved when she describes their ache.
Kavalier will not be an empathetic soul. He’s a self-styled man-child, disdainful of society’s ethical codes. The present hasn’t gone as far as to border him as a villain (until you’re the type of viewer who thinks of Willy Wonka as a nasty man), however neither is he being proven to be “proper” in any explicit means (until you’re the type of viewer who roots for Lex Luthor). Greater than something, he’s the sort of oligarch who seems for high-minded, pseudo-intellectual excuses to do what he wished to do anyway. And Hawley does appear to need us to attract some modern-day parallels. In different phrases: If Kavalier have been an actual man, alive at this time in our world, he’d in all probability nonetheless be a trillionaire. He’s bought an undeniably musky aroma.
Throughout Wendy’s go to, she argues that Kavalier ought to enable her brother to remain on Neverland Island, which the Prodigy boss agrees to very reluctantly. (When she makes a “pinkie promise” that having Hermit round received’t distract her, Kavalier covers her pinkie along with his complete hand.) As for Joe, he’s not all that passionate about being detained at Neverland, particularly when Prodigy’s gruff enterprise supervisor, Atom Eins (Adrian Edmondson), tells him that he has no alternative within the matter, since he owes Prodigy for the price of his synthetic lung. Atom additionally laughs off the concept Hermit might simply take his sibling residence, saying, “The unit you name your sister is a product of the Prodigy Company.” He calls her the following evolutionary step between “our animal previous and our trans-human future.”
Additionally, not super-stoked about Hermit hanging round? Barely, who complains it’s not honest for Wendy to have a brother. (When Wendy defends her privilege by saying she’s the oldest, Barely notes that, truly, Curly is, since she was 12 when her consciousness was transplanted.) It doesn’t assist that Barely is receiving messages in his head from Morrow threatening to hurt Barely’s family until he arranges to sneak a human into the lab with the Xenomorph eggs, to allow them to do their face-hunting, alien-planting enterprise. The plain candidate for that is Hermit, whom Barely already dislikes.
Despite the fact that all of those calmer, conversational scenes lead to an episode with out a variety of drive, the smaller moments do have a function, making one main level clear: that nobody at Prodigy actually is aware of how both their hybrid experiment or their alien research are going to end up. Each conditions are shifting in a short time, in instructions nobody might’ve predicted. To the Sylvias, that is terrifying. To Kavalier, thrilling. And to Kirsh? Nicely, he simply watches all of it quietly, often muttering, “Fascinating.”
Anyway, after an episode with a variety of discuss, Alien: Earth returns to its regular mode of unnerving suspense and gooey violence on this episode’s remaining minutes. There’s a variety of intrigue, as we see Kirsh remotely monitoring Barely, and Barely eyeing Hermit. In the meantime, Wendy enters the lab to speak with the aliens, utilizing a language that consists of clicks and sighs — like a swarm of bugs nesting in a windswept forest. This eerie music ultimately coaxes out the creature rooted in Hermit’s amputated lung. That embryonic Xenomorph then shatters its container and leaps at Wendy, who pets it gently.
Who knew? It appears one in every of these hybrids could also be able to motherhood in any case.
• For the primary time for the reason that season premiere (not less than by my reckoning), the opening-credits “beforehand on” imagery options one thing we haven’t truly seen earlier than: a creepy-looking doll’s head washing onto a seaside with the tide.
• In one of many clumsier bits of backstory filling, Curly asks Hermit to clarify “the 5,” and he mentions the companies — Prodigy, Weyland-Yutani, Threshold, Dynamic, and Lynch — that took the place of world governments and democracy and “mounted issues.” It appears unlikely that Curly wouldn’t already know this, though I did like how Hermit simply accepts that it’s higher for the companies to be in cost, since he’s by no means recognized the rest.
• My favourite Maginot menagerie beastie stays the multi-eyed crawling eyeball, who on this episode takes up residence throughout the eye socket of a Prodigy lab goat. Observing this course of, Atom expresses concern about one in every of these monsters escaping, to which Kavalier says, “Glass half-full, child … we talked about this.”
• Certainly one of my favourite little bits of bodily enterprise on this episode is when Wendy exhibits Hermit round her bed room — with a mattress that’s “extra like a charging station” — and he or she surreptitiously kicks her toys out of sight so the area received’t look so cluttered or infantile.
• Hermit poses some good inquiries to Atom about Wendy, like, “She has her recollections, her humorousness … doesn’t that make her Marcy?” He additionally asks, “Did you actually obtain her consciousness to that physique? Is it her?” Atom replies that answering these questions is the distinction between a trillion-dollar enterprise and “a blanket with sleeves … an invention that nobody wished.”
• The hybrids don’t have to eat in any standard human sense, however apparently the Prodigy engineers have concocted for them a sort of digital sweet, which simulates the reminiscence of taste. Neat!
• Similar to Curly final week, one other one of many extra clever and impressive hybrids, Tootles (Package Younger), tries to impress the Prodigy bosses along with his diligence and cleverness. He even has the nerve to ask Kirsch to name him by a non–Peter Pan identify, selecting “Isaac” for himself, after “this scientist.” (When he tells Barely concerning the identify change, Barely asks, “We will try this?” Isaac’s nonchalant reply: “Don’t learn about ‘can,’ however I did.”)
• I’ve been watching Rysdahl as Arthur for weeks now and at no level earlier than this episode did I understand that I’d seen him earlier than in a Noah Hawley present, enjoying the candy, meek Wayne Lyon in Fargo season 5.
• Boy Kavalier cites that outdated saying about how, at a sure degree, science is indistinguishable from magic. He credit it to Isaac Asimov. Does anybody at Prodigy have the braveness to inform him that the quote is definitely from Arthur C. Clarke?
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