Season 1, Episode 8: ‘The Real Monsters’
A few weeks ago, I was talking to a friend about where “Alien: Earth” was headed. Already things on Neverland Island had begun breaking down. The island’s owner, Boy Kavalier, was growing more loathsome with every second of screen time spent looking at his leering, Midas-rich mug. Aliens of several species had been eating people all season long, too.
Surely the boy genius had an appointment with a xenomorph in his future, no?
Half-jokingly, my friend wondered if the show’s creator, Noah Hawley, would deny viewers the catharsis they surely crave, a tactic he has been known to employ on some seasons of his frequently bleak crime anthology series, “Fargo.” Perhaps Kavalier’s face would go un-hugged, his chest un-bursted, his skull free of any alien-induced “rapid unscheduled disassembly.”
My buddy needn’t have worried. Sure, Kavalier is alive at the end of this episode, but he isn’t unscathed. He has wet his pants while looking a xenomorph in the mouth(s) and lived to tell about it only because his hybrid Lost Boys have decided to lock him up instead. His island is being invaded by his chief corporate rival and overrun by creatures as deadly as they are disgusting. His right-hand man has been turned into a large, expensive paperweight (more on that in a moment).
One by one, Kavalier and his sleazy employees and henchmen get their physical and/or psychological clocks cleaned — courtesy of the hybrid once known as Marcy Hermit, who can talk to the aliens and control computers the way a wizard casts spells.
The mandatory evacuation of Neverland in the face of the alien outbreak sets the stage for the big payback. As the evac begins, the Lost Boys are locked up in a holding cell that looks like something out of a 19th-century zoo. Under Marcy’s direction, the hybrids put their heads together and come to a couple of conclusions.
One, they do not like the way any of the grown-ups — human, synthetic or cyborg — have been treating them. Two, they’re powerful enough to do something about it. In fact, they’re powerful enough to take over the island completely.
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