📝 usncan Note: Earth’ Episode 4 Recap And Review — Dreadfully Dull And Goofy
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Alien: Earth continues to be a show I wish I loved, but keep having a hard time enjoying. The show’s production value remains (mostly) quite good, and a few of the performances are spellbinding. Babou Ceesay’s Morrow is a gripping antagonist. Timothy Olyphant’s Kirsh is a captivating synth whose motivations remain unclear.
But the extended Peter Pan metaphor drags the whole thing down. If it had been a subtle parallel that audiences had to work out on their own, it could have been quite brilliant. Instead, the whole thing is shoved in our faces relentlessly. Most of the Peter Pan characters are even given those character’s names. Wendy, Nibs, Curly, Slightly, Toodles, Smee.
Morrow is very obviously Captain Hook and Boy Kavalier, the techbro “genius who isn’t actually all that smart”, is quite obviously Peter Pan himself. They live on a research island called Neverland. Kavalier reads from the book, either to the children-in-adult-synth-bodies called the Lost Boys, or to record an audio book.
Kirsh is outside the fold, as are the various scientists and other adults at the facility; Arthur Sylvia and his wife, Dame Sylvia; Atom Eins, Kavalier’s advisor; the various guards. Are they pirates? Or do you have to be on Morrow’s side to be a pirate? But the only adults in Peter Pan are pirates, so . . .
Much of the tension the show tries to create is undermined by this Peter Pan framing and by the goofiness of the kids in adult bodies. Watching adults behave like children is inherently unserious. The lack of basic safeguards on these hybrids is also perplexing. Morrow continues to manipulate Slightly and even though Kirsh ends up listening in, he doesn’t inform Boy Kavalier or Prodigy security. One would think that some basic security protocols would be in place beyond a synth playing detective. Do they really not have security monitoring everything these kids do and say?
Then there’s Nibs, who we saw going a bit crazy last week and who has now decided she’s pregnant. She’ll hear nothing to the contrary, and grows increasingly angry during her conversation with Dame Sylvia. At one point, she snaps and leaps over the coffee table, grabbing the older woman by the throat. If this were Westworld, Dame could just say “Cease motor functions” or some other code word to stop her, but they have no safeguards built in here at all. She has to surreptitiously call for security, and even then only two guards show up. Given her super speed and super strength, I think Nibs would make short work of the pair.
We can handwave this all away by pointing out that Boy “Peter Pan” Kavalier isn’t actually that smart at all. He sent his wildly expensive hybrids into a dangerous situation without care. He brought back extremely dangerous alien specimens and has barely done anything to keep them locked down. And he misatributes a quote by Arthur C. Clarke to Isaac Asimov at one point: “Any sufficiently advanced science is indistinguishable from magic,” he tells Wendy when urging her to use her newfound ability to hear the aliens to reproduce their speech at a frequency the rest of them can hear. (It’s surely no accident that the scientist protesting Kavalier’s actions is named Arthur, a fitting pairing to Toodles choosing to ditch his “code name” in favor of Isaac).
But Boy Kavalier being a parody of the “tech bro” stereotype is not a very interesting or compelling characterization. If anything, it’s too on-the-nose. It’s also incoherent. At times, Kavalier is played as a type of Willy Wonka figure, but without any of Wonka’s cleverness. Besides, in a world where five corporations rule everything, a single CEO would have built a massive bureaucratic structure around himself. There would be security measures in place regardless. The problem here is they’re trying to make Neverland feel a bit like Jurassic Park, but it’s not. Prodigy, unlike John Hammond’s InGen, is a vast and powerful corporation.
Then there is the sheep that the eyeball alien possesses. Here, the show abandons both its grasp of subtlety and its special effects acumen. The CGI during this scene was laughably bad, and completely ruined the moment for me. What could have been a really terrifying and unsettling scene, especially as the dead-eyed sheep stares ominously back at them, becomes just another goofy moment. A better scene takes place later, when Wendy and the newly hatched Xenomorph snake baby chitter back and forth to one another.
I continue to find most of the scenes involving Wendy and her brother, Joe Hermit, quite dull. He’s basically just a plot device at this point, a bargaining chip for Kavalier and Kirsh to use with Wendy. Wendy herself is a mildly interesting protagonist, but she seems less like a real character to me and more like a plot vessel. She’s the Chosen One, but perhaps a corruptible one now that she seems to have taken a liking to the aliens. In a TV landscape that produced Westworld’s Dolores, I’m having a hard time really latching onto Wendy as a hero to root for.
So it is Kirsh and Morrow who continue to hold my attention. And the cinematography. There are some really cool moments in Episode 4 where scenes rapidly crossfade between one another, revealing just how much Kirsh is watching and listening in on what everyone is doing.
The problem I’m having is that I want to like all of this but I just can’t bring myself to really get invested in the story. There’s some cool setup going on, some really palpable tension between Kirsh and Boy Kavalier, and it’s keeping me invested enough in the story to keep watching, but I’m constantly thrown out off by the Lost Boy stuff and the preposterousness of it all. Morrow should not have this easy a time at infiltrating Prodigy vis-a-vis naive children. Dame Sylvia should not have almost died because nobody thought to put any safeguards on the Lost Boys. The lab should be locked down with guards everywhere and the specimens in secure containers. Nobody should be able to sneak in and retrieve an egg.
Still, the various fuses that have been lit promise fun explosions. Just how much violence and death is at the end of the Nibs storyline? Will Kirsh kill Boy Kavalier or just let the eyeball alien possess him? Which of the Lost Boys will survive (none of the grownups will, obviously)? How does this lead to Alien, the movie, which is only a couple years later on the timeline? It also seems clear that Eins is also a synth, and I wonder if we get him siding with Kavalier against Kirsh when the betrayal eventually takes place.
All told, a mixed bag but I’m once again leaning toward “thumbs down” and more than a little disappointed with Noah Hawley’s creation. I was feeling more optimistic after episode 3, which I talk about in the video below, but this one was a snoozer.
Scattered Thoughts
- The sheep standing on two legs was a revealing moment, as if the eyeball alien normally only infects bipedal creatures. This was undermined by the goofiness of the special effects.
- Some of the dialogue is so bad. Boy Kavalier telling them to remind Hermit that he works for him. “This is my world, he just lives in it.” You don’t have to make characters say everything. Some things can be implied. I realize this is probably just another way to make Kavalier unlikable, but that point has been driven home. It’s time to save some of it for scenes that actually matter.
- It’s weird writing about the episode because a lot of the stuff I’m describing sounds exciting and cool but in execution it’s all dreadfully dull. I find my mind wandering a lot while watching this show. I keep thinking it would probably be better as a movie with all the fluff cut out. So far, nothing about it really justifies Alien: The Show. It’s just so poorly paced. A glacial slog.
- The stupid Ice Age stuff returns this episode. It’s so weird! They have our heroes sitting there watching a CGI kids movie from well over 100 years ago on a TV screen that fits the “cassette futurism” aesthetic. Anyone who properly understands that aesthetic would understand that putting CGI animation on one of these screens is deeply incoherent and immersion breaking.
- So far, I like pretty much all of the credits songs that play at the end of each episode and absolutely hate that they’re being used as credits songs for this show. It’s not as offensive as, say, the rock music played in Disney’s Willow series, but it’s really jarring. Just give us more original soundtrack. Give us some creepy synthetic tunes. Quit taking us out of the world you’ve created with dumb references to modern stuff and songs from our world. I mean, it could be worse.
What did you think of this episode?
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