'Alien: Earth' Episode 3 Is Creepy, Brainy, and Painfully Existential

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I remember first watching British actor Babou Ceesay in the overlooked martial arts series Into the Badlands. I was struck by his power. And I don't mean the power of his fists, but his icy glares and spoken words that have the cadence of a just-awoken subterranean monster. When you can simply stand just over someone's personal space and make them squirm, that's power. That's all to say: It's been thrilling to watch Cessay at work in Alien: Earth. In a show overrun with creatures that drool and bleed acid, Ceesay's predatory cyborg Morrow might just be the biggest threat yet.
"Metamorphosis," the third episode of Alien: Earth on FX and Hulu, finally lets its characters step out of that crashed ship and actually begin all the other story threads beyond Wendy (Sydney Chandler), Hermit (Alex Lawther), and Samuel Blenkin's Boy Kavalier. There's a lot going on here: the seeds of insurrection and sabotage, split loyalties amongst the Lost Boys, and even allusions to grooming. Ridley Scott's original Alien in 1979 was simple enough; it's a sci-fi horror thriller that asked, What if the darkness actually had a scary monster in it? Decades later, Alien: Earth complicates matters with transhumanist dread and intrigue. But it still has the good mind to let the monsters run amok.
Here's everything that went down in episode 3 of Alien: Earth.
Sibling Survival
Imagine being Hermit for a second. You spend years thinking your little sister is dead, only for her to turn up alive (!!!) in the body of a synthetic adult (???), and then she's trapped behind a steel door with the most hideous and vicious thing you've ever seen in your life (?!?!?). It would be a stressful day, to say the absolute least.
The episode starts with most of the Lost Boys, under the watchful eye of Kirsh (Timothy Olyphant), gathering the data on the ship's cargo of alien species. Nibs (Lily Newmark) has just survived a close encounter, and she is clearly changed by the ordeal. Thanks to her synthetic body, she might have survived—in this universe, aliens thrive on organic material—but with an organic mind, she's not walking away unscathed. Something has changed inside Nibs, even if her artificial body is unharmed.
"Why couldn't we keep our names?" Nibs asks aloud to Curly (Erana James), who stands within earshot and later demonstrates her utter devotion to Boy Kavalier. While Curly is on the side of Prodigy, Nibs is eager to question everything about herself and the other Lost Boys—and she's clearly not happy about the answers. Take note of her eyerolls and annoyed stares. When mutiny strikes on the ship, I've got gold on Nibs holding the flintlock.
And Nibs wouldn't be the only one. The loyal Kirsh suffers yet another indignity by Boy Kavalier, who embarrasses him for letting his "favorite," Wendy, venture on her own for her brother. "I thought you were supposed to be better than a man. But all I'm hearing are excuses," a most cavalier Boy Kavalier says. Kirsh might be programmed to do everything Kavalier says, but even he can take so much until he breaks.
That brings us to our main protagonists, occupying the most action-heavy plot of the episode. Their fight against a loose Xenomorph gives an otherwise story-dense hour some excitement in the early going. Wendy and Hermit are practically lambs to the slaughter, as if their environment—a butcher's locker with raw meat on hooks—wasn't on the nose already.
Eventually, things come down to a 1v1 between Wendy and the Xenomorph. If Kavalier sent his Lost Boys for a stress test, boy does he get one, as Wendy, impossibly, barely survives the violence. The alien is dead, but Wendy is messed up enough to essentially go offline, with that familiar "white blood" (which is actually circulatory fluid found in all synthetics, and is as synonymous to this franchise as eggs and dark corridors) spilling from her head wounds. The stress of the last few minutes leads Hermit to yak up his lunch and pass out, leaving both siblings on the floor with a Xenomorph carcass. Man, machine, and alien, splattered everywhere.
This conveniently leaves our heroes out of commission for the rest of the episode, until the very end, when Prodigy's experimentation on the retrieved species reveals an inexplicable psychic connection to Wendy. What actually happened inside that garage?
"When is a Machine Not a Machine?"
I'm not declaring Babou Ceesay an Emmy contender—not yet anyway. But you can't tell me his Morrow isn't an effective antagonist. The way he "plugs into" the ship's computer and makes a bunch of goofy lights blinking on a tube look so menacing, it's a testament to Cessay's skill that he can turn a dumb prop into a weapon.
The lone survivor of the Maginot, it turns out, has orders directly from a real flesh and blood Yutani, played by Sandra Yi Sencindiver. She is the CEO of Weyland-Yutani, who inherited her post from her grandmother, and with whom Morrow originally arranged business.
That Morrow relishes scaring the piss out of two children in adult-sized artificial trench coats is a treat. While still in the ship, Slightly (Adarsh Gourav) and Smee (Jonathan Ajayi), who the most like kids of the ensemble, wind up cornered by Morrow. Sensing there's more than meets the eye with them, Morrow slips a dissolvable piece of himself onto Slightly's neck before getting scared off by Kirsh.
Later, back to the island, Morrow "calls" Slightly from such a seedy, grimy BDSM club that I almost can't believe I'm watching this show on a Disney streaming service. Morrow doesn't get much out of Slightly, who is obviously bothered by this whole thing. Instead, it's part courtesy call, part warning; Morrow reveals he's literally inside Slightly's head, and will whip him into revealing Prodigy secrets for Weyland-Yutani. Once again, Alien: Earth lacks subtlety as the moans and cracks of leather whips surrounding Morrow illustrate a subtext of control and dominance—which is all the more messed up when you remember that Slightly is no older than twelve.
In the Race
"Metamorphosis" is by no means a difficult episode to understand or describe, but it is kind of all over the place with regards to all the table-setting it's doing for the rest of the season. But perhaps we can wrap up in a single word: Loyalties.
For Curly, her loyalty is to Prodigy and Boy Kavalier. Thankful she gets to "live forever" no matter what humanity she's actually lost, Curly now appears to want to pay it back with undying devotion. (To an extent. She won't tell Kavalier her own plans to rule the world, for example, because he'll "steal them." Kavalier admits: "True.") Eager to unseat Wendy as Kavalier's favorite of the Lost Boys, Curly has already taken it upon herself to be the most refined and sophisticated of the bunch. (She knows French now!) This also places her at odds with Wendy, who isn't loyal to anyone or anything except whatever keeps her close to her brother.
On the other side, there's everyone else. I mentioned Kirsh and Nibs, who are feeling the cracks of their invincible shells. I've also pointed out Slightly, who might turn against Prodigy albeit against his own will. But there's also Prodigy scientists (and married couple) Dame (Essie Davis) and Arthur Sylvia (David Rysdahl), who fear Kavalier is taking them off-track from their hybrid project in favor of the new discovery of species. Between wrangling the Lost Boys back to health (after jeopardizing them all) and having to accommodate alien creatures that no one on Earth knows the full biology of, the Sylvias might soon play a bigger role than their supporting parts imply.
The Alien movies have long shown that people can and will fall apart when death comes knocking at their door. There are monsters and there are monstrosities. Alien: Earth is slowly but surely weaving a story where it's never easy to tell them apart.
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