Alien: Earth Episode 8 Review - The Season 1 Finale

Alien: Earth arrives at the end of its first season with “The Real Monsters,” an episode title that means a little bit of everything. The show hasn’t made too much of a secret about who “The Real Monsters” will turn out to be, but just how wide a net the phrase throws still manages to be surprising; it’s a fitting end to a very good season of television.

Spoilers follow for Episode 8 of Alien: Earth

“The Real Monsters” is a tried and true bit of moralizing. From Frankenstein and King Kong to The Mist and The Iron Giant, by now we’re all very familiar with an anguished third act cry of “We were the monsters all along!” Twisting a familiar trope has been the story of Alien: Earth’s freshman season, though, and by my count, there are no fewer than nine ways to interpret the title of Noah Hawley’s Season 1 finale.

More: Alien: Earth Makes Right the Sins of One of the Worst Alien Movies

Possible Real Monster # 1 – The Real Monster

The episode opens with the xenomorph curiously sniffing Arthur’s (David Rysdahl) dead body and the crab laying claim to it, which, first of all, poor Arthur. All this guy wanted to do was help these children and advance the human condition in a clear-eyed, responsible way, and where did that get him? He’s an empty husk, dead on a beach that his old boss owns; that’s rough. I can say with certainty, as the one writing this review, Arthur will not be on this list of possible real monsters.

But really, these opening moments offer the first possible real monster: the traditional and most obvious xenomorph. It is by all non-metaphorical rationale the most real monster there is, and seeing it stalk through the jungle and blend in with the trees is a quick reminder (one we probably didn’t need) that this is a deadly creature on the prowl. Watching it poke around an empty gestation pod named Arthur is pretty brutal too. The haunted house vibes in the rest of the episode, complete with strobe lights and fog, are vintage 1979 Alien as well.

Possible Real Monster # 2 – Dame Sylvia

It was an interesting choice to reveal the children’s graves in last week’s episode, but having Dame Sylvia (Essie Davis) visit the burial site with flowers for each kid was so much more uncomfortable. The tombstones felt a little superfluous when the kids visited them last week, but to see Sylvia tending to them this way makes them feel even more performative. They serve a similar purpose of putting blanks in the rifles of all but one member of the firing squad, where there’s a bit of plausible deniability for each gunman to think, “maybe it wasn’t my bullet that killed them.” Here, it seems to be a reminder for Sylvia that the sick children she met before their transformation are in fact dead, and any guilt she might feel about experimenting on the Lost Boys is like a blank round in her rifle. While her intentions are nowhere near as explicitly self-interested as those of her boss, Boy Kavalier (Samuel Blenkin), that almost makes it worse. She’s talked herself into being okay with what’s going on in Neverland, and quietly become her own kind of monster in the process.

Possible Real Monster # 3 – Her Boss, Boy Kavalier

This guy has been a real prick the entire season, but is he “The Real Monster?” Absolutely; he sucks. The great trick director Dana Gonzales and writers Noah Hawley and Migizi Pensoneau pull with this episode is that watching the Boy Genius wallowing in defeat is not nearly as satisfying as I wanted it to be. There’s a wistfulness to him watching footage of Wendy taking her first steps, but ultimately he’s still pressing his luck and plotting his next move, too stubborn and arrogant to admit any sort of fault. But since all of this is literally his fault, he too is a real monster.

Also: Put some damn shoes on. He’s got a staff of full-time mold scrubbers, but still he walks around barefoot. That alone makes him a real monster before you even get to his God complex.

Possible Real Monster # 4 – The Other Aliens

They’ve been plotting for a few episodes now, at minimum acknowledging each other as fellow inmates, but by the finale, the other aliens have all been set loose. Left to their respective natures, the results are definitively monstrous. The way Noah Hawley and his team have slow-played the reveal of each specimen’s abilities, ending with the big maybe-a-plant tentacle pod in the finale, has been a real bright spot of this season. However, it’s hard to make a case for any of these being the real monster because they’re just doing what they do. The xenomorph is doing the same to a degree as well, but now that it’s following orders, that proves intent and is certifiably monstrous. The same is true for the eye-ctopus; as snuggly a character as it’s proven to be, its hyper-intelligence puts it in the running for sure. But I can’t imagine Noah Hawley titling an episode after something we already knew was a real, literal-sense monster.

Possible Real Monster # 5-9 – The Lost Boys

The aforementioned haunted house energy of “The Real Monsters” is very fun, and it’s the Lost Boys at the center of it. With the discovery of their own graves and the realization that they’re sort of like ghosts, the decision to haunt Neverland with Wendy’s dominion over electronics (And I think wifi? It’s unclear.) is one about which the kids are downright gleeful. Wendy and Nibs already have a taste for blood after last week’s carnage, but they’ve all turned a corner here in the finale. There’s a decidedly monstrous tinge to their behavior, even if it’s righteous.

The kinship with the xenomorph puts these kids in the same category as our first potential real monster as well; Hawley and company have built the story of these children in the mold of xenomorphs past. The rich and arrogant corporate bosses hope to harness a power they don’t understand or respect, then scramble to contain it as it matures and ultimately fall victim to its fully realized form. Ridley Scott told that story in 1979, and Alien: Earth did it again, only subbing a bunch of hybrids in for an H.R. Giger design.

I also can’t help but go back to the graves and the children’s inherent Frankenstein’s Monster-ness making them sort of double monsters. Dying-if-not-quite-dead bodies resurrected by an artificial spark of life stolen from the Gods is the defining quality of one of pop culture’s oldest and most enduring would-be monsters. Of course the pitchfork wielding villagers were – ahem – the real monsters of that story, but Alien: Earth does not let these kids off the hook. They’ve been used, studied, manipulated, and possibly murdered; they have every reason to fight back. It’s the casual nature with which Wendy tortures the Prodigy employees, however, like she’s flipping through Hulu trying to find what to watch next, that gets creepy.

Ridley Scott told this story in 1979, and Alien: Earth did it again, only subbing a bunch of hybrids in for an H.R. Giger design.

This is where I gradually come to my favorite part of this finale, not that it allowed me to be cute by structuring a review like a listicle, but that nobody comes out of this season without dirty hands. It makes their trajectory for a potential Season 2 that much more intriguing.

“The Real Monsters,” and the whole of Season 1, ends in a bit of a strange place. It could be a cliffhanger, as Yutani’s forces are arriving at Neverland imminently. The “Avengers assemble” moment with Wendy leading her brother, the Lost Boys, and two loyal xenomorphs into a future in which they rule might also be enough. If they don’t get another season of Alien: Earth, just knowing that the kids have come into their own, tightened their ranks, and are determined to fight for themselves could be a satisfying end to this story. Personally, I think it leans more towards cliffhanger, but as finales go in this day and age, playing it both ways at least to some extent is a necessity, and this one seems to be banking on at least one more season.

Credit Roll Needle Drop Check-In

The season closes to the shouting, early ’90s angst of Eddie Vedder with “Animal” by Pearl Jam. As though they’re giving me a break on reading too much into Godsmack lyrics, the second track off their sophomore album is speaking pretty clearly about the side Wendy has chosen.

I’d rather be

I’d rather be with

I’d rather be with an animal

All the Lost Boys spent at least some time this season weighing their options within Neverland. Some helped in the lab, some liked it there, and some defended the Boy Genius, but they never considered being a family unit unto themselves until the very end. Studied and poked and prodded in the same way as the specimens that crash landed eight episodes ago, they’re all on one team now, and they’re mad…and maybe super into grunge.

It’s also important to note there’s an angry goat on the cover of Pearl Jam’s Vs.; it’s not quite the eye-ctopus embedded in a sheep, but it’s giving very similar energy.

Coincidence? Maybe we’ll have to find out what it all means in season 2!