Season 1, Episode 7: ‘Emergence’
“Alien: Earth” does something I’ve never seen another show do before with its opening titles.
The sequence has four component parts: the title itself, which slowly coheres from individual letter strokes; Jeff Russo’s score, which slowly crescendos from creepy and ominous into darkly triumphant; an alien body, its H.R. Giger carapace shot as lovingly as a luxury car in a commercial; and snatches of footage from the last episode, concisely showing us what happened and to whom. Hiding your “previously on” in the opening credits is the kind of ruthless efficiency even a xenomorph could appreciate.
That last bit is a joke, obviously: Not even the Queen Alien from James Cameron’s film seems sophisticated enough to have strong opinions about whether the “Sopranos” opening credits are superior to those of “Cheers,” or what have you. But writing it gives me pause. What do xenomorphs “appreciate”? Are they intelligent enough to formulate likes and dislikes? Or are they bereft of any comforts and devoid of any desires but killing? After this episode, it feels like we’re a little closer to getting an answer.
The action is divided primarily between two separate attempts to get off Boy Kavalier’s Neverland island, before either his security forces or his monsters triumph. We start with Slightly, the child-synthetic hybrid who is being blackmailed by Morrow into stealing a xenomorph in order to save his family. This results in one of the most disturbing visuals in the franchise’s history: a human with a facehugger attached, hidden beneath a child’s bed. There really is a monster under the bed, it turns out, but in this case the child put it there himself.
After explaining his plight to a horrified Smee, Slightly gets his pal to help him smuggle the unconscious body out of the facility. They receive aid from an unlikely source: their monitor, Kirsh, who sees full well what they’re doing and then offers them better directions to their rendezvous point with Morrow on the beach. (Put a pin in this point, as we’ll return to it momentarily.)
But, as Slightly whines to Morrow later, everything goes wrong. The facehugger detaches itself and Arthur wakes up, his memory about his circumstances foggy. When the boys concoct a story of saving him from a gas leak, he actually thanks them for saving his life, which seems to make the guilt-stricken Slightly almost sick to his stomach. Even when he regains enough of his memory to realize something has gone very wrong and that the hybrids are lying to them, he promises with obvious sincerity that he’ll help them out of whatever jam they’re in, because he loves them.
Then he starts puking up blood and a chestburster erupts through his rib cage, killing him. The creature slithers off into the jungle. Slightly and Smee show up to meet Morrow — who rises out of the sea with his heavily armed security team like monsters themselves — with nothing but a corpse that promptly gets dumped into the water to vanish from our story, and the world. If anyone on that island deserved better, it was Arthur.
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The post ‘Alien: Earth’ Episode 7 Recap: My Pet Monster appeared first on New York Times.
