‘Alien: Earth' Episodes 1 and 2 Recap: Gross Encounters
The year is 2120, and the planet is controlled by five gigantic, unaccountable corporations? Perhaps the 'Earth' part of 'Alien: Earth' doesn't sound so far-fetched. The 'Alien' element, however, remains gloriously alien. With its chitinous black body and projectile jaws, the creature that burst out of John Hurt's chest and into the public consciousness in 1979 has, at long last, arrived on both our planet and the small screen.
When this prequel series, created by Noah Hawley, begins, the newest conglomerate on the block is Prodigy, the creation of a genius inventor with the Pynchonesque name Boy Kavalier (Samuel Blenkin). He's the youngest trillionaire in history and a glib sociopath who sees a mass casualty event as an unexpected but welcome business opportunity.
He is also the Dr. Frankenstein behind the latest techno-organic life form in town: hybrids, which are nearly indestructible adult-size artificial bodies into which the consciousnesses of dying human children are transferred. We're told only that children's minds are flexible enough to withstand the procedure, and since synthetic bodies don't grow, those minds have been stuffed into grown-up forms. This way, they can mentally and psychologically progress through adolescence and adulthood without looking like the Robot Little Rascals in the end. (This will also help the show avoid any 'Stranger Things'-style aging issues going forward.)
The procedure's pioneer is a sweet young cancer patient named Marcy (Florence Bensberg), who is both the first of her kind and the show's protagonist. She rechristens herself Wendy when her mind is transferred because she feels her new body (in which she is portrayed by Sydney Chandler) 'looks like a Wendy.'
Lucky for her, the so-called Boy Genius is very big on 'Peter Pan,' so 'Wendy' suits him just fine. Kavalier's research island, like Michael Jackson's ranch, is named Neverland. He calls his initial batch of hybrids 'the Lost Boys' and gives them the names of Peter Pan's gang in the J.M. Barrie book. There's also a Smee, who was Captain Hook's first mate and not a Lost Boy at all, but don't let's split hairs.
Dumping children's minds into adult bodies and hoping for the best sounds preposterously unethical, and likely illegal, even in a completely corporatized world. Indeed, Wendy and her fellow Lost Boys are forbidden from having any further contact with their families, a price for remaining alive that all of them are just old enough to be willing to accept.
Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Yahoo
16 minutes ago
- Yahoo
Fans Are Saying They've Never Seen Taylor Swift Be So "Open" And "Intimate" With A Partner Like She Is With Travis Kelce, And My Heart Might Truly Burst
Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce are making fans around the world blush after watching their new viral interview. After countless requests, Taylor finally appeared on her boyfriend's podcast, New Heights, alongside his cohost and brother, Jason Kelce. This marked Taylor's first-ever podcast appearance, and, boy, did she make a lasting impression on audiences. The multi-Grammy winner laughed, cried, and gushed while chatting about an array of topics like reclaiming the masters to her records, falling for Travis, life after the Eras tour, details about her 12th studio album The Life of a Showgirl, the album artwork, baking, and so much more. It was a jam-packed conversation, which is why it lasted for more than two hours. Related: During the discussion, viewers couldn't help but notice how "comfortable and safe" the "Fortnight" singer appeared in the interview. They noted the vulnerability in her responses and the effortless way Travis and Taylor would flirt with each other. So much so, that at one point during the interview while they were discussing their relationship, Jason jokingly felt like he was intruding on something very intimate and asked, "Should I leave?" "This podcast has done a lot for me," Taylor exclaimed. "It got me a boyfriend. Ever since Travis decided to use it as his personal dating app about two years ago." If you didn't know, Travis attended Taylor's Kansas City Eras show in 2023, hoping to meet the star, but when he didn't, he publicly "threw a man tantrum" about it on his podcast as he bluntly admitted that he wants to date her. 'It was such a wild, romantic gesture to just be like: 'I wanna date you,'' she said. '[It] felt more like I was in an '80s John Hughes movie, and he was standing outside of my window with a boombox saying: 'I want to date you! Do you want to go on a date with me? I made you a friendship bracelet.' I was like: 'If this guy's not crazy, this is sort of what I've been writing songs about wanting to happen to me since I was a teenager.'' Fans loved how open and transparent she was being, adding that they'd never seen Taylor like this before. Related: Here's what some people said online: "I don't think the Kelce brothers realize what a true gift this was for fans. I've never heard Taylor speak so openly and candidly for so long." —@chemistryflavored "This podcast made me realize I dont think ive ever heard taylor talk this much or in a natural setting ever." —@laurenbartley425 Related: "The best thing about this entire podcast isn't even the album announcement, it's just seeing Taylor so freaking happy and comfortable with some who clearly cares about her so much!" —@GOTGames "Full disclosure, I was a bit annoyed that this sports podcast was going to have a pop singer on it. I was going to skip it. I have NEVER been this engrossed in anything for 2 hours in my entire life. Friends, is it crazy for a 54-year-old dude to be googling, 'What is a Swiftie and how can I become one?' I laughed, I got angry (at her not owning her music), and I got choked up. Seeing two people genuinely in love (when all we heard all season is this relationship isn't real, it's a marketing scheme, etc., etc.) gave me a feeling I did not know I could have. I've always thought the Kelce brothers were just dudes with dope jobs. Like they would chug beers with you if you met them. They don't act like famous people. Taylor seems the same. This showed ALL of their human sides and I loved every minute of it!! I am now a Taylor Swift fan as well. Well done girl!!!" —@sdreed70 "The way Travis just SO intently listens to her when she —@samanthaclapp "Getting Taylor 'Professional Yapper' Swift on a podcast that won't have trick questions and with people she's comfortable with is what the fans needed." —@bananak1o "It feels like I'm not suppose to be hearing this conversation. It's so natural and so safe like we're all sitting in their kitchen listening to her talk. All 1.3 million of us." —@jrraiderscheer3760 Related: "We really owe a lot to Travis. We never get to see this side of Taylor. He's made her feel safe in a way that she can share this way." —@sarahgondos "As a die hard Taylor fan since 2008 I'm so shocked to see her like this. I honestly thought we'd never see her this candid and especially not with a boyfriend, talking so openly about their relationship. I'm in awe. But then this made it so clear that this is what she always wanted, she never wanted secrecy and crazy borderline obsession with privacy, she wanted this, she'd just never found a man that had loved her enough and loved her right. I'm so happy for her, words can't explain." —@isasch123 And with more than 30K comments on the video, the majority of them looked like these. To see why, you can watch Taylor's full New Heights interview below: Happy for both Taylor and Travis! Also in Celebrity: Also in Celebrity: Also in Celebrity: Solve the daily Crossword
Gizmodo
17 minutes ago
- Gizmodo
‘Star Trek' Is Born on ‘Strange New Worlds'
A few weeks ago in Strange New Worlds' up-and-down third season, 'A Space Adventure Hour' delivered a deeply unsubtle paean to the creation of Star Trek. This week, Strange New Worlds does much the same: but this time the birth of Star Trek is within the text itself, making for a much more interesting lens on the birth of an the moment that it opens, it becomes clear that 'The Sehlat Who Ate Its Tail' (named for a Vulcan idiom that Spock uses later on) is not going to be a typical episode of Strange New Worlds. Not in that 'oh, something's going to be kooky and fun!' way that you might expect after last week's dire-stakes episode and the season's general back-and-forth in tone swaps so far, but because we do not open on the Enterprise, or with her crew at all: instead, on the personal log of Commander Kirk, aboard the U.S.S. Farragut. At which point the planet the Farragut was monitoring—and Kirk was butting heads with his captain, V'Rel (Zoe Doyle), over beaming down and surveying—explodes. Just like last week, everyone immediately locks in, especially Jim, when V'Rel is incapacitated by the extreme damage caused by the Farragut's proximity to an exploding planet. But things go somehow even more badly when, of course, the Enterprise beams to respond to the Farragut's distress signal—beaming over an assist team of Nurse Chapel, Scotty, Spock, and Uhura. As everyone races into action and Kirk begins slowly realizing that he's getting the command experience he's been waiting for at the worst possible time, the vessel responsible for destroying a planet in a single blast, a massive, tendriled junk ship comes flying along and gobbles the Enterprise up before promptly warping away. The Farragut is alone, and barely holding together, let alone capable of pursuit. It's operating on a skeleton crew, most beamed away to Enterprise before its abduction. And James T. Kirk is staring at a captain's chair, with Mr. Spock, Mr. Scott, Uhura, and Chapel at his side. If 'A Space Adventure Hour' was an episode talking about the metanarrative about the birth of Star Trek as a television show, then suddenly, you realize: this is an episode about the birth of Star Trek, the team that we know will go on to appear in the original series. At long last, the crucible that will one day forge one of the franchise's defining heroes has begun. So it's great then that 'The Sehlat Who Ate Its Tail' is really an episode about rocking Kirk's shit for 45 minutes. The episode splits between the Farragut and the captured Enterprise, disabled in the interior of the junk ship as its systems are drained of power, effectively doing one of Strange New Worlds' 'disaster on a spaceship' episodes twice over. Kirk has to rally a group of officers who don't really know, and don't really trust, him as he tries to figure out what kind of a leader he is in time to rescue Enterprise and stop this junker ship on a collision course with destroying another world called Sullivan's Planet. Pike, meanwhile, has to deal with shadowy infiltrators sucking his ship dry, a ticking time bomb that will kill both the Enterprise crew and the Farragut's wounded. The stuff aboard Enterprise is fun and definitely tense, even if it is also definitely the b-plot of the episode. Pike and La'an have the mystery of the junkers to solve, Carol Kane gets to ham it up and get everyone to wire up rotary telephones to overcome the ship's power loss and communications blockage. There's intrigue and whimsy, but still, the focus of 'The Sehlat Who Ate Its Tail' is clear: this is the making of Kirk's moment. It gives Wesley material that, for the most part up to now, he's lacked the chance to chew on. Most of Kirk's appearances on Strange New Worlds have been technicalities: alternate realities, through the lens of episodes like the musical or 'Space Adventure Hour' and its holodeck metanarrative (thankfully, Wesley does not go hard on the Shatnerisms as he was encouraged to then). This is Kirk, the man who is going to become Captain Kirk, and he has been thrust into an incredible challenge, with a team that he doesn't know yet and arguably before he may even have really wanted to be in it. Thankfully, Strange New Worlds realizes that it's important to not suddenly supercharge this character into the man that we already know. We see elements of the man we will come to love in the original Star Trek, his braggadocio and his desire to always challenge and take risks, but crucially, we also see the deeply human elements of Kirk that people often forget in their memories, especially amplified here in his younger self. This is a Kirk that doubts, and loses his cool, and is allowed to react to the stress of the situation he's found himself in, and react poorly, and fairly so given the circumstances. Likewise, this gives the proto-TOS crew that he finds himself leaning on to get the Farragut even remotely close to shipshape a chance to react to this Kirk, and begin to feel out the seeds of what will become their relationships. It's fun to watch Martin Quinn's Scotty absolutely hate working with this guy, a thickheaded commander who wants to push systems an engineer knows can't be pushed, just as it's fun to watch Kirk's relationship with Uhura, and the trust they already established together last season, flourish even further as that bond deepens. It is, of course, also fun to watch the early days of Spock and Kirk's understanding of each other begin to coalesce. That becomes crucial here when the stress does get to Kirk when his plan to juice Farragut's engines almost literally blows up in his and Scotty's faces, leaving the ship dead in the water between the junker ship and its next target at Sullivan's planet, which is home to a pre-warp civilization. Kirk blows up, needing to get off the bridge, and his more senior fellows among the Enterprise crew realize that the young commander is in a very precarious moment. It takes Spock confronting and comforting him, removed from an emotional response to the stress everyone is feeling, to get Kirk to rearticulate and find the confidence he needs to deal with the setbacks and pressure the situation has demanded of him. It's a wonderful moment between the two as they start feeling each other out, how comfortable they can be even in this nascent phase of their relation, what boundaries there still are, and what can be bonded over to create a friendship that we know will span lifetimes. Again, crucially, Strange New Worlds understands here that it cannot just speedrun these characters into their original Trek selves just yet. We can see glimmers of those bonds, but just as it's vital for this episode to give us a Kirk that is flawed and still learning, and willing to both make and accept his mistakes, it's just as vital that we come out of this episode feeling that the crew that will one day serve aboard the Enterprise together are still not yet that crew. They're just closer than they were an episode before. This is the most important thing 'The Sehlat Who Ate Its Tail' arguably needed to nail, and so when the day is saved by some Kirkian ingenuity (and some assists from Scotty, Uhura, Spock, and Chapel) to free the Enterprise and destroy the junker ship before it can consume Sullivan's Planet, we can perhaps forgive that the last twist the episode makes doesn't quite land as effectively as the rest of it does. Amid the destruction of the junker ship, Spock manages to confirm, right as Pike and La'an do, ridding the Enterprise of its last infiltrator, that the mysterious foe they faced was a colony ship of 7,000 human beings, life signs blinking out as the junker ship tears apart. It turns out, as the Enterprise discovers during debrief, the vessel was, in its core form, a ship sent from Earth just after the end of World War III, staffed with scientists who believed that Earth may not be able to recover, and humanity's hope lay in the stars. Whatever happened to them in the generations since to transform their descendants into monstrous, planet-and-ship-devouring scavengers is left unsaid as Kirk's first victory in the chair is tinged with the discomfort that he is responsible for having to have slaughtered thousands of people to save millions, and both the Farragut's interim commander and the Enterprise crew find themselves humbled by the revelation. While it does again build on this episode as not being about the establishment of the legend of Jim Kirk but the flawed and deeply human man that he will come to be (and always was beneath our memory of that legend), what sits as odd in this final twist is the sudden swerve Strange New Worlds has to take to serve it. Would the climax of the episode have labored this consternation if this crew of disenfranchised descendants were early Vulcans, or Romulans, or another Federation species? What if they were some other alien species that we either knew or didn't know? Or is the point meant to be that our deeply human heroes are now touched and aggrieved at the revelation that they have had to kill other humans, specifically, before they could kill them? After all, up to the moment of this revelation 'The Sehlat Who Ate Its Tail', both through its characters and the narrative itself, framed these mysterious junkers as explicitly monstrous, just as this season did with the Gorn in its premiere. They had destroyed worlds, killed countless crews of ships whose vessels were consumed in its growth, and were on the precipice of indiscriminately extinguishing a population in the millions. The fact that it suddenly wants Kirk and the rest of the characters to wrestle with remorse because the perpetrators of these atrocities were human raises some uncomfortable questions about who and what gets to be treated with sympathy on the show that the episode simply does not have time to answer, saving this moment for its very end. But again, for the worse this time, that was never meant to be the focus of this episode. From beginning to end, 'The Sehlat Who At Its Tail' is about the genesis of the unit that would go on to become the original Star Trek, forging them together amid a grand trial. There, at least, it delivers one of the season's best episodes yet, albeit in a slightly compromised form. Want more io9 news? Check out when to expect the latest Marvel, Star Wars, and Star Trek releases, what's next for the DC Universe on film and TV, and everything you need to know about the future of Doctor Who.
CNN
18 minutes ago
- CNN
Climate pollution is making GPS and communications satellites even more vulnerable to solar storms
Satellites, including those used for GPS and communications, will face greater risks in coming decades during solar-triggered geomagnetic storms because of the effect climate pollution has on Earth's atmosphere, a new study found. The increasing volume of planet-warming carbon dioxide in the upper atmosphere is likely to make the air less dense, while geomagnetic storms have the opposite effect: The ensuing rapid changes in density as a result could cause serious troubles for satellite operations. This study, published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, comes at a time when the world is growing more dependent on satellite networks for everything from internet access to navigation, as well as military applications. Geomagnetic storms occur when charged particles from the Sun interact with the Earth's upper atmosphere. Their most visible impact is the auroras that light up the sky with green, purple and pink light. But strong storms can wreak havoc on satellite operations and communication. They can increase how dense the air is in these thin upper layers, making it difficult for satellites to maintain their speed and altitude and potentially make them sink, cutting down on their operational lifetimes. Geomagnetic storms later this century that are of similar intensity to those today will cause bigger spikes in atmospheric density because Earth's upper atmosphere will be less dense overall, the researchers found, using a supercomputer to model changes in the entirety of Earth's atmosphere. 'For the satellite industry, this is an especially important question because of the need to design satellites for specific atmospheric conditions,' lead author Nicholas Pedatella of the National Center for Atmospheric Research told CNN. A less dense atmosphere means satellites in the future would experience less drag, and that could lengthen their lifespan — and would also exacerbate the problem of more space junk in low Earth orbit, Pedatella said. Scientists already knew that the upper atmosphere is likely to become less dense as the climate warms, with a lower concentration of non-ionized particles such as oxygen and nitrogen. It's partly because of how higher concentrations of carbon dioxide affect temperatures in the upper atmosphere, which in turn affects the density of the air. But this study breaks new ground by showing how much the atmosphere's density could change during strong geomagnetic storms. The researchers used last May's strong geomagnetic storm as a case study. At that time, a series of powerful coronal mass ejections from the Sun interacted with the Earth's atmosphere, disrupting and even damaging satellites and leading to brilliant displays of the Northern Lights unusually far south. The scientists analyzed how the atmosphere would respond to the same event in different years: 2040, 2061 and 2084. To perform the experiment, they used a supercomputer that can simulate the entirety of the Earth's atmosphere, including the thinner, upper layers, to show how changes in the composition of the lower levels can alter the characteristics at much higher altitudes. The researchers found that by later this century, the upper atmosphere would be 20% to 50% less dense at the peak of a solar storm similar to the 2024 event. The relative change would be greater, going from a doubling of density during such an event to a potential tripling. Such a rapid throttling up of atmospheric density could damage critical satellite networks and thereby cause problems for society at the Earth's surface. The bigger the spike, the bigger the impact on a satellite's orbit, Pedatella told CNN: 'If you have a really big increase in density, then the satellite kind of comes down closer to Earth.' The satellites being designed today need to take these climate change-related impacts into account, rather than basing their engineering on historical calculations, he added. 'You would think, 'Okay, for this magnitude of a (geomagnetic) storm, I would expect this density response.' But in 30 years from now, that magnitude of storm will have a potentially different magnitude of response,' Pedatella said.
