Move Fast, Break Things, and Never Grow Up

This post contains spoilers for this week’s episode of Alien: Earth, now streaming on Hulu.

After last week’s flashback to all the poor decisions that killed the crew of the Maginot, “The Fly” brings us back to the present-day action at Neverland, where various adults, synthetics, and eyeball monsters conspire to make life very difficult — and, in one case, impossible — for the Lost Boys. Smee complains at one point that, “Being grown-up sucks.” But it’s even worse when you still have the emotional intelligence of a child, and are treated that way by the genuine grown-ups (and synths and possessed sheep) around you.

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By the end of the episode, Isaac is dead, Nibs has had part of her memory wiped, and Slightly has been manipulated by Morrow into letting one of the face-huggers turn Arthur into a Xenomorph incubator. All of it’s bad.

Isaac’s death is a master class in suspense, and another example of how the eyeball has somehow turned out to be the scariest creature on a show featuring one of the most iconic monsters in the history of filmed entertainment. On last week’s official Alien: Earth podcast, Noah Hawley explained that, contrary to my interpretation, the eyeball was trying to distract Chibuzo rather than warn her about her thermos being infected. Here, the manipulation is even more overt, as the eyeball and its ovine host set up poor Isaac to get locked inside one of the other enclosures, resulting in evidence that the Lost Boys’ “immortal” bodies can still be killed under the wrong circumstances.

Atom’s order to alter Nibs’ memory seems wildly shortsighted, if the plan was to keep her around the other hybrids. Of course Wendy or one of the others would quickly realize that Nibs no longer remembers the crash and its aftermath. And of course Wendy tells Nibs the truth, putting them both on guard against the manipulations of their seemingly benevolent guardians.

Earlier, Kirsh dismisses Joe’s question about how best to care for Wendy, saying, “That’s like an onion, asking how to care for a star.” Kirsh sees Wendy as a wholly separate entity from Marcy Hermit. That Dame Sylvia is able to so easily alter Nibs’ memories — even without the help of Arthur, who gets fired for taking the moral stand that his wife won’t — suggests that Kirsh is probably right. An argument could be made that the Nibs who woke up in this new body was the same person as the little girl. But once the Prodigy team starts wantonly rewriting aspects of Nibs’ brain, it starts to feel like that girl is dead and has been replaced with something else.

(That said, Dame Sylvia addresses Wendy as Marcy at one point. We don’t know whether this means Dame, like Joe, believes Wendy really is Marcy, or is just trying to manipulate her most precocious, potentially troublemaking charge.)

Slightly, meanwhile, targets Joe as his patsy to smuggle a Xenomorph embryo out of Prodigy, still resentful that Wendy’s family is here safely while his mother is far away and being threatened by Morrow. But when Joe gets pulled away by his old search-and-rescue squad mates, Slightly has to improvise and take advantage of the chaos in the lab caused by the eyeball, locking poor Arthur — one of the few adults on the island putting the Lost Boys’ safety above all else — inside to get his face hugged.

In the midst of all this, we get an interlude with the most powerful grown-up involved, albeit one who tries to carry himself like a kid. Boy Kavalier sits down for a mediation session with Yutani and pulls off a double victory. He gets her to pay him a $20 billion settlement for the Maginot crash — a crash Kavalier himself arranged, and wound up not even having to pay for when his saboteur died — then exploits the laws about quarantine to hang onto the specimens for an additional six weeks. Hawley doesn’t try to hide the tech bro allegory here, as Kavalier even paraphrases Mark Zuckerberg’s “move fast and break things” motto. (The bare feet are borrowed more from Steve Jobs.) For as much as Kavalier tries to present himself as an overgrown kid, he’s ruthless and calculating in a way that none of the Lost Boys are capable of being; he’s more like the eyeball than he is like Wendy.

On the way out of the mediation session, Kirsh and Morrow ride an elevator together, taking one another’s measure. Kirsh is as condescending toward Morrow as he was toward Joe, viewing cyborgs as obsolete dead-ends in mankind’s quest for immortality. But we’ve seen how capable and dangerous Morrow is.

Maybe the biggest question left by the episode is how dangerous Kirsh is — not only to Weyland-Yutani forces, but to his own. We see that he’s been watching Slightly and is aware of what he’s doing at Morrow’s behest. And when Slightly locks Arthur inside the lab, Kirsh not only doesn’t intervene, he doesn’t tell Boy Kavalier about it when his boss asks if all is well. In the movies, we’ve seen synthetics betray their co-workers, but on behalf of their corporate overlords. Is Kirsh acting against Kavalier, or does he have a plan that we mere onions can’t yet comprehend? And whatever he’s doing, will Wendy or any of the show’s other children be able to stop him?

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