Sydney Chandler on Wendy’s Dangerous Epiphany in <i>Alien: Earth</i>’s Season 1 Finale

Spoilers below.

When Alien: Earth began, it looked like a survival story: humans battling monsters in dim corridors, tangled jungles, and sun-bleached shores. Over eight episodes, however, that premise warped into a more psychological, more mythic story about children transformed by betrayal, loss, and wounds that refused to heal. By the finale, the question isn’t just whether the humans or monsters survive, but who the real monsters actually are.

In the episode, “The Real Monsters,” Wendy (Sydney Chandler) is no longer tethered to anyone and more powerful than ever. Joe (Alex Lawther), her brother whose memory carried her across oceans, reveals his capacity for violence when he turns a gun on Nibs (Lily Newmark). Boy Kavalier (Samuel Blenkin) and Dame Sylvia (Essie Davis), once seen as protectors, are exposed as manipulative figures who are willing to risk children’s lives in their pursuit of immortality. The aliens, ironically, remain the only constant: predators without pretense.

Creator Noah Hawley’s Alien: Earth inherits the franchise’s unease with humankind’s hubris, especially our attempts to control the unknown. But his vision turns inward. In his adaptation, the threat isn’t just what breaks into (or out of) the body; it’s how the body is manipulated into a tool for power.

In Wendy’s case, she now wields the ability to communicate with the aliens and bend them to her will, with terrifying calm. “There’s a lot of power and authority that comes with stillness, especially when your body is a lethal weapon,” Chandler tells ELLE over Zoom. “It’s just her, and she’s more than enough.”

That stillness extends to her bond with Joe, which is now complicated by his act of violence. Love pulls her close, but hurt pushes her back. “She’s fighting internally with the frustration she feels towards him, because she does love him, and you can’t categorize that type of feeling,” she explains. “I think at the end, she’s come to accept him for who he is. … But it’s a rocky relationship.”

Sydney Chandler and Alex Lawther in Alien: Earth.

Chandler’s offscreen bond with Lawther made those moments convincing. She recalls meeting him while performing stunt work, holding two fake knives in hand, and instantly thinking of him as a brother. “We found this comfort really quickly. Siblings have such a close spatial relationship. You lick each other’s elbow when you’re kids, or you fight or scratch,” she continues. “We were able to find that proximity really quickly.” To deepen the connection, the actors wrote letters in character, left them under each other’s doors, and traded drawings and voice notes.

The finale builds through stark, unforgettable images. Arthur’s body lies in the sand. Sylvia murmurs at Marcy’s grave before a xenomorph breathes down her neck. Now imprisoned in a holding cell, the hybrid children question who and what they’ve become. Wendy looks into the surveillance camera and declares they no longer need to fear—it’s their captors who should be afraid. When she speaks in the aliens’ guttural tongue, a distant creature answers.

Wendy, now fully in control of the facility’s systems, snaps her fingers and the cell door grinds open. She frees the other hybrids and assigns them missions: find Boy Kavalier, Dame Sylvia, Kirsh (Timothy Olyphant), and Morrow (Babou Ceesay). At one terminal, she casually overrides a security protocol, releasing a contained xenomorph that rips through a squad of armed soldiers—another gesture of her newly realized power delivered with eerie ease.

Essie Davis as Dame Sylvia.

Her next encounter with Joe becomes a rescue. Boy Kavalier unleashes a grotesque eye-creature designed to overtake Joe’s body, but Wendy crashes through the glass just before it strikes. She collides with Atom Eins (Adrian Edmondson), one of the elite enforcers, in a punishing brawl filmed over nearly three weeks of night shoots. Chandler felt like she was “christened by fire” working on that scene. “It was a marathon,” she says. “Like 2 A.M. to 5 A.M. doing sprints and jumps, and then you do it again the next day. … It accelerated my heart rate. I’m sweating. I’m really doing the [stunts], and that helps so much.”

In the aftermath, Wendy and Joe argue over what the aliens represent. Joe sees predators; Wendy sees an honest reflection of herself. She doesn’t align with the aliens out of loyalty, but out of recognition. “They’re truthful to their natural nature,” Chandler explains. “They are not trying to manipulate or change their hard-wiring.” In acknowledging their rawness, Wendy finds clarity. In one of the finale’s most intimate moments, she admits to Joe: “I don’t know what I am. I’m not a child. I’m not a grown-up. I’m not Marcy. I’m not Wendy. And I can’t be what everyone wants me to be.”

The line lands somewhere between a confession and warning, but it’s another step in her journey of self-acceptance. Here, Wendy is “speaking such honest truth,” Chandler says. “She doesn’t have all the answers, and that’s okay.” In the Alien films, Ripley’s (Sigourney Weaver) arc was about protecting humanity from the creature, but Wendy’s is about letting go of the idea that she must be seen as human at all. She doesn’t want to kill the monster; she’s learning to embrace what she’s become. In refusing to define herself, Wendy becomes something no one else can define either, which makes her dangerous.

The episode’s climax reshapes the show’s mythology. In the main hall, Wendy summons a xenomorph that tears through soldiers while Joe subdues Boy Kavalier. Later, with the adults locked in a holding cell, Wendy circles them with deliberate calm. The Peter Pan references that once felt whimsical now turn sinister. She sees through the fantasy of eternal boyhood. In a few quiet words, she dismantles Boy Kavalier’s long-held fantasy that he’s Peter Pan and the hybrid children are his Lost Boys. He wasn’t the eternal boy—he was a “mean, angry little man” clinging to a lie. “She’s able to say ‘checkmate,’” Chandler adds. “Now you’re entering my game, and my game is going to be very different.”

The true meaning of the finale’s title shifts. Who are the “real monsters”? While Wendy may now be the biggest threat, everyone fits the description, according to Chandler. “All of the adults have done horrible wrongs, then you have a child who is allowed to murder, and then you have an alien who is the epitome of an apex monster,” she explains. It’s an unsettling answer: The monsters are already here, and they’re everywhere.

When Wendy says in the final moments, “Now, we rule,” her words land with the weight of an undeniable truth. Though viewers can’t see who she was speaking to, Chandler says the line is aimed directly at Boy Kavalier. “If the camera was spun around, you would see that she’s holding eye contact with him that whole time,” the actress explains. “Boy Kavalier finally met his cerebral match, and he was looking for that the entire season.”

Chandler knew the episode’s final close-up mattered. “That’s it. Do not screw the last frame of this. Show up,” she remembers telling herself, grounding the moment in physical presence and resolve. Watching the scene later with her mother, it hit differently. “I got goosebumps,” she continues. “The first thing I said out loud to my mom was, ‘She’s so much cooler than me.’ It brings a finality to season 1, but it’s also such a launch pad for what comes next. She does leave you with this sense she could go either way. She’s extremely dangerous, and I don’t know how conscious she is of that, which is scary.”

The Alien franchise has always been about power: who wields it, how it shifts, and what it destroys. Alien: Earth sharpens that theme with generational clarity. The old guard has fallen. The new one doesn’t ask for permission. By the end, Wendy’s story isn’t about escape or survival, it’s about refusing to be defined. In that transformation, she became something larger, and infinitely more dangerous, than anyone anticipated. She’s rewriting the rules now, and the danger lies in who will follow—and how they’ll handle the new world she’s created.