We are somehow already at the halfway point in the eight-episode Alien: Earth series. Reviews of episodes 1-3 can be found here and here.
As I like to do, I will start by reflecting on episode 3 with the benefit of a week’s worth of musings. Feel free to skip to the episode 4 section if you want to go straight to this week’s review.
Episode 3: what I missed or ignored (spoilers alert)
- As pointed out by OKPitboss in last week’s comments, the Lost Boys have tiny surveillance cameras embedded in contact lenses in their eyes, but when Kirsch performs the autopsy on the alien egg, someone films it with a giant video camera that’s big enough to hold a VHS cassette. We’ve got more futuristic video cameras available now, in 2025. Is there is a retro-tech fetish in the year 2120?
- The decision to implant children’s minds in adult bodies, and then having those adult actors behave like Tom Hanks in Big while dicking around with alien eggs is…a bold one, to say the least. It’s starting to bother me.
- As mentioned by Giant Cahuna last week, the Chinese guy in the corridor resembles Hannibal Chew, the replicant eye maker from Blade Runner. We see him just as Nibs is seen poking herself in the eye. Also, as Tuxedocat pointed out, Kirsch resembles Rutger Hauer as Roy Batty. Are these meaningless Easter Eggs or something more? Alien and Blade Runner have long been rumoured to be part of the same Universe. Maybe this show would have been better off as a Blade Runner show. The morality around hybrids is the most intriguing part so far. The alien seems shoehorned in at this point.
- I said last week that I would take a deep dive into the poorly thought-out episode 3 fight scene between Wendy, her weakling brother Joe and the alien. So here it is. Buckle up, buckeroos, this is going to be a rough one.
Wendy and Joe Versus the Alien part 1: the Suck Begins
Episode 2 of Alien: Earth ends on a cliffhanger when the alien, who until that point has slaughtered everyone it sees on sight, kidnaps Joe instead of murdering him. The plot armour is strong with this one.
Wendy gives chase, armed with a blade from a guillotine paper cutter (yes, really). Must be that retro-tech fetish I mentioned earlier. She locates Joe in a shipping container full of beef carcases. The alien has cocooned him, but it’s a poor job, and Wendy frees him easily. Maybe it just sneezed on him.
The alien pokes its head into the container, which has only one way in or out. Wendy and Joe are trapped and should be torn to shreds at this point, but plot armour strikes back. Instead of attacking, the alien retreats, jumps on the roof and just…stays there.
Wendy stabs the alien through the roof with her blade, and it bleeds acid through the metal. This pisses it off and it tips the ENTIRE SHIPPING CONTAINER over and over in a violent barrel role. Wait…what? How could it do that? It’s reminiscent of the two T-Rex attacking the modified RV in The Lost World: Jurassic Park, except stupid.
Wendy falls out the hole in the container made by the alien’s acid. Can synthetics get knocked out? It’s unclear, but she disappears from the fight for a while so she can make a dramatic return later.
Wendy and Joe Versus the Alien part 2: Full Retard
Joe exits the container carrying a large hook (Peter Pan reference number 698). The alien spears him right through his body with its tail. Finally! Some credible action. No, wait – Joe’s fine. It didn’t spear him in his centre mass, so he just lost a lung. Return of the plot armour.
The alien looms over Joe, but instead of killing him, it engages in a bit of posturing: dribbling on him, showing its inner jaw, flexing its biceps. Maybe not that last one. To be fair, aliens have a track record of doing stuff like that before killing someone, so I’ll let it go.
Wendy decides that this is the dramatic moment she’s been looking for to return to the fight. Just as the alien is about to kill Joe, she hooks its inner jaw/tongue with the hook and drags the creature around the floor like a wet mop.
How has the most terrifying movie monster of all time been reduced to this?
Wendy drags the alien into a room by its fucking tongue like a Looney Toons cartoon, and Joe closes the doors on it. Wendy tears off the tongue with the hook (girl power!), but it pulls her into the room as the door closes.
Joe frantically tries to open the door. Why? What’s he going to do? He opens it, and wouldn’t you know, girl boss Wendy has decapitated the alien with the guillotine blade.
Just…how? The creature is armoured, for god’s sake, and she’s hitting it with a blade that would struggle to cut more than four pieces of A4 paper at the same time.
It’s so shit that they don’t even show the end of the fight, just the result.
Episode 4: A New Hope Observation
It’s becoming harder to review these episodes without spoilers, so I’m just going to go for it. Please be warned.
Observation is a boring title for an episode, although an appropriate one given that episode 4 of Alien: Earth is another slow, meandering slog. I gave episode 3 a pass because it appeared to be setting up the second half of the show, but episode 4 continues to inch the story along.
Many scenes are too long and beset by lingering looks and drawn-out dialogue. It’s not terrible, but it needs a trim. Maybe then they can get some momentum going. The show seems too convinced of its own importance, and it’s rubbing me the wrong way because it hasn’t earned it yet.
There’s still some interesting stuff going on in Alien: Earth, it’s just not clear what it all adds up to. Wendy’s hearing has been accidentally tuned into Alien FM. She can hear the ‘baby’ aliens – the embryos carried by the face hugger. Boy Kavalier is excited at the prospect of being able to communicate with them. Communicate…with a foetus?
I suppose the ultimate aim of communication would be control, and I’m sure we can guess how that ends.
The Perfect Alibi
It strikes me that a lot of the stupid decisions this show makes can be explained by Boy Kavalier’s rather, er…cavalier attitude towards conventional decision making. He’s an innovator. He’s a disrupter. He thinks outside the box. That’s why he’s a trillionaire and we’re peasants.
For example, when the characters question the idea of sending multi-million-dollar synthetics with the minds of children to an alien infested crash site, it’s not because it’s a dumb decision. They just lack his superior imagination.
The questioning characters reflect the audience, who are asking the same thing about the dumb plotting. It’s a neat trick when you think about it. The screenwriters aren’t clever enough to write a credible story, but they are clever enough to write a dumb story and then blame the poor plotting on this maverick character. They’ve created the perfect alibi for themselves.
Joe is back, with an artificial lung. His conversation with Adrian Edmondson’s Atom flirts with the question I’ve been pondering since the start of Alien: Earth: is Wendy Joe’s actual sister or a convincing copy?
It wimps out of providing any answers, perhaps because the question is unanswerable. But it must suit the company for her to be a copy/paste rather than a cut/paste, because then she’s just software, company property, rather than a person with rights (albeit in an expensive company owned vehicle). But if she is a copy, then surely the originals didn’t need to die.
Slightly Difficult
Morrow is grooming Slightly so he’ll steal an alien egg, but it proves too difficult and he bails. I like this because it’s exactly what a kid would do: give up and say it’s too hard after running into literally one person near the lab.
Luckily, Morrow has anticipated this and has travelled all the way to India somehow and is sitting in Slightly’s mum’s kitchen at that very moment! He’ll hurt her if Slightly refuses to cooperate, so he does.
Kirsch has realised that Slightly is bugged, but doesn’t do anything about it other than ask him a vague question about loyalty. Is Kirsch playing some kind of long game?
I didn’t anticipate that Alien: Earth would wade into the trans debate, but here we are. Nibs thinks she’s pregnant, but as a hybrid, or trans human, she can’t possibly be. But try telling her that. She throws a tantrum and threatens Dame Sylvia, her therapist. Dame Sylvia is forced to nod and go along with Nibs’ delusion or bad things will happen to her.
Any similarity to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
You might be wondering if eventually they’re going to have an alien in this alien show. Good news: in the last five minutes of episode 4, we return to Mighty Joe’s lung – the original one that they removed, placed in a fluid-filled tank and impregnated with an alien baby.
I like that they don’t rush the gestation period and treat it like an inconvenience, like most Alien movies do. That’s the only part I like about this scene. Wendy arrives just as the alien hatches and the glass tank explodes. Security!
The alien emerges and…I don’t really know how to say this but…Wendy strokes it. Like a pet cat. And it seems to like it.
How did it come to this?
Random observations
- The evil sheep is pretty cool. Please do something with it.
- Joe is now an indentured servant for life. Can the company repossess his lung?
- More Peter Pan references. Boy Kavalier likens the alien to the crocodile. Did it really need to be said?
- Tootles wants to change his name to Isaac. Well, would you want to be called Tootles?
- Unnecessary dialogue concerning the five companies that run the globe when it’s already been mentioned in the opening episode.
I’m reducing the score for Alien: Earth episode 4 by half a point for the alien stroking scene. Pray I don’t reduce it any further.
