The Lost Boys Find Themselves in Alien: Earth’s Tense Finale - Reactor

And now we come to the end of Alien: Earth—at least the first season—with the finale, “The Real Monsters” which was written by Noah Hawley & Migizi Pensoneau and directed by Dana Gonzales. The finale answers a few questions, and raises a lot more, but it wraps things up much more neatly than I expected.

Let’s Dissect a Still-Quivering Facehugger

Poor Arthur.

Arthur’s corpse is sprawled on the beach, crabs scuttling to and fro. A Xenomorph creeps up, and one crab adorably waves its claw in warning.

Dame Sylvia visits the graveyard and lays lilies (I think) on several of them, until the Xenomorph interrupts her impromptu memorial service. The security forces shoot the alien and rescue her as it flees into the jungle.

Meanwhile, Boy Kavalier sits in his room, communing with the Optipus Sheep. He once again laments the fact that Optipus can’t talk (I really don’t think this conversation would go as well as Boy Kavalier thinks it would) and then all of his computers crash again. His eyes flick back and forth between Wendy, his old favorite, on his multiple screens, and Optipus, the new hotness, trapped in a sheep. He talks to Atom Eins, who tells him their communications are down, the Lost Boys are locked in a cell that isn’t designed to hold them, there’s a Xenomorph loose on the island, there aren’t enough security forces left to protect the non-enhanced humans, Yutani has blocked access to the satellite, everything technical is on the fritz, and they all need to evacuate. Boy contacts Kirsh, who reminds him: the secure lab is on its own power grid, so he can stay down there and work as long as he wants to and everyone else can get fucked for all he cares. (Or I should say, he implies this.) Also, Boy Kavalier should take his ADHD meds.

The Lost Boys sit in their circular cell. Nibs has been resuscitated, so apparently the gun Joe shot her with only stunned her. They bicker for a moment; Nibs accuses Curly of snitching, but she insists she didn’t—she doesn’t even know why Smee and Slightly are in trouble! And she still thinks she’s Boy Kavalier’s favorite. They talk about finding the graveyard, as Curly insists that the treatment worked, and Nibs insists that they’re all ghosts now. It takes Wendy to point out that they are the most powerful beings on the island, and that they should work together.

“What do ghosts do?” she asks.

“Haunt houses?” Smee offers.

Kirsh works in the lab, unbothered as ever, and Dame Sylvia has been delivered back to her room. She seems pretty fragile, a state that is not helped by Wendy taking over the screens in her room to run footage of the kids before Transference.

The security forces are still sweeping the hallways, until Wendy lures them into an elevator and messes with it to torment them. We check back in with her in the cell, swiping from room to room on a screen. She checks on Joe and Morrow, who are in a holding cell together. She’s still extremely angry with Joe, but Smee tells her “He’s one of us” and hugs her.

Man, in a world of corporate nightmare bullshit, a person like Smee shines all the brighter.

We cut to Joe gently waking Morrow. Despite everything, Joe tries to check Morrow’s injuries, but Morrow rebuffs him. And then Wendy opens their door. Joe (barely) stops Morrow from killing the guard, and says he’s going to save everyone he can. Morrow tells him to get the kids before he burns the Prodigy complex to the ground.

Morrow goes straight to Kirsh to fight him. The two grapple each other and it turns into a surprisingly brutal brawl—I expected both of them to use more strategy than just trying to throw each other through every table in the room. Morrow breaks Kirsh’s back over a table and the synth leaks milk-blood from his mouth. Just when it seems like Morrow’s won, a couple of aliens break loose and distract him, and Kirsh manages to grab him, yank him down, and choke him out.

That doesn’t fix Kirsh’s back, though.

Boy Kavalier sends Atom Eins after Joe, and finally goes to confront his Lost Boys. He tries to be vaguely intimidating, but then Wendy opens their cell door with her mind. She demands a stay, and he tells her about being born a prodigy to a drunken, abusive, troglodyte of a father. At the age of 6, he built a synth to replace that father—that would be Atom Eins—and the synth killed his dad for him. And then he had to build a corporation from there since no one was going to hand a 6-year-old a company, with Atom acting as the literal adult in the room to provide cover until Boy came of age.

Hilariously, after all this, we learn that Boy Kavalier is actually a self-made trillionaire (unless he’s lying, of course). Unlike Yutani, he didn’t inherit a family business. But that also means that he wants to keep making money. He found a way to sell people immortality, and a lot of his high-minded chatter about having mindblowing conversations and never wanting to grow up is, presumably, a way to make pure unfettered capitalism sound noble.

When Curly protests that he doesn’t own them, he assures her that he does. “You’re floor models,” he says. Nibs offers a rebuttal by way of killing the single guard he brought with him. With her bare hands. As Wendy stares her creator down.

The “floor models” flank their big sister.

“Run,” she tells Boy Kavalier, and he does.

Wendy instructs the Lost Boys to split up: Nibs can get Dame Sylvia, Slightly and Smee can deal with Kirsh and Morrow, Curly can get all the guards, and she’s going to collect Joe. Curly tells Wendy that she’s going to go by Jane again now.

Atom Eins finds Joe, and, promising him a meeting with Boy Kavalier and Wendy, lures him back to Boy’s room, and closes the door behind him before Joe realizes the Optipus Sheep’s enclosure is (a) open, and (b) empty.

Smee and Slightly find the cyborg and the synth, both pretty beat up. Kirsh orders Smee to tie Morrow, but Smee ignores him and ties him up instead. Morrow reassures Slightly that he didn’t hurt his mother, and Slightly bashes him in the face with a metal canister. Nibs grins as she finds Dame Sylvia in her room, staring pensively into the rain.

Optipus shakes free of her sheep body, and Joe only barely holds her off until Wendy arrives and saves him. For a moment. Then Atom Eins comes in and knocks Joe back to the ground and throws Wendy across the room, while bitching about Boy Kavalier’s insistence on making children immortal. But Wendy has control of all the tech, remember? She freezes Atom in his tracks, and helps Joe up a moment after he watches Optipus wiggle herself into an outlet in the floor.

The siblings argue for a minute, and Joe apologizes for shooting Nibs, but only after pointing out that she was literally killing people. But Wendy counters that she likes the aliens because “they’re honest” in the kind of pointed resentment that only a sibling can unleash upon another sibling.

Joe’s old security friends make the mistake of searching the lab for survivors, and then, well, there are a few fewer survivors. The Xenomorph hunts Boy Kavalier until Wendy and Joe catch up, just as the last security team catches up with their boss. Wendy sends her Long Teen Son out, and the alien knocks Boy over and slaughters the security team.

I notice Joe doesn’t make a goddamn peep this time.

Boy reaches up, thinking Joe will help him, and Medic Hermit responds by kicking Boy in the face.

The next day, we watch Optipus wiggle her way into Arthur’s corpse.

The former Lost Boys have locked all the non-Joe humans in the holding cell, and Wendy lectures Boy Kavalier, calling him “a mean, angry little man just like his father.”

We end with the Lost Boys, minus Isaac, plus Joe and a couple of hissing Xenomorphs, standing outside the cell. Presumably they know Yutani’s on the way—but presumably Yutani has no idea she’ll have to deal with five fully mature hybrids who have realized they’re stronger than everyone. And they have two Xenomorphs who are fully bonded to their leader. And they don’t have to be property anymore.

Or, as Wendy says to the her new family: “Now, we rule.”

In This Space, Everyone Can Hear My Opinions

Once again I am of several minds.

Did it KICK ASS to see the hybrids finally assert themselves? Yes.

Was I happy about spending quality time with my beloved Optipus? Of course.

I think I’m mostly just irritated by the pacing of the season. The first two episodes of the show were riveting, but since then it’s been a bit of a rollercoaster, with some sequences that were among my favorite on TV this year, and others that seemed too slow or too obvious. I think last week’s episode needed to be the one where the kids figured themselves out, Joe picked a side, Morrow resolved to burn everything to the ground, and Boy dropped most of his mask—because this finale needed to be an hour and half of the shit hitting the fan, with aliens loose, hybrids avenging themselves, humans on the run, rather than the first ten minutes functioning as the aftermath of last week’s action.

Instead the last two episodes have been two 45-minute blocks that weren’t as tense as they could have been. And as usual, if you let the aliens become too familiar you lose some of the terror. Part of me loves a Xenomorph that loves Wendy and will wait for her commands like a bored Australian sheepdog; part of me misses the Alien lurking in the shadows and waiting to strike.

I’ll also admit to being a bit disappointed with the Kirsh/Morrow showdown. After their conversation in the elevator I was expecting the two of them to hunt each other through the hallways slicing pieces of each other off and yelling bon mots from the shadows, and instead their fight became two superstrong dudes grappling each other.

Same idea with Wendy/Atom. We saw Wendy figure out how to hack into pretty much any communication way back at the beginning of the series, but it was never explained—she just figured out how to do it. Now we see that no one has put up any kind of safeguards against it—which tracks, for Boy Kavalier, but it still felt awfully convenient that Wendy can just say “No” and Atom Eins freezes in place.

Above all of that, however, it’s been kind of a dark joy to tune into this show each week. Entering a world where capitalism has won, completely, no take-backsies, where every human on earth is subject not to a government or an institution but to one of the five corporations, where everyone, really, is property. It’s been interesting (especially over the last few weeks of upheaval, censorship, and boycotts) to see what I think is our actual future… or at least, our future until the electricity fails.

I also loved how this show became an exploration of tactics to cope with that future. Morrow becomes a cyborg because he thinks that will give him security, but he loses everything he cares about. (But he does also take the time to reassure Slightly that his mom is okay—I think that was genuine, Morrow knew he was fucked.) Joe keeps trying to act like a moral person in a system that won’t allow it, but even after everything he tries to look at Morrow’s wounds, and says he’s going to save as many people as he can. Boy Kavalier responded to abuse by becoming an abuser, rather than using his vast wealth to rise above his father’s example. Nibs uses her strength whenever she feels threatened; Smee chooses kindness.

On Immort(AI)lity

Dame Sylvia visits the kids’ graves, which is not the wisest move when there’s a Xenomorph loose on the grounds. Right before she’s rescued by the security team she murmurs “It’s just growing pains” to Marcy Hermit’s tombstone—which implies that she does still believe in the Transhumanism Project. But also, doesn’t she know that Wendy, and whatever’s left of Marcy’s consciousness if that’s what it is, is in a prison cell with the other remaining Lost Boys?

But apart from all that, the best meditation on this element came from Boy Kavalier, who finally dropped all of his metaphysical speeches about having a conversation on a mountaintop, and finally just said that he built the Lost Boys to be “floor models” to sell people immortality. In the end, it came down to money after all.

Now that the show has come to a close, at least for now, I’ll say that I wanted it to use its expanded runtime to dig into these questions even more than it did.

Boredom’s Not a Burden Anyone Should Bear

This week’s episode ended on yet another classic, Pearl Jam’s “Animal”, off their 1993 album Vs.—which features a sheep on the cover. Or a fluffy goat. But whatever close enough OPTIPUS SHEEP SUPREMACY.

And sure it’s a little on the nose, but it was nice to hear an underscore of Wendy’s thoughts on the aliens, with Eddie Vedder growling “I’d rather be with an animal” over roaring grunge.

David 8 Was Right

We finally get Atom Eins’ backstory! Atom was the synth Boy Kavalier built when he was six, essentially to replace/murder Boy’s drunken abusive father. So he’s… kind of Boy Kavalier’s Threepio?

We finally get a proper showdown between Kirsh and Morrow, and it’s more of a brawl than I was expecting. I love Morrow riffing on John Henry vs. the steam-powered drill, and even more than that I love Kirsh saying, “Didn’t John Henry die of exhaustion?” But as I’ve said a few times, I was hoping for more of a plan from Kirsh. At times it seemed like he wanted to overthrow Boy Kavalier in true David 8 style, at times it seems he resented the hybrids, at times he seemed to just want to watch the world burn. But in the end he just wanted to be left alone to work in his lab—relatable, but I think I wanted more from the character in the end.

Whatever Happened to “Save the Cat”?

Optipus leaves her sheep and takes up residence in Arthur! Otherwise no animals are harmed.

Scattered Transmissions in the Void of Space!

• Once again I must sing the praises of these actors. Just when you think Samuel Blenkin has exhausted every way to come off as snotty, unhinged, and traumatized, he finds a new nuance. Sydney Chandler takes a character that could have been kind of a Mary Sue and instead creates someone who seems like an impossibly intelligent, but kind, child. Jonathan Ajayi projects such warmth as Smee that you believe his character really is still, somehow, holding onto a shred of innocence.
• Curly has gone back to her old name, Jane!

• Kirsh reminding Boy Kavalier about hid ADHD diagnosis while the Boy Genius rattles his pill bottle around like a baby jangling its own keys was pretty fun.

• The fact that the episode opened and closed on Arthur’s corpse made me happy. The fact that we see Isaac’s body still lying in the lab makes me happy. The trillionaires don’t care about the people they use. People like Morrow are willing to do terrible things to innocent people. But the show itself makes us look at some of the very real people who have been destroyed by all of this.

• Likewise, giving space to a scene of Joe remembering a letter from Marcy that he read years ago—the way he’s been ripped away from them for work, and can do nothing but helplessly sob as he realizes his dad is dying, his sister is alone, and there’s nothing he can do about any of it—it was a nice reminder of just how fucked this situation has been.

• I loved the faint twinge of outrage that flits across Dame Sylvia’s face when she realizes she’s not considered an “essential” employee, and has to evacuate—a nice, tiny reminder of how much she believed in the project, how badly she was duped by Boy Kavalier, and how much individual worth rests on your status as an employee in this future.
• Do we think that Boy Kavalier was kind of proud of the hybrids by the end?

Quotes!

Wendy (to her Lost Boys): “What do ghosts do?”

Kirsh (to Boy Kavalier): “A symptom of ADHD as severe as yours is impulse control problems…[static]…medication…[static]”

Atom (on the folly of giving children immortal bodies): “An eternity of ‘Are we there yet?’.

Wendy, speaking of the aliens: “They’re honest.”

Wendy, to Joe: “Don’t say ‘It’s complicated’—that’s what powerless people say to make doing nothing OK.”