alien: Earth, Season 1, Episode 4: Observation
The Prodigy staff is starting to wonder if putting children in adult robot bodies was a good idea after all.
Editor’s Rating: 3 starsThen the conversation takes a darker turn, as Dame tries to get Nibs to admit that her new body is different. All Nibs will allow is, “It’s big,” and then when Dame tries to show her an actual diagram, Nibs kicks it angrily out of her hand. Dame then asks exactly what happened to her in new Siam, which prompts Nibs to jump at her and pin her to the ground. The sequence is incredibly disturbing, underlining the carelessness with which Prodigy has been treating these overgrown children.
Elsewhere on Neverland Island, Wendy reclaims her place as the most special of the hybrids by revealing the unique gift we’ve seen from her across the past two episodes: an ability to hear and understand the Xenomorphs’ language. While the Sylvias again are concerned about what this may mean – especially given Wendy’s other unexpected power, to manipulate technology by touching it – Kavalier is excited to see where it might lead. He reminds Dame that she isn’t Wendy’s mother. (This is “an IT issue, not a gab session,” he warns.) Then he takes a shot at the Wendy-bashing Curly, asking her if she can hear the Xenomorphs. (“Maybe,” she lies.)
As part of the “getting to know the characters a little better” direction of “Observation,” we get multiple scenes with Kavalier this week, all emphasizing how he thrives on “move fast and break stuff” tech-bro energy – combined, quirkily, with his Peter Pan obsession. When Wendy comes to talk to Kavalier, he points with his foot toward an empty seat for her, then proceeds to pepper her with questions about her Maginot experience, wondering whether fighting the Xenomorph was more like fighting pirates or Indians … or maybe a crocodile? (“You fought the crocodile and now you can hear the clock!”) He also wants to know what she hears from the Xenomorphs and is unmoved when she describes their pain.
Kavalier is not an empathetic soul. He’s a self-styled man-child, disdainful of society’s moral codes. The show hasn’t gone so far as to frame him as a villain (unless you’re the sort of viewer who thinks of Willy Wonka as a bad guy), but neither is he being shown to be “right” in any particular way (unless you’re the sort of viewer who roots for Lex Luthor). More than anything, he’s the kind of oligarch who looks for high-minded, pseudo-intellectual excuses to do what he wanted to do anyway. And Hawley does seem to want us to draw some modern-day parallels. In other words: If Kavalier were a real guy, alive today in our world, he’d probably still be a trillionaire. He’s got an undeniably musky aroma.
During Wendy’s visit, she argues that Kavalier should allow her brother to stay on Neverland Island, which the pr
In one of the clumsier bits of backstory filling, Curly asks Hermit to explain “the Five,” and he mentions the corporations – Prodigy, Weyland-Yutani, Threshold, Dynamic, and Lynch – that took the place of world governments and democracy and “fixed things.” It truly seems unlikely that Curly wouldn’t already know this, even though I did like how Hermit just accepts that it’s better for the corporations to be in charge, as he’s never known anything else.
My favorite Maginot menagerie beastie remains the multi-eyed crawling eyeball, who in this episode takes up residence within the eye socket of a Prodigy lab goat. Observing this process, Atom expresses concern about one of these monsters escaping, to which Kavalier says, “glass half-full, kid … we talked about this.”
One of my favorite little bits of physical business in this episode is when Wendy shows hermit around her bedroom – with a bed that’s “more like a charging station” – and she surreptitiously kicks her toys out of sight so the space won’t look so cluttered or childish.
Hermit poses some good questions to Atom about Wendy, like, “She has her memories, her sense of humor … doesn’t that make her Marcy?” He also asks, “Did yo