The Fall of the Boy Genius

Last week (at the time of this writing) saw the season finale for Alien: Earth and, currently, perhaps the series finale. We won’t know yet. Set to end of a cliffhanger (and I’ll try very hard not to spoil things from there), creator Noel Hawley says he has high hopes that Disney will renew the show for a second season. As of right now the studio has been cagey about it, which is strange. Traditionally (as we’ve seen over the last few years during the current streaming era of television) when a show does well, even with just one episode out the gate (and sometimes before that even happens) a studio will greenlight a second season. Hawley is a trusted voice, and the season got good buzz and good ratings, and yet Disney has yet to say a second season is incoming. That could change any day now, but until it does, it leaves this show in a weird place.

We will get into the meat of the season and my feelings for and against it, but I want to start by discussing the fact that Hawley, who is also the mind behind both Legion and Fargo, is a strong director to have in charge of this series. He is a sure hand and a surer voice, and his previous shows have been successful because the studios trusted him to tell his stories his way, even when he’s adapting other franchises. My guess is that Hawley expected he’d be in a position to do two, three, or however many seasons he had planned for Alien: Earth, and it’s something of a surprise for him that he hasn’t gotten the greenlight yet. It’s surprising for all of us.

At the same time, though… maybe don’t end your first season on a cliffhanger. While you can leave some narrative threads out there that could be picked up by another show, or a different movie, or something, it’s always good to tell a complete story in a single go. Hollywood history is littered with franchises that were expected to run for decades that only got a single movie or a few episodes of a partial season (see also: Bloodshot, Eternals, Being Human, Battlefield Earth, etc.). While it’s great that Hawley clearly has ambitions for his show, a single, self-contained season that at least gives the characters some kind of closure is better than something left hanging just in case all the characters end up getting dropped and ignored in a future show or movie. Which, until Disney renews Alien: Earth, might just happen here.

These are characters I would like to continue to see. The series has an interesting setup, giving us characters that aren’t quite androids but also aren’t quite human. The minds of children that were put into the bodies of human-like robots, powerful beings that can out maneuver and out-think their flesh-based counterparts but maybe without the moral complexity that would come with age and time. And that’s to say nothing about the fact that their android bodies don’t think and feel the way humans do (or, really, at all), so they’re minds with emotions that don’t have to feel emotions anymore. It could make them into little sociopaths, which is something the series has toyed with.

Take Wendy, aka Marcy. She’s our introductory character, the first of the children turned into synths. The goal of the tech is to prove that human minds can be moved into android bodies, effectively giving humanity immortality. At least that’s clearly what the boy genius, Boy Kavalier, has planned for the tech. They think of themselves as children still, real humans that just so happen to be in android bodies, but Kavalier considers them tech demos, “floor models” as he puts it, to show off the promise of the technology. They aren’t really humans anymore, they’re property, and over the course of the season Wendy comes to realize this. And then she teaches it to the others.

But that also puts Wendy in an interesting position. It gives her a crisis of identity (and other actions around her reveal how much people don’t treat her and her kind like humans anymore), the realization that the girl she once was is dead (for real dead) which makes her not really Marcy anymore even if she has her memories and feelings (or a simulation of her feelings, at least). And if she’s not really Marcy does she even have to act like Marcy anymore? It’s a question the show raises, and begins to indicate the answer to that, except it ends before we get to a resolution for that plotline… or, really, any of the others that are raised by the season.

It’s a similar issue with another major character development for Wendy: she kind of becomes the xenomorph queen. In its series premiere the show opens with an interesting concept: a Weyland Yutani ship brings not just one but five predator, alien species to Earth. The xenomorphs are one, and there are four others as well (in various levels of slightly fucked up to seriously FUBAR). While these creatures are more or less dominant in their attitudes, the trick with the xenomorphs is that they don’t have a queen to guide them. We understand them to be a kind of hive species, able to act independently when on their own, but working more as drones when they have a queen. While the other alien creatures are generally against all the beings working at Kavalier’s Prodigy compound, the xenomorphs lack that guiding voice to direct them.

And then Kavalier is stupid (especially for a genius) and decides to teach Wendy how to communicate with the aliens. Very soon she learns the clicks and growls that the xenomorphs use, and then learns to guide them and control them. In effect she becomes the xeno-queen, and it’s an intriguing prospect for future exploration. Or it would be, if I had any faith that the characters and concepts would get explored further. Right now, without a renewal in sight, that prospect seems less likely.

The fact that we don’t get an ending for this season leaves the series in a weird kind of limbo, and because of that I actually like it a lot less than I might have otherwise. I was kind of on the fence with it for a little while because while I like the setting, the characters, and the concepts at play, I won’t deny that the pacing has been slow. The series has eight episodes for its first season when, I think, in reality it really only needed six. There’s good stuff here, but it feels a little dragged out, a touch long in the tooth. If things had been tightened, pulled together a little faster, the show could have some serious momentum to it, but it seems content at times to follow every narrative swirl and whirl even if they don’t end up going anywhere.

For instance, what is Kirsch planning? He’s an android put in charge of overseeing the aliens once Kavalier gets ahold of all of them, but it feels like he has his own agenda. Except we never really see where that’s going or what’s going on. Is that due to the pace of the storytelling, or the fact that Hawley has plans to reveal more in a follow-up season that has yet to be announced. The fact that I can’t answer that shows there’s some flaws in the way this season is set up, and this isn’t the only example.

There are more questions than answers raised by this season which wouldn’t be bad if we already knew a second season (or something else) was coming soon, but we don’t, and that makes this season feel weaker because of it. I would like the/ pace to be stronger, yes, but even just having that knowledge that a second season (or movie, or something) was greenlit would make this easier to process. Right now everything just ends without resolution of any kind, with all the pieces converging on each other but not even fully meeting yet, and we just don’t know where things are going or what any of it means. It’s half a story, instead of even one smaller complete one that fits into a larger whole, and that is an unsatisfactory way to end a season let alone, maybe, a series.

I liked Alien: Earth a lot in the moment, but the problem I’m struggling with is legacy. Will this story continue, or is this a narrative thread started that never gets completed? The Alien franchise is rife with those, from the Predalien created in Alien vs. Predator: Requiem, to whatever David was planning in Prometheus and Alien: Covenant. We’re just as likely to get nothing as something, and that makes this first season feel like an uneasy ending. We’ll just have to see what happens next but until we get some kind of word one way or another I can’t really recommend this season. It was good in the moment, but moments aren’t enough if the story remains incomplete.