Alien: Earth Recap: The First Pancake

There are many adjectives you could use to describe the Alien franchise. Scary? Absolutely. Thoughtful? At times. Satirical? It can be. But for me, the word that always comes to mind is wet. There’s scarcely any set in an Alien movie — even in outer space! — that doesn’t look like it was sprayed down with a hose just before the director called “Action!” And the goo! Dear God, the goo. Dripping from ceilings, oozing from biomasses, coating the Xenomorphs’ many mouths. Sometimes, these films look downright viscous.

“Metamorphosis,” Alien: Earth’s third episode, finally brings this TV series’ first big adventure to a close, as Prodigy’s Lost Boys head back to Neverland Island with a transport full of dangerous alien specimens. But before that can happen, Wendy has to wade into the muck one more time, to rescue her brother and to neutralize an escaped Xenomorph. She finds Hermit glued to a wall in a chilled, meat-filled shipping container, guarded by the monster, which bares its sopping wet teeth at her in a display of dominance.

Wendy fancies herself a superhero, so she first stabs the beast — unleashing streams of acidic blood — and later snags one of its mouths with a meat hook to yank it off of Hermit. The Xenomorph then drags Wendy behind a retractable door, and by the time Hermit opens it, he finds the creature decapitated and an unconscious Wendy leaking white fluid. Simply put: There’s goo everywhere.

Despite the Wendy woes, as far as Boy Kavalier is concerned, the Maginot mission was a success. His team gathered useful data about how the Lost Boys operate in the field; plus, in his words, “a trillion dollars of R&D just landed in our laps” in the form of Weyland-Yutani’s menagerie of murder-aliens. Kavalier’s puckish smile indicates how thrilled he is.

But while gawking greedily at the big picture, the boy genius is overlooking some messy details, mostly involving his disgruntled android army. Kirsh in particular is looking more and more like a free agent, inclined to follow his own fascinations rather than to listen to his Prodigy boss. For now, he’s doing what Kavalier wants, studying the Maginot specimens. But judging by the way Kirsh stares intently at the aliens, he’d probably be up for doing this job anyway, whether or not Kavalier asked. (Maybe I’m prejudging Kirsh, since the synthetics take the side of the human-killing monsters in nearly every single Alien movie.)

The situation with the Lost Boys is more complicated, given the disconnect between their powerful adult-size robot bodies and their immature human minds. Nibs (Lily Newmark) — who, pre-transformation, asked Wendy, “When do we get to go home?” — seems rattled by the reality of where she is and what she’s become. In the previous episode, she talked about how she hated taking baths in her child’s body but now misses them. In this episode, she peppers her fellow female-presenting Lost Boy, Curly (Erana James), with questions about the organization. Why the Peter Pan names? Why are they “Lost Boys” when they’re not all boys? Most important: How come Wendy gets to be Wendy?

Curly offers quasi-reassuring, Prodigy-affirming answers to most of these questions. But the Wendy query perhaps gets under Curly’s artificial skin a little. Back at Neverland, she makes a point of reminding Kavalier that his darling Wendy “got broken” on her first real mission, and that Wendy is obsessed with “her stupid brother” while Curly is taking advantage of her super-powered electronic brain to learn new things. Sure, Wendy was the first Lost Boy, but according to Curly, her “dad always threw the first pancake in the trash.”

Here’s what stood out to me about Curly’s big scene: Even as she’s provoking Kavalier, saying things like, “I think I could be you one day … more than you,” she’s also suppressing a juvenile snicker at the thought that her new synthetic body means “no more pooping.” She’s still a kid, in other words, just like the rest of the Lost Boys, even if her precocity sets her apart from the likes of Slightly and Smee (Jonathan Ajayi), who sound very much like boys as they compare notes on “these space bugs that drink, like, all your blood.”

Still, it’s Slightly who may end up being the biggest internal threat to Prodigy. Before the team leaves the Maginot wreckage, Slightly and Smee run into the Weyland-Yutani cyborg Morrow, who is so curious about the obviously synthetic Lost Boys’ reference to their “parents” that he stealthily plants a tiny communication device in Slightly’s neck. Nothing much comes of it in this episode, although Morrow does make use of the gadget once, appearing as a voice in Slightly’s head to introduce the idea that the much older and more experienced cyborg could be a friend to this confused and terrified youngster.

Anyway, let’s get back to the goo, since this episode ends with a sequence that’s both lousy with slime and aimed straight at the primordial ooze in the viewing audience’s brains. With minimal dialogue and some clever cross-cutting, these climatic scenes show Wendy arising from an extended slumber and making her way toward the Neverland underground lab, as though summoned. Meanwhile, inside the lab, Kirsh and Curly are carving up a Xenomorph egg, removing a face-hugger parasite from the goop inside. They then carve up that parasite, removing a wriggly wormlike creature, which they then drop into a tank with what appears to be one of Hermit’s lungs.

What’s happening here isn’t exactly clear, nor is it necessarily intended to be. This whole concluding sequence is meant to look and sound like some weirdo mad scientist stuff, between the androids’ cyberpunk goggles and the squishy noises the wriggling creatures make. It’s supposed to penetrate our subconscious and creep us the hell out.

But if you want a major takeaway from this ending, consider this: In the previous episode, Wendy alone seemed to hear the aliens within the Maginot; and this week she becomes physically pained as Kirsh is wielding his scalpel against the Xenomorph bio-matter. We’ve been thinking of her as a “hybrid” of a synthetic being and a human. But could there be something extraterrestrial, too, snaking through her bio-mechanical guts?

• Lots of striking images in this episode, but my favorite practical effect is the glowing dots flowing through thick wires into Morrow’s cyborg brain, as he’s uploading data.

• Kirsh chases Morrow away when the cyborg is hassling the Lost Boys on the Maginot, but not before some snippy banter between the two. Kirsh refers to the ship as “a ball that got hit over the fence into the neighbor’s yard” (with Prodigy being the neighbor). And when Morrow sniffs that he doesn’t talk to “errand boys,” Kirsh counters with, “Which country are you king of again?” I tell you, there’s a reason why you hire Timothy Olyphant for a role like this. No one better combines “steely” and “pissy.”

• Boy Kavalier is at his most Wonka-like when he’s telling Curly that prodigies are geniuses because they’re children, with “access to a world of infinite imagination.”

• Morrow has been away from Earth for a long time, so while he’s limping through New Siam, stealing food, he takes a moment to check in with Weyland-Yutani’s current CEO (Sandra Yi Sencindiver), the granddaughter of his original boss. He also reads up on Prodigy, which didn’t exist when he left home 65 years ago. (He finds a headline about how the “Triumvirate” has become “The Five.”)

• Inspired needle drop: Funkadelic’s seminal acid-rock instrumental “Maggot Brain,” playing as the Prodigy team packs up in New Siam and heads back to Neverland. The song itself is a moody masterpiece, but also … maggot brain? Just those words alone fit this show so well.