The nightmarish xenomorph, with its piston-like inner jaw and blood that could melt your face off, might be the “perfect organism” as succinctly described in the original Alien movie, but that hasn’t stopped subsequent franchise installments from attempting to one-up it on the horror scale.
We’ve gotten the acid-spitting “dragon” (alien that spawns out of a dog), the “predalien” (alien that spawns out of a well, predator), and last year’s Alien: Romulus even gave us the creepy “offspring”, the towering, lanky humanoid result of a foetus exposed to an alien pathogen.
While the xenomorph reappears in Alien: Earth, the sci-fi horror series goes much smaller in terms of creature design for the rest of its menagerie. And that’s precisely what makes them so unnerving.
Rather than the vast, terrifying unknowingness of space, Alien: Earth brings the horrors home, when the space vessel Maginot crash-lands in the (fictional) Prodigy City. On board are five alien organisms, each more shudder-inducing than the last, from a tick that latches on to victims’ necks and drains them of blood, to an octopus-like eyeball monster compact enough to burrow into creatures’ sockets, dislodge their eyeballs and then puppeteer their corpse.
“I started with this idea of, ‘If we have a new creature, what’s the most revolting function it can provide?’ Then we’ll design the creature around the function,” said the show’s creator Noah Hawley in an interview. Objective achieved.
When hybrids Nibs (Lily Newmark), Smee (Jonathan Ajayi), and Curly (Erana James) first spot it on the Maginot, it’s mangled and taken over the crew’s pet cat (the visual calls to mind Alien’s tomcat Jonesy at first, but tinges the image with sadness) that’s pulling itself forward by its front legs, its hind ones dragging uselessly behind.
When it bursts out of the cat’s socket, however, it moves quickly, skittering around on its sucker-tipped tentacles, leaping towards Nibs and attempting to latch on to her face before the group captures it. She emerges physically unharmed, but the way she views her body begins to change. She first prods at her own eyeball, then becomes convinced she’s pregnant—impossible, given she’s a child’s consciousness stored within a synthetic form.
Nibs later refuses to acknowledge that her body is “different;” an attempt to help her understand her inner mechanics only enrages her.
By the third episode, The Eye—officially known as Trypanohyncha Ocellus, or Species 64—is helpless, contained within a glass tube. But make no mistake, it’s always watching.
In Episode 4, Prodigy CEO Boy Kavalier (Samuel Blenkin) unleashes it on an unsuspecting captive sheep, which backs into the corner in fear. In a few seconds, however, The Eye has launched itself onto the animal’s face, scooped out its eyeball and nestled itself into the empty socket.
After a brief, frenzied struggle, the bloodied sheep thrashes around and then lays still on the laboratory floor, as though dead. It then picks itself up, however, one eye now noticeably oversized. When it stands on its hind legs and then drops back down, its dangling original eyeball comes fully unattached, plopping to the ground. If all this wasn’t unsettling enough, electrodes attached to the animal reveal that its problem-solving skills and concentration have increased.
“Once replaced in the eye socket, T. Ocellus takes over the ocular pathways to the brain, overriding the neuro-transmissions throughout the body. [It] has shown remarkable problem solving abilities at a near-human measure,” reads a computer screen in the Maginot. Not only is The Eye hostile, it’s smart.
The Alien franchise has long tapped into the horrors of a loss and violation of bodily autonomy, both by cruel, enslaving corporations and the aliens themselves (they don’t call them Facehuggers because they’re cuddly).
Few things conjure a devastating stomach-lurch sensation quite like discovering the form you inhabit no longer belongs to you, or that you don’t inhabit it alone. The reckless, shortsighted Boy brushes aside concerns that The Eye might escape, attempting to communicate with it as it peers out at them, unblinking. Surely this will end well.
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