‘Alien: Earth’ S1E06 Review | “The Fly”
The sci-fi horror series begins its endgame as it examines the high cost of loyalty.
[This review contains spoilers for the sixth episode of Alien: Earth, “The Fly”]
As much fun as it is to watch a xenomorph wreck hapless humans and synths, Alien: Earth gained a firm identity from its surrounding world, particularly questions regarding what it means to raise another person. There are times when this whole plot could exist separately from the world of the beloved sci-fi horror franchise, but showrunner Noah Hawley has endeavored to take a collection of space monsters and used them to mirror not only monstrous humanity, but emphasize how little adults care for the children they’re ostensibly supposed to protect. As disturbing as these aliens are, they’re not “evil.” They’ll kill any human, and do so without prejudice or malice. The same can’t be said for Boy Kavalier, Atom, Morrow, and others in this twisted orbit where casual cruelty towards children is standard operating procedure. How much does being “human” matter if this is how humans behave?
The show’s sixth episode takes a closer look at how the perversion of nature–trying to cheat death–is not the only perversion at play here. The natural order of things is for parents to care for their offspring. That’s not sentiment; that's just evolutionary biology, and while obviously not every parent is a good one, the continuation of the human race demonstrates how parents typically raise their young. However, in the upside-down world of Alien: Earth, children only exist to be exploited or observed. The episode once again emphasizes the distance between Boy and the hybrids with him reading them Peter Pan, but over a PA system. He’s also clearly lost interest with the hybrids. His focus now on his latest toys: the specimens he hijacked from Weyland-Yutani. Far from a benevolent Peter Pan looking for friends to ward off loneliness, Boy relishes his alienation from others, seeing himself as a bored god needing fresh amusements.
When it comes to actually interacting with the hybrids, that work gets outsourced to others. Nibs, deemed violent and delusional, now has to be “reset,” a clear violation of previous tenets, and one that doesn’t matter to Atom. He just wants a pleasant product to show off in a few weeks. Nibs’ humanity and trauma are inconvenient, and now it’s time to stop pretending that she’s a real person. Atom’s priority is that she simply be a more convincing synth, one that might be able to fool people who want to upload their consciousness into a new body. When Arthur refuses, he’s fired while his wife and fellow scientist Dame Sylvia agrees to Atom’s demand.
Elsewhere, Morrow continues to push Slightly to be his inside man, threatening his mother if he doesn’t get a xenomorph out of containment. For such a valuable investment and all the talk of the Lost Boys being a group, it’s clear how alone these characters are. No one is looking out for Slightly, and so his behavior can only appear odd to those around him. There’s no recourse or defense, and Morrow only creates a greater sense of isolation, forcing his way into Slightly’s thoughts and playing on his fears.
Finally, we have poor Tootles, who thinks he’s found a place as Kirsh’s helper, but gets thwarted by a feeding door. It’s one of those moments where at first blush you want to shout, “Don’t be stupid!” and you have to remember, he’s twelve. He’s a 12-year-old kid who seeks an authority figure’s approval, and so he does something reckless by putting himself in the cell with the fly alien that promptly dissolves his face. It feels like a small mercy that synths can’t feel pain (presumably neither can hybrids if they’re in synth bodies), but like with Atom and Morrow, Kirsh displays a carelessness with the life of a child. They exist as tools; extensions for other projects rather than an individual with free will. We can debate whether or not the hybrids have souls, but even if these were just robots who thought they were children, I’d have second thoughts about treating them horribly.
This exploitation gets juxtaposed against Arthur and Hermit clinging to notions of loyalty that have nothing to do with business, and being rebuffed at almost every turn. Hermit refuses to abandon Wendy, and he’s met with cold resistance. Even his fellow soldiers, those who know him best, think he’s being ridiculous, and tell him that he should appreciate a steady job rather than dream of anything better. Arthur gets it far worse; when he sees Tootles is offline, he chooses to investigate. At this point, he owes Prodigy nothing and could just walk away, but he’s loyal to the hybrids. Unfortunately for Arthur, Slightly is loyal to his mother, which means unleashing a facehugger on the hapless scientist and then carting his body away.
In between these two poles, you have Wendy, who is trying to grow up and thinks that playing mother to the xenomorph will give her the maturity she craves. It’s only later in the episode when she sees what the corporation has done to Nibs that she realizes what exactly “being an adult,” means in this world. The ethos of Neverland, from its egotistic founder and down through the company’s capitalist goals, is one where you exploit anyone to get what you want. “I don’t want to be people anymore if this is what people are,” Wendy tells Dame Sylvia.
Far scarier than any space alien is the idea at the center of “The Fly,” and perhaps the whole show: that maturity means hurting others. You make compromises because that’s what adults do, and you throw out loyalty when it becomes inconvenient. Guys like Arthur and Hermit show you can still be loyal, but there can be an awfully high price for trying to be a decent person in a world that does not value decency. If children learn the values of the adults around them, how can we expect them to be any better than those who came before? Is the best we can expect from anyone a transactional relationship? If survival is simply a matter of being an apex predator, then we’re all bound to lose. Those cages won’t hold forever.
Stray observations:
I loved the conversation between Morrow and Kirsh in the elevator. Two ice-cold killers calmly insulting each other.
I’m glad I still can’t figure out Kirsh. Part of that comes from Olyphant’s great performance, but it’s also interesting to see where his loyalty lies. He ends the episode seeing that Tootles is dead, there’s been a breach in the lab, and then he lies to Boy about it. Perhaps Kirsh resents everyone, both hybrid and human, and wants to see them all die, but I certainly can’t tell you what he’s going to do next.
I’m genuinely glad you have characters like Arthur and Hermit in this piece because even though Arthur meets a bad end, you still need people who aspire to be good. It makes for a richer work than an aggressively misanthropic world where everyone sucks.
Alien: Earth airs Tuesday nights at 8pm ET on Hulu. Look for recaps of the latest episodes here within the next day. Matt Goldberg is a film critic who lives and works in Atlanta. If you enjoyed this review, check out his newsletter, Commentary Track.