\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\tThis post contains spoilers for this week\u2019s episode of <\/em>Alien: Earth, now streaming on Hulu.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\tAfter last week\u2019s flashback<\/a> to all the poor decisions that killed the crew of the Maginot<\/em>, \u201cThe Fly\u201d brings us back to the present-day action at Neverland, where various adults, synthetics, and eyeball monsters conspire to make life very difficult \u2014 and, in one case, impossible \u2014 for the Lost Boys. Smee complains at one point that, \u201cBeing grown-up sucks.\u201d But it\u2019s even worse when you still have the emotional intelligence of a child, and are treated that way by the genuine grown-ups (and synths and possessed sheep) around you. <\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\tBy the end of the episode, Isaac is dead, Nibs has had part of her memory wiped, and Slightly has been manipulated by Morrow into letting one of the face-huggers turn Arthur into a Xenomorph incubator. All of it\u2019s bad. <\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\tIsaac\u2019s death is a master class in suspense, and another example of how the eyeball has somehow turned out to be the scariest creature on a show featuring one of the most iconic monsters in the history of filmed entertainment. On last week\u2019s official Alien: Earth <\/em>podcast, Noah Hawley explained that, contrary to my interpretation, the eyeball was trying to distract Chibuzo rather than warn her about her thermos being infected. Here, the manipulation is even more overt, as the eyeball and its ovine host set up poor Isaac to get locked inside one of the other enclosures, resulting in evidence that the Lost Boys\u2019 \u201cimmortal\u201d bodies can still be killed under the wrong circumstances. <\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\tAtom\u2019s order to alter Nibs\u2019 memory seems wildly shortsighted, if the plan was to keep her around the other hybrids. Of course Wendy or one of the others would quickly realize that Nibs no longer remembers the crash and its aftermath. And of course Wendy tells Nibs the truth, putting them both on guard against the manipulations of their seemingly benevolent guardians.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\tEarlier, Kirsh dismisses Joe\u2019s question about how best to care for Wendy, saying, \u201cThat\u2019s like an onion, asking how to care for a star.\u201d Kirsh sees Wendy as a wholly separate entity from Marcy Hermit. That Dame Sylvia is able to so easily alter Nibs\u2019 memories \u2014 even without the help of Arthur, who gets fired for taking the moral stand that his wife won\u2019t \u2014 suggests that Kirsh is probably right. An argument could be made that the Nibs who woke up in this new body was the same person as the little girl. But once the Prodigy team starts wantonly rewriting aspects of Nibs\u2019 brain, it starts to feel like that girl is dead and has been replaced with something else. <\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\t(That said, Dame Sylvia addresses Wendy as Marcy at one point. We don\u2019t know whether this means Dame, like Joe, believes Wendy really is Marcy, or is just trying to manipulate her most precocious, potentially troublemaking charge.)\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\tSlightly, meanwhile, targets Joe as his patsy to smuggle a Xenomorph embryo out of Prodigy, still resentful that Wendy\u2019s family is here safely while his mother is far away and being threatened by Morrow. But when Joe gets pulled away by his old search-and-rescue squad mates, Slightly has to improvise and take advantage of the chaos in the lab caused by the eyeball, locking poor Arthur \u2014 one of the few adults on the island putting the Lost Boys\u2019 safety above all else \u2014\u00a0inside to get his face hugged.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\tIn the midst of all this, we get an interlude with the most powerful grown-up involved, albeit one who tries to carry himself like a kid. Boy Kavalier sits down for a mediation session with Yutani and pulls off a double victory. He gets her to pay him a $20 billion settlement for the Maginot <\/em>crash \u2014\u00a0a crash Kavalier himself arranged, and wound up not even having to pay for when his saboteur died \u2014\u00a0then exploits the laws about quarantine to hang onto the specimens for an additional six weeks. Hawley doesn\u2019t try to hide the tech bro allegory here, as Kavalier even paraphrases Mark Zuckerberg\u2019s \u201cmove fast and break things\u201d motto. (The bare feet are borrowed more from Steve Jobs.) For as much as Kavalier tries to present himself as an overgrown kid, he\u2019s ruthless and calculating in a way that none of the Lost Boys are capable of being; he\u2019s more like the eyeball than he is like Wendy.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\tOn the way out of the mediation session, Kirsh and Morrow ride an elevator together, taking one another\u2019s measure. Kirsh is as condescending toward Morrow as he was toward Joe, viewing cyborgs as obsolete dead-ends in mankind\u2019s quest for immortality. But we\u2019ve seen how capable and dangerous Morrow is.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\tMaybe the biggest question left by the episode is how dangerous Kirsh is \u2014\u00a0not only to Weyland-Yutani forces, but to his own. We see that he\u2019s been watching Slightly and is aware of what he\u2019s doing at Morrow\u2019s behest. And when Slightly locks Arthur inside the lab, Kirsh not only doesn\u2019t intervene, he doesn\u2019t tell Boy Kavalier about it when his boss asks if all is well. In the movies, we\u2019ve seen synthetics betray their co-workers, but on behalf of their corporate overlords. Is Kirsh acting against Kavalier, or does he have a plan that we mere onions can\u2019t yet comprehend? And whatever he’s doing, will Wendy or any of the show’s other children be able to stop him?<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n<\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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