Alien: Earth Recap: Oh, Brother
No offense intended to Lt. Ellen Louise Ripley — a god-tier science-fiction action hero, brought to vivid life by Sigourney Weaver — but for the most part, the Alien movies have been a little light on sympathetic rooting interests. Ripley’s awesome, don’t get me wrong. But she’s a chilly character by nature; and anyway, her stories have always been more about raw survival than the fine details of her personal life.
I bring this up just to note that I’ve never seen a scene in an Alien movie quite like the one in episode two of Alien: Earth where Wendy reunites with her brother. The emotion these two bring to the moment has nothing to do with escaping danger. It’s more about the profound loneliness that the siblings have felt in each other’s absence, and the relief in knowing — however briefly — that they’ve found each other again.
The journey to that scene matters, too. Let’s start with Wendy, who early in this episode, before locating her brother, worries about how he’s faring at the Maginot crash site, noting that he’s “not like us… not premium… he can break and bleed and burn.” Then she flashes back to one day earlier, remembering the selfish choice she made that inadvertently put J.D. Hermit’s life at risk.
As we saw briefly in the series premiere, Wendy has been allowed by her Prodigy masters to keep tabs on Hermit from Neverland Island. Because Hermit’s a Prodigy employee too, he’s closely monitored. So whenever Wendy can, she uses her preternatural connection to all technology to manipulate any nearby video screens, making them show her what her brother’s doing. That’s how she learned that Hermit was planning to resign from Prodigy before his contract expired, to go to a Martian medical school, fulfilling a promise he once made to their father. Wendy then alarmed her handlers by going far beyond her assumed tech-warping capabilities, interacting both with Prodigy’s HR system and with Hermit to reject his resignation. (To the extent that her hybrid self can feel guilt, Wendy does seem to regret making this move.)
As for Hermit, he has some wild and scary adventures before he meets up with Wendy. Embedded with other Prodigy troops — who first examine some Maginot crew corpses and then leap between busted stairwells to get clear from the ship’s wreckage — the medic seems to be living through one of those restless, unsettling dreams, where nothing quite matches up and dark omens predominate.
His experiences get trippier when he knocks on the door of an apartment in a skyscraper damaged by the Maginot. The owner, clad in a foppish costume, is throwing a fancy party filled with people who don’t feel obliged to follow the evacuation orders of some paramilitary stooge. But then one of the ship’s escaped aliens — a Xenomorph! — races in, quickly and savagely making a meal of these swells. Hermit gets knocked around in the melee, first by the monster and then by its would-be captor, the mysterious Maginot cyborg Morrow. When Hermit regains his wits, he finds himself surrounded by dismembered bodies, in a ritzy home that contains, among other things, an autographed Reggie Jackson baseball. (This is why this episode is titled “Mr. October.”)
It’s around this time that Wendy shows up, while Hermit is muttering to himself and reflecting on how his father nurtured his love of baseball. When she asks who he’s talking to and Hermit says “my dad,” her face lights up. “You talk to dad?”
It’s hard to explain exactly why this sequence is so moving. It’s worth noting that Hermit is at a disadvantage when Wendy arrives. The last time he saw his sister, she was a little girl named Marcy, who then — as far as Hermit knew — died. “I went to the funeral,” he says with no small amount of dismay when Wendy tries to explain who she is.
But think about this scene from Wendy’s perspective. A big part of what keeps her in touch with her human side is her frequent reflections on her brother and their childhood, which she has romanticized greatly during her time as a synthetic/human hybrid. So to hear that Hermit also thinks about their father and about Marcy… that has to be so validating for her. It’s a reminder that her animating personality is not some Prodigy creation. She was a real person once.
On the whole, “Mr. October” isn’t as satisfying an episode as “Neverland,” if only because the series premiere was packed with characters and ideas, while this episode plays more like a continuation of the action-horror scenes that ended episode one. This chapter doesn’t tell its own story or introduce anything excitingly new. That said, those action-horror scenes are pleasurably icky. In addition to such fresh grotesqueries as a zombified kitty cat and enormous dripping cocoons (“it presents as flora but it may be fauna,” Kirsh dispassionately notes), we get our first good look at the monsters the Maginot was transporting. My favorite? The crawling eyeball, covered in extra eyes.
We also get an extension of some of the philosophical debating present in the premiere, as Dame Silvia banters with Boy Kavalier. She wonders aloud if he’s capable of helping the hybrids reach their full potential and he — while idly munching on an apple, like an indifferent Adam in Eden — admits that he’s just hoping at least one of his super-machines will be able to engage him in a truly intelligent conversation. Silvia worries that if Kavalier doesn’t stay focused on the human component of his hybrids, then all Prodigy will have accomplished is “making consumers immortal.”
Then again, perhaps Prodigy’s technology is advanced enough that the humanity component will take care of itself. We’re still getting to know Wendy, but she certainly appears to have a personality that is unpredictable and kind of delightful. If nothing else, she has a way with language, apparently carried over from her Marcy self. After finding Hermit, she and the Lost Boy named Slightly (Adarsh Gourav) start making their way to a section of the Maginot containing enormous alien eggs. As soon as they arrive, Hermit gets snatched up by the Xenomorph, and as the episode ends, Wendy — determined as always to keep her brother around — heads off after him, telling Slightly, “Stay safe. Guard the omelet.”
Maybe that wouldn’t count as an intelligent conversation for Kavalier. But it’s hilarious.
Screaming, Hearing, Etc.
• I’ll have to watch more episodes to see if this is always going to be the case, but it appears that rather than doing a “previously on Alien: Earth,” the show’s editors have cut together relevant images from the premiere and then placed them, without comment or explanation, under the opening titles.
• We get more examples in this episode of the Lost Boys being childlike, as they respond to the gory aftermath of the Maginot crash by saying things like, “Whoa, gross.” Perhaps the most poignant kid moment, though, comes when Wendy bonds with Hermit by reminding him of one of their favorite Ice Age: Continental Drift lines, when Sid the Sloth responded to the warning “face my fury!” with “face your furry… what?”
• Boy Kavalier, true to his name, sprawls across chairs like an adolescent who has no idea what to do with his growing body. At one point, while talking via video-chat with the Weyland-Yutani boss, he lays on his back, holding his tablet with his feet.
• Cool shot: As the Lost Boys walk through a crumbling Prodigy City store, we see a billboard behind them displaying images of fashion models, looking as cool and suave in their own way as our hybrid mercenaries.
• Dana Gonzalez (a Fargo and Legion regular) directed this episode, but the visual style is very similar to the Noah Hawley-directed first episode, with lots of dreamy slow-motion superimpositions. The horror movie elements are strong too, as Gonzalez and his team take advantage of the darkness along the edge of the frame to conceal many nasty surprises.
• Wendy convinces Hermit of who she is by remembering something she said one Christmas morning at age 7: “I still don’t think my big toe looks like my thumb”
• Kirsh, coldly trying to motivate the Lost Boys: “Fear is for animals. You are not animals.”