‘Alien: Earth’ Episode 2 Recap: “Mr. October”

The premiere of Alien: Earth was plenty scary, something it was able to achieve with only brief allusions to Big Xeno ripping apart the entire crew of a spacecraft. With Episode 2, and Weyland-Yutani’s research vessel falling out of the sky and landing on a city owned by Prodigy, its corporate competitor, W-T’s precious deep space cargo is now loose at the crash site, and already providing direct scares of the body cavity-filling, face-attaching Alien franchise variety.

Something A:E creator and co-writer Noah Hawley’s series-based interpretation gets right immediately is just how casually humans – and hybrid humans – in Alien-related projects treat uncategorized lifeforms that are obviously gross-looking and probably aggressive. Oh look, the rescuers at the crash site will say. It’s the ship cat of the Maginot. Let’s give her some scritches. But then its eyeball splutters out of its reanimated host body, grows an attitude problem, and closes the short distance across the ship’s busted laboratory on tentacles made of capillaries and sinew. Probably no big deal! Good thing the Lost Boys team of hybrids are only armed with flashlights.   

All over the wrecked ship, inside the building it crashed into, and back at Neverland where Boy Kavalier watches his hybrids’ progress, Episode 2 of Alien: Earth offers many ringing examples of hubris and human folly. 

At least Hermit seems appropriately terrified. After a close encounter of the xenomorph kind, the medic’s radio call is by-the-book but tinged with an incredulous air of I can’t believe I’m not dead. “Creature – she’s loose.” (Interesting that he notes the alien’s gender.) “Approximately 8 feet tall – armored.” All of which is true, and supported by the presence of corpses everywhere. But don’t tell that to the costume ball happening on an exclusive upper floor of the skyscraper. When Hermit and the SAR team try to convince a wealthy fat cat literally wearing a frock wig that “there is a spaceship in the lobby” – not to mention its stalking Big Xeno cargo – the guy stays rosy and dismissive behind his pancake makeup. If there was such a problem, Boy Kavalier would notify them. The Prodigy boss and trillionaire is a close personal friend, you see.

The scene is illustrative of the show in a bunch of different ways. First, it shows off the tactical thinking we know from the alien species. While the rich folks repel these warnings, Big Xeno is camouflaging its eggplant-shaped head against a nearby abstract sculpture. Second, the scene is funny, something we didn’t necessarily expect from Alien: Earth. (Alex Lawther’s expressions as Hermit gamely attempts to convince this rich idiot.) And third, the scene’s an example of wealth armor as it exists in the 22nd century. Wealthy people of the future, dressing up like wealthy people of the past, as a non-terrestrial threat to life, limb, and the very fabric of human civilization consumes earth’s genetic material. If the xenomorphs attacked America in 2025, these same one percenters would expect to ride it out in their bespoke survival bunkers. Either way, the alien would be like, “Hold my beer.”

Teeth bared, the xeno attacks Hermit after she wipes out the frock wig crew. But the medic is saved by Morrow. Well, kind of. The Weyland-Yutani security cyborg incapacitates Hermit with a stun blast before switching his rifle to cocoon mode. Morrow isn’t trying to be rescued, and certainly not by people who work for his employer’s competitor. He drags away the coccooned xeno’s body with the intention of delivering it to his W-T bosses. 

Back at Neverland, Boy Kav is dealing directly with Yutani (Sandra Yi Sencindiver). Since her grandmother sent the USS Maginot on its mission 65 years before, she considers the research vessel and all the organic material it contains as proprietary. And Kavalier? He considers it his. The ship, and the bio-weapon research potential it contains, is Prodigy property now. “Yutani can sue for it.” Hilarious that a hundred years in the future, oligarchs care only about themselves and the bottom line. Oh, wait. 

Kavalier also sheds some light on what inspired his hybrid creations. When Dame Silvia considers the import of Prodigy’s consciousness transfer tech – “We ended death” – Kav can only respond from a place of such selfish arrogance, it’s almost profound. “I wanna talk to someone smarter than me.” This whiny baby genius made the very essence of human life a commodity, hardwired it to a supercomputer, and installed it in a custom housing, all for his singular intellectual entertainment. It’s like he just wants a TV that can talk back.      

Maybe Kavalier sees the tech as just another widget to sell. To those who can afford it, an offer to mobilize human consciousness like it’s on a luxury vacation. But Wendy does not see herself as an appliance. Her new form is full of personal discovery, and Sydney Chandler is already a bright spot in the blue-lit gloom of Alien: Earth as she makes certainty of purpose and growing confidence in her abilities central to Wendy’s experience. In a brief flashback, Wendy watches via screen as Hermit interacts with a human resources bot. She is captivated, filled with emotional response. It’s curious to Dame Silvia and Kirsh, the way these human traits merge with Wendy’s technical capacity. She only has to touch the screen to communicate a real-time change to the bot’s code. (They’re like: “Did we give her that?”) But Wendy does this to drop in a reference to Ice Age that only Hermit would understand. Spontaneity, joy, mischief – three things Boy Kavalier and Prodigy, with all the advanced technology in their future world, still can’t artificially construct.     

With just a crooked eyebrow and weird/intense line delivery, Timothy Olyphant keeps being off-putting and terrific. On the crashed ship, when Kirsh and his charges encounter another drippy and pulsating version of non-terrestrial life – “it presents as flora but it may be fauna” – the hybrids are at least wary. But Kirsh, who has also used his arm node to jack into the Maginot’s computer system, seems both preoccupied and fascinated. It’s the breadth between these two descriptors where a lot of Olyphant characters like to reside. And in the case of Kirsh, we can’t tell yet if he’s friend-ish, foe-ish, or ultimately concerned most with self-interest. But how anyone – or any something/one like these synthetics and hybrids – can get so close to these alien lifeforms is just crazy scary to us in itself. Talk about hubris. That venus flytrap thing is going to open up and eat you!

Specimens for Alien: Earth Episode 2 (“Mr. October”):

• It’s just so cool to us that Alien: Earth doesn’t care about staying shadowy and scary. Its horror is living right out in the open with everything else it’s uncovering about this deeply-imagined future. So in Ep 2, you get a shot of secreting alien egg pods, as iconic a sci-fi horror thing as there ever was, punctuated with the slashing guitar lines and body horror lyrics of Tool’s 1996 single “Stinkfist.”

• The Big Xeno body designs we’ve seen since they evolved from facehugging and eyeball sentience have been lithe and athletic. These are the young ones, and the impressive VFX in A:E renders them with sheen on the exterior armor and incisors that glimmer like blue steel. Formidable!

• All this talk of consciousness-phasing in Alien: Earth also reminded us of Altered Carbon. As a Netflix sci-fi thing, its two seasons maybe got a little too complicated to land. But its big ideas were numerous, like imprinting a human consciousness on a hard disk and binding it to the vertebrae of another physical body.

• We also really like this idea of Morrow as his own disruptor. His agenda is tied to Weyland-Yutani, but as the apparent sole survivor of the Maginot crash – besides the xenos – he’s also a man out of time, who is returning to Earth after decades away. It makes his perspective interesting as something greater than just villainy.    

Johnny Loftus (@johnnyloftus.bsky.social) is a Chicago-based writer. A veteran of the alternative weekly trenches, his work has also appeared in Entertainment Weekly, Pitchfork, The All Music Guide, and The Village Voice.