[COLUMN] The Reproductive Horror of Alien: Earth | by Darren Mooney

Note: This piece contains full spoilers for the first season of Alien: Earth, which wrapped up this week on FX. It’s pretty solid. It suffers a little bit in its second half, ending in a way that very consciously sets up a second season rather than putting a bow on this chapter of the story, but it’s thoughtful, well-produced and a fitting continuation of the series. If you haven’t seen it, and plan to, feel free to bookmark and come back. If you can’t contain your egg-citemen, read on.

The Alien franchise has always been a tale of reproductive horror. It is a franchise about monsters, but those monsters are – in the most literal manner possible – birthed from human beings. The Alien films are about the fear that the future is coming, and that there is no place for humanity within it. Alien: Earth understands that theme and crystalizes it.

One of the more interesting creative choices that showrunner Noah Hawley made was to focus on children. Serving as a prequel to the original film, the show is built around the aptly-named company Prodigy (“the new one”), run by a young technocrat also-aptly-named Boy Kavalier (Samuel Blenkin), who was the “youngest trillionaire ever.” As the show begins, Kavalier is working on an innovation in cybernetics, developing “hybrids” by essentially transplanting human minds into synthetic bodies.

Kavalier uses children to pioneer this process. “Grown-up minds are too stiff, they can’t make the trip,” explains his prototype Wendy (Sydney Chandler). “But our minds – kids’ minds – they fit just right.” Kavalier leans into this, branding his secret island headquarters “Neverland”, naming his test group “the Lost Boys” and reading to them every night over the announcement system from J.M. Barrie’s Peter Pan. It is clear from the outset that Earth is a story about children.

This is a comfortable fit for an Alien series. The film series is, after all, about a strange creature that begins life as an egg before implanting itself in a host before “birthing” itself from their body in a gruesome and fatal manner. However, the host is more than simply an incubator. They are a parent. Alien3 suggests that part of the monster’s evolutionary cycle involves taking on characteristics of the creature housing it; a xenomorph born from a human differs from one born of a dog or cow.

Throughout the Alien franchise, there is a recurring sense that the creature is perhaps more adapted to the mechanized and industrialized world that the humans have created. With its slimy black design, the xenomorph blends in perfectly among the surroundings of the cargo ships, colony worlds and prison planets of the franchise. It moves freely through the ducts and air vents of these cold metallic structures. Watching the Alien films, it can feel like this world was built for them, not us.

In this sense, the franchise is an extension of one of the core themes of science-fiction and horror, an idea that can be traced back to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. The Alien series is about the idea that humanity might create something so perfect adapted to the modern world that it will destroy us. It is an expression of that Freudian anxiety, the understanding that children are a reminder of one’s mortality, tied to broader anxieties about the inhumanity of an increasingly industrialized world.

Even as the series expanded into prequels focusing on the android character of David (Michael Fassbender), it retained this interest in the tense dynamic between parents and children. David has patricidal instincts against his creator, Peter Weyland (Guy Pearce). “What happens when Weyland is not around to program you?” asks Elizabeth Shaw (Noomi Rapace). David replies, “I suppose I'll be free.” When Shaw asks if David wants this, he replies, “Doesn't everyone want their parents dead?”

This anxiety has always simmered through the series, but Hawley literalizes it in Earth. The synthetic lifeforms in the show are not just metaphorically children in the sense they are a new life created by humanity, they are actually children in adult bodies. “If you’re telling a story about humanity there’s nobody more human than a child,” Hawley argued. “They don’t know they’re bad liars, they can’t pretend they’re not scared and they learn to be cynical. So that was interesting to me.”

In this sense, Earth is part of the recent wave of films and shows about children forced to grow up too quickly and confront the possibility that their caregivers are not able or willing to protect them, movies like Weapons or 28 Years Later. The children in Alien: Earth are placed in adult bodies and put under the supervision of parties that do not have their best interests at heart. When the children argue that they don’t “belong” to Kavalier, he replies, “Sweeties, you’re floor models.”

The children in Alien: Earth have to grow up quickly. Early on, Kavalier dispatches them to investigate a crashed Yutani vessel, putting them in a high-risk situation. Throughout the series, the children are treated like guinea pigs, manipulated and abused. Morrow (Babou Ceesay) grooms and blackmails Slightly (Adarsh Gourav) into helping him attempt to steal lab samples from Prodigy. When Nibs (Lily Newmark) has a breakdown, Dame (Essie Davis) and Arthur Sylvia (David Rysdahl) simply reset her.

It becomes very clear that none of the adults see the hybrids as actual children. They see them merely as a means to an end. They are a milestone in “the race for immortality.” There is a paradox here. These children are being used to ensure that these adults will never be replaced. These children are tools in an effort by this older generation to avoid ever having to surrender to the inevitability of time or the necessity of the next generation. They’re making children redundant.

Much like Ridley Scott’s prequels, Alien: Earth parallels these new synthetic lifeforms with the franchise’s iconic monster. In Alien: Covenant, the xenomorph is framed as the product of David’s experimentation, a perverse creation of a perverse creation. Over the course of the first season of Alien: Earth, Wendy develops an empathy for the xenomorph, which she describes as “the baby”, another strange creature locked in a cage to be studied by trillionaires.

More than any earlier entry in the franchise, Alien: Earth has sympathy for the monster. The creature didn’t ask to be taken hallway across the galaxy and trapped on an island owned by a technocrat. Wendy advocates for releasing the alien creatures that Kavalier is experimenting upon, “Because it’s wrong keeping them.” It’s a very childish, very innocent, perspective. In the finale, Wendy confronts her brother, Joe (Alex Lawther). “You want to know why I like them?” she asks. “They’re honest.”

Throughout Alien: Earth, there is a lingering question about what the hybrids actually are. “So what am I?” Wendy asks older android Kersh (Timothy Olyphant). “If I’m not human, what am I?” Kersch replies, “Whatever you want to be.” Unfortunately, the show suggests that things are not as simple. Nobody has the luxury of deciding completely independently who or what they are. They can shape that and direct it, but the raw material comes from outside sources.

The irony is that even monstrous children are still children. Just as the xenomorph takes on attributes of its host, the children learn from their creators. “We know from the Alien franchise that humans aren’t the best people,” Hawley mused. “So you start to think, ‘Well, do we even deserve to survive?’ And then my thought was, ‘Well, who’s more human than a child?’ Children haven’t learned how to hate, they’re not greedy. Those are things we have to learn to be by becoming adults.”

The children in Alien: Earth have to learn those skills, but they have excellent teachers. At one point, Arthur notices that Slightly and Smee (Jonathan Ajayi) are clumsily trying to deceive him. “The thing is, children have to learn how to lie,” he warns the pair. “And you two are still learning.” In the season finale, Wendy rallies the Lost Boys to rise up against Kavalier, locking the humans away in a cage. It’s a dramatic reversal of a scene earlier in the same episode, where Kavalier had done the same to her.

This is the bitterest twist in Alien: Earth. As much as the show builds on the reproductive horror of the Alien franchise, it really hammers the idea that this fear is ultimately a displaced anxiety. If the kids are messed up, if the children are dangerous, then that must logically reflect upon the adults responsible for raising them. Much like Wendy and her fellow hybrids are stuck in a strange liminal space between childhood and adulthood, the show suggests the same is true of Kavalier.

Kavalier is the product of a broken and abusive home. “When I was little, my daddy was a drunk,” he explains. “Yeah, the last in a long line of mouthbreathers, each meaner than the last. And to this troglodyte was born a miracle. A boy genius destined to rule the world. Unless his jealous daddy killed him first.” Kavalier frames his own life as a more literal expression of the intergenerational struggle facing Wendy or the xenomorph. Kavalier killed his own father, insisting it was justified.

This is the stuff of Greek tragedy. Kavalier was a child who killed his father, but who lives in fear that he will be killed by his own children. Kavalier’s response to this anxiety is to try to keep his children in a perpetual childhood. When he locks the hybrids in a cell towards the end of the season, Wendy explains, “We’re all in this cell because we can’t be kids anymore, but they won’t let us be adults.” The fear isn’t just that children will replace their parents, it’s that they will do to their parents what those parents have done to their own parents.

Does that mean that Kavalier is like Peter Pan, the boy who never grew up and who insists that the world must shared his state of arrested development? “Who would make children immortal?” opines Kavalier’s factotum android, Atom Eins (Adrian Edmondson). “An eternity of ‘are we there yet?’ But he’s a child at heart, our founder, god bless him.” In this reading, Kavalier is a child who never grew up, and so of course he creates synthetic children who can also never be allowed to grow up.

Wendy, however, disagrees with that assessment of Kavalier’s character. “You’re not Peter Pan,” Wendy observes. “He was the boy who never grew up but you were never a boy. You’ve always been a man. A mean, angry little man who decided to hate everybody – just like your daddy.” Much like Wendy, Kavalier is both child and adult, but ultimately neither. If Kavalier’s is Wendy’s father, then it seems like she has inherited his patricidal tendencies.

There is a sense that Hawley is making a broader point here. Arrested development is something of a recurring theme of the show. Morrow has spent lifetimes trapped in cryosleep, watching the world go by. In early episodes, Wendy still watches and fixates up the Ice Age movies that she used to watch with Joe. There is something interesting in Alien as a recycled piece of intellectual property, with the show painstaking reproducing the aesthetics of the 1979 movie at times.

There is a metatextual reading of this. Just as Kavalier tries to keep his hybrids in a state of perpetual arrested development, as expressed through the emphasis on Peter Pan and Ice Age – two intellectual properties that originated outside the Walt Disney Corporation but are now inexorably linked to it, with Alien: Earth using Disney-owned footage from both – there is something pointed in Hawley using Alien: Earth, another intellectual property now owned by Disney, to make this point.

The Alien franchise is a story about the fear that one day, humanity will be supplanted by children that they don’t understand. Alien: Earth wonders about the logic underpinning that age in a world where it seems like very few children are allowed to grow up.