(This article contains spoilers)
You don’t play with human brain.
There it is. The experiment is slowly turning into something even Kavalier will struggle to handle. As the days go by and children are basically left to their own devices, choosing their activities, they are rapidly growing apart. Wendy is becoming closer than ever to the Xenomorphs and is even communicating with them now. Nibs is in her own tale. The trauma is now making her think she’s pregnant but she’s also becoming violent. Then we have Curly, still ambitious and trying to become Kavalier’s favorite, which will backfire at some point.
Again, Kavalier underestimated the human part of his new technology and thought younger brains would adapt faster. But all that we see is that children left without proper guidance become unpredictable and will come to their own conclusion. Dame Sylvia, acting more like a mother than a teacher, is losing Nib’s trust. What if the young girl projects her fake pregnancy on a creature? So much can happen in a show with unpredictable forms of life.
On the other, we have boys taking very different paths. Tootles decided to give himself a new name, on top of his original one and his hybrid one, choosing Isaac, after Isaac Newton. Tootles is working closely with Kirsh at the lab and is becoming more independent. Slightly is still under the influence of Morrow who is now using Slightly’s mother as a way to blackmail him into stealing a Xenomorph’s egg. Smee is barely in this episode so we don’t know what’s happening with him yet.
In the background of all this, Kirsh is watching and listening. He knows more than anyone else what is really happening. He knows the best about the Xenomorphs by working with Tootles on alien specimens, he knows about Slightly’s conversations with Morrow, he also knows about Wendy’s closeness with the Xenomorphs.
There’s also a clear difference between the directions the girls and the boys are taking. Girls become more ambitious and are rapidly growing out of their shell, even Wendy. While she’s following Kavalier’s orders, it’s also an active choice she made. Then you have the boys who are all following orders, who stay in the ranks, who try to meet the expectations of the one giving the orders. Slightly is betraying Prodigy under Morrow’s orders, Tootles is the perfect science student under Kirsh and Kavalier’s orders.
I’m not sure I like the stereotype of the girls becoming more mature/independent faster than the boys. In our world, this only happens under society’s pressure, because girls are expected to be mature, while boys grow up to become men able to follow orders without asking questions. In a show like Alien: Earth, it could be a nice societal commentary, but the stakes are also elsewhere. They have aliens to study and tame.
This episode also confirms the children are now Prodigy’s property. The mind alone has no agency and their bodies do belong to Prodigy. Ethically, it’s obviously all wrong. Legally? Well, there’s a few things missing. We know the children are officially dead but again: who signed them off to Kavalier’s company? Parents? But what of Slightly’s mother who didn’t know about him being alive? Kavalier even repeats they “killed the children”. The process of creating those hybrids is still not very clear.
The nature of what makes people human still opposes opinions. Joe, who is now working for Prodigy, believes his sister is still human, but during a tense discussion with Atom Eins, this certainty is starting to become blurry. Though I have to say, Eins saying they’ll create “human immortality” makes his entire speech about what’s human or not invalid. It’s not human immortality if hybrids are not humans, right? Prodigy is made of very smart people and choice of words is usually always calculated. Hybrids are not a new form of life but human immortality, making them, well, humans.
Now more than ever, every species is observing the others closely, studying them. Humans, hybrids and aliens now live under the same roof, learn from each other, but without fully understanding one another. The episode ends with the Ocellus (the eye creature) taking its quarters in a sheep’s eye socket, and Wendy communicating with a newborn Xenomorph, still in its Chestburster form. Nothing good can come out of any of it, and we’re all here for it!
