Season 1, Episode 1 and 2: ‘Neverland’ and ‘Mr. October’
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.
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