‘Alien: Earth’ Episode 4: All Eyes on Wendy
This post contains spoilers for this week’s episode of Alien: Earth, “Observation,” now streaming on Hulu.
After Wendy and her brother Joe spent most of last week’s installment out of action, both are up and around for “Observation,” the episode that in many ways feels like the real start of the story that Noah Hawley and company are telling with Alien: Earth. The previous three chapters introduced the idea of the Lost Boys, as well as the cold war between the corporations that rule the planet. But they also spent a lot of time mixing and matching elements of different Alien films, particularly the first two, and focusing a lot on the threat posed by the familiar Xenomorph.
With “Observation,” the various recovered alien specimens are now fully under Prodigy control, ready to be analyzed and experimented on. And when Wendy wakes up, we get the series’ next major idea: Wendy can speak the Xenomorphs’ language, and feels far more warmly towards them than Ellen Ripley ever did.
Earlier in the opening scene, Boy Kavalier tells Kirsh, “Assume I’m ahead of you always.” Hawley hasn’t generally used a lot of author-surrogate characters. But given what we know about how Hawley operates, it’s not hard to see Kavalier as Hawley’s worst-case scenario for himself: a genius with infinite resources and no checks or balances, who can do whatever he wants to anyone, and does. He won’t listen to Atom’s warnings about keeping these dangerous creatures in the same facility as their multibillion-dollar investment in the Lost Boys. He manipulates Wendy into helping him study the Xenomorphs by threatening to banish Joe from the Neverland facility. He unleashes the eyeball monster on a defenseless sheep, just to see what it can do.
And when he hears Xenormoph sounds emerging from the mouth of Wendy — a little girl he has turned into an adult woman, and now into something of a monster herself — he looks practically aroused. His creation has already evolved beyond his wildest imagination. But we all know how these kinds of mad scientist stories go after this point, don’t we?
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Wendy had already demonstrated powers beyond the other Lost Boys, like when she took control of the robot when Joe was trying to get permission to go home. This is several orders of magnitude beyond that, and it triggers much of the conflict for the rest of “Observation.” Joe is as horrified by this sound as Kavalier is elated. Joe’s presence creates ample tension and leverage. Kavalier threatens to send him away. Atom blackmails him into studying Wendy for them — to determine if she really is Marcy Hermit in a new body, or a wholly new entity that has Marcy’s memories — by pointing out the cost of the artificial lung Prodigy gave him. Slightly foolishly tells Morrow his real name, allowing Morrow to track down and threaten Slightly’s family to get him to cooperate, which in turn makes a frightened, resentful Slightly decide that Joe should be the victim of Morrow’s plan to incubate another human with a Xenomorph egg.
Along the way, Hawley and the episode’s co-writer, Bobak Esfarjani, use a conversation between Joe and the Lost Boys to fill in some of the history of Earth as understood in the year 2120. He explains that the planet once had “something called governments,” but that clearly didn’t work, so the big corporations took over and somehow fixed all the problems. Based on the glimpses we’ve seen of life outside of Neverland, this feels more like propaganda that Joe has been fed for his whole life than a measure of how things actually work.
We also spend some more time with the eyeball creature, and get to see its process from the start. It attacks the poor sheep, digs out one of its eyes, climbs into the empty cavity, and from that position somehow takes over the animal’s entire body. And it can control that body to the extent that it can get the thing to stand on its own hind legs. Kirsh can tell that the eyeball is intelligent in a way that the real sheep wasn’t, and Kavalier is once again giddy to play with all these new toys that crashed into his lap. But Nibs remains traumatized by her own near-miss with the eyeball, and/or is struggling to adjust to her new body. She begins behaving erratically, telling Dame Sylvia and everyone else that she’s somehow pregnant, despite the impossibility of that happening in a synthetic body.
In an Alien story, pregnancy usually involves a Xenomorph egg being forcibly implanted in an unsuspecting human body. Kirsh has found a way to cheat that process by putting one in Joe’s former lung, and the episode concludes with a new baby Xeno bursting out of its jury-rigged incubator while Wendy is watching. Whenever one of these things first appears in the films, it’s rightly treated as a moment of pure horror by the human characters. But Wendy, already something more than human, and connected to the Xenomorphs in ways even she doesn’t understand, is instead fascinated by the tiny creature in front of her, whom she strokes gently like a pet — or like the baby she couldn’t birth herself.
Her tight bob haircut and big eyes alone make Sydney Chandler an arresting camera subject. But she’s also found something, well, alien to play in Wendy, and this glimpse of an overgrown child contentedly playing with one of the most terrifying monsters in cinematic history is both riveting and completely unnerving. It’s like the audience has had one of its own eyes replaced by the eyeball creature, and we’re now looking at this familiar structure in an entirely different way.
