Well, this week on Alien: Earth there are a lot more questions raised than answers given. But the answers we do get, man, they’re pretty juicy.
What’s up, my know-it-alls. Let me say this up front: not a bad episode. It really wasn’t. I thoroughly enjoyed it. And I still walked away from one specific scene feeling robbed.
Let’s get into all of it.
The Man Who Gave a Lifetime to These Things
Right out the gate you see Timothy Olyphant’s character understanding a lot more about what’s going on than most people think he does.
But the character who grabbed me this week is the cyborg off the ship. Two of the boys, I believe it’s Nibs and Slightly, are poking around the egg area, and he shows up. What an interesting character. He has a wonderful conversation a little bit later with Weyland-Yutani, and it’s funny because of how they put it in context. He asks to talk to the old lady, and she tells him her mother passed away, that it’s been 65 years.
“You used to know my grandmother.” “It’s been 65 years, Mr. Morrow.” “I run the enterprise today.”
Because you forget they use cryosleep. Which means anytime you go off on these long missions, you’re gone for a good chunk of your life. And he makes that argument. She’s over there talking about how they’ll recover this and that, let’s get you out, and he says no. No, no, no. I’m staying. I’m going to recover this thing because I’ve given my life to it. I’m gone a lifetime. Everyone I know is dead.
“You should have read your contract.” “I’m not complaining. I’m just telling you these creatures, they are my life’s work, and I’m going to get them back.”
Okay. I get that level of commitment, especially considering the whole cryosleep concept sitting underneath it. So I’m down.
When Is a Machine Not a Machine
When he encounters the kids, and yeah, I call them the kids, it’s starting to get a little disconcerting watching grown-ups behave like eleven-year-olds. They’re just exploring. And notice the eggs aren’t opening for them, because obviously there’s no human there.
So he shows up and he immediately peeps that there’s something wrong with them. He clocks that they’re synths and he calls them out on it. They mention having parents, and he works it out. Then he releases this little thing out of his cyborg hand. I thought it was just a tracking device. Come to find out it’s a tracking device and a communication device. As he approaches one of the kids he whispers in his ear, when is a machine not a machine, and he puts it on his neck. The thing sinks in. Now he can talk to the kid and, I believe, track him too.
Then Olyphant’s character shows up, and the guy gets away.
The Fight They Wouldn’t Show Me
This is the one thing that absolutely, without a shadow of a doubt, pissed me off.
You did great the first two episodes. If you don’t have the money to do this, don’t do it.
Here’s what I mean. Wendy has chased after her brother and found him, and the xenomorph shows up, so she has to face it. As the creature is about to bite her brother, she gets this ring tool around its second inner mouth and starts yanking on it, and the creature is wrestling her, trying to pull her off its face.
Now, online, people are like, oh, there she goes, she’s a Wendy Sue, and the whole bit. She’s a synth, bro. They’ve already established her strength. I don’t know what the big issue is. I actually thought the scene was kind of cool. I’m not going to sit here and tell you it’s wonderfully deep storytelling. I literally just went, that’s neat.
So she wrestles it into a garage area while dude is supposed to drop the door. The creature grabs her and pulls her back in. The door shuts. And we proceed to hear the most intense fight, and all she has is this cutting thing. I want to say sword, but it honestly looks like the arm of a giant paper cutter. Her brother is out there going oh my god, oh my god, trying to hotwire the door. He gets it open, and you see the creature with its head cut off.
How are you going to show me a really cool end to a fight you didn’t show me?
At least give us something while he’s working the door. Brief glimpses lit by the flashes of whatever laser device she’s using. Something. Because I feel robbed, and it felt cheap, and it undermined what they had already done for me.
You have already, in two episodes, shown us wonderfully graphic xenomorph material without going terribly over the top. So why, all of a sudden, are we not seeing what sounds like an amazing fight? I think the answer is pretty simple. You didn’t have the budget for it. And that’s a problem, because you can’t build a show on this kind of visually interesting stuff and then require us to not see what’s happening.
Now, if this technique had been used in the first episode, or the second, and we hadn’t actually seen the xenomorph until now, maybe I could have been okay with it. That’s not what happened. So it felt cheap, and I’m definitely dinging it on the score.
The New Shiny Thing
Everybody does make it back. Wendy is hurt, by the way. She gets hurt in the whole situation and falls unconscious, and they take her in.
Olyphant’s character has them bringing the eggs and everything else into a sealed research lab, because the boy genius has decided they’re keeping whatever this trillion-dollar discovery is. And everyone really kind of gets on him for it. You didn’t care about what we’re trying to do, the big product we’re about to launch, all because you want the new shiny thing. He resents that at first.
“Was it worth it?” “What?” “Just getting a decade’s work on something new and shiny.” “My, you’re all so feisty today.”
Sidebar. One of the other kids has suddenly gotten very ambitious and wants to be the boy genius’s favorite, which I find awesome, because I too have a favorite. Oh yeah. She knows who she is. It’s so funny, because I had to remind Mrs. Know-It-All about it. He tells her he’s going to send her some books, this and that, and she goes, am I your favorite now? And he goes, no, but you’re in the running.
That lands because of an earlier conversation from a previous episode. He created these humans downloaded into synth bodies because he’s trying to make someone to talk to. Which is a very sarcastic, or maybe a very glorified, way of saying he wants somebody he can have an intelligent discussion with, because frankly his mind outlasts everybody else’s. Nobody can outthink him.
Trust me, I know what that’s like.
Lock It Down
He goes to see the creatures, and they’ve got all of them, every different alien that’s been introduced. And as soon as he stands over one of the egg things, Olyphant peeps that the thing wants to open. Time to leave. Get out. And he shoves him out the door.
Dude’s like, what’s going on? And he tells him flat out. I do like how intelligent that character is written. I feel like Olyphant is playing him in such a wonderful way. He’s real talented. So once he’s kicked him out, he explains the whole thing: these creatures burst out from inside. The entire thing, laid out.
So what does the kid do? All right, fine. Lock it down. Nobody who isn’t synthetic comes in.
And that’s arguably the safest way to do this. Which immediately made me look over and go, why the heck hasn’t Weyland-Yutani figured that out and just sent a ship full of synths after them? Apparently the face huggers can detect and simply don’t care about the robot people.
The Verdict
This was a glorified filler episode, and that’s fine. It definitely told and advanced the story. Is it the greatest of episodes? Probably not. There’s more good than bad here. The bad just happens to hit sometimes. And aside from feeling like they misstepped in a few areas, I’m still on board.
So I’m giving this episode an 8 out of 10 on the Know-It-All Index.
I am beginning to see the edges of the story they want to tell, I think. I’m going to reserve my full judgment until next week, because episode four puts us at the middle of the season out of eight total, and that’ll tell me whether what I’m seeing is correct.
There you go. Now you know.
Did you see what I saw, that this one wasn’t as strong as the previous two? Or am I not giving it a fair shake? Tell me down in the comments on the video above, I can’t wait to talk more about this one.
