‘Alien: Earth’ Ending, Explained: A Thrilling, Unresolved Finale

While the Lost Boys bicker and argue about who snitched on them—the obvious candidate being Curly (Erana James), who swears it wasn’t her—Wendy wrestles with her anger toward her brother for hurting Nibs (Lily Newmark) back at the docks. (Speaking of, it is strange that Nibs was wounded at the end of last week’s episode but now seems fine? Second to Isaac, Nibs has suffered the most damage to her programming. One would think she’d be glitching like a computer with coffee poured all over the motherboard.)

In a different cage, Hermit (Alex Lawther) and Morrow (Babou Ceesay) make for unlikely cellmates. Distant as these two have been in the show thus far, they find common ground in their incredibly short time together, aligned in their hatred for not only Prodigy but for the megacorporations. With some help courtesy of Wendy, whose abilities to control the facility have conveniently amplified, Hermit and Morrow break free and split up to settle their scores. Hermit seeks his sister and the Lost Boys; Morrow goes after Kirsh (Timothy Olyphant), culminating in the one-on-one, no-holds-barred brawl we’ve been waiting for.

After Kirsh and Morrow duke it out as though they were in a WWE match from the Attitude Era (the Lost Boys silently watching security-cam monitors reminds me of when I was nine years old, watching Steve Austin beat up Booker T in a grocery store), Boy Kavalier appears to taunt and assert dominance over the Lost Boys—but not before delivering a supervillain monologue about his tragic and abusive backstory, which affords a teeny glimpse into what haunts the barefoot trillionaire. But Boy’s power immediately fades when the Lost Boys realize their artificial shells have been weapons this whole time. As the lights flicker behind them and string instruments score the scene as if it were a pulp horror movie, these vulnerable children no longer feel like victims of a cruel world. They might, in fact, have been the monsters all along.

Speaking of monsters…

Kirsh might have won his fight against Morrow, but he ends up in horrible shape by the end of the episode.

Eyes Up

Hermit’s search for the Lost Boys leads him to Atom (Adrian Edmonson), Boy’s most trusted man—or, at least, something that looks human. Atom is working under orders from Boy to get Hermit for the Ocellus, which he would, were it not for meddling Wendy, who arrives just in time. After delivering some shockingly killer lines—”Who would make children immortal? An eternity of ‘Are we there yet?’ “—Wendy’s tech powers overcome Atom, who isn’t some normal senior executive but another synthetic like Kirsh. All the while, the Ocellus slips away unnoticed, resurfacing somewhere else not long afterward.

Here, Wendy and Hermit finally get into a proper conversation, one that’s both personal and philosophical, not to mention long overdue. “We’re food to them,” Hermit says of the species that surround them and to which Wendy has become uncomfortably close. Wendy retorts, “I don’t know what I am. I’m not a child. I’m not a grown-up. I’m not Marcy. I’m not Wendy. And I can’t be what everyone wants me to be.” When Hermit apologizes, Wendy warns him not to use the excuse of things being too complicated. “That is what powerless people say to make doing nothing okay.” (Chills.) While nothing feels resolved between them, they do seem to arrive at a place of understanding even if they aren’t on the same page.

Toward the end of the episode, the Ocellus crawls to Arthur’s body, and upon attaching itself into his eye socket, the monster fully reanimates Arthur under its control. (Well, that answers that question.) When he reunites with the other characters, who do you think will flip out more: Boy Kavalier or Dame Sylvia, Arthur’s wife?

In the end, Wendy and the Lost Boys round up the grown-ups as the aliens further trim down Prodigy’s forces (including Hermit’s friends, whose deaths are expectedly savage but still undignified). Just before the credits kick off, we’re back where we started, only now it’s the adults—Dame Sylvia, Morrow, Atom, a malfunctioning Kirsh, and a hog-tied Boy—in the birdcage. The Lost Boys lord over the adults and christen themselves the new rulers of Neverland, backed by two Xenomorphs yet blissfully unaware of Weyland-Yutani approaching the island. A smile washes over Boy’s face. I get the feeling he’s proud of his creations more than he’s ready to admit.