<em>Alien: Earth</em> Episode 2 Recap

Looking for a recap of Alien: Earth episode 1? We have you covered.

Alien-heads, I’ll spare you the rant I was working on following Alien: Earth’s premiere episode about how the series is only technically true to its namesake so far. Because we’re still pitter-pattering aboard a wrecked spaceship full of Xenomorphs—despite this Alien TV series technically taking place on Earth! Still, watching that sneaky death machine rip through humanity’s outdated meat bodies is sending new levels of dopamine highs to my brain.

Don't believe me? In the second half of Alien: Earth’s two-episode premiere, the Xenomorphs go hog wild at some party where wine-guzzling and wig-wearing fancy lads found their stomachs ripped out of their bellies and their faces smashed in by the alien’s secret inner mouth. I’m not sure what kind of bizarre Eyes Wide Shut activities were going on in there, but the Xenomorph racks up around twenty kills in a manner of seconds. Episode 2 is basically a hype video for the alien—and its the best this franchise has been in a long time. (And I loved Alien: Romulus.)

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Episode 2 first picks up with our medic, Joe (Alex Lawther), and his tactical team as they assess the damage from the Weyland-Yutani's spaceship's crash-landing on Earth. It’s yet another chance for an unassuming bunch of scientists and soldiers to come face-to-face with the Xenomorph. Just wait until they meet the eyeball with tentacles.

Joe is absolutely in over his head.

Joe and his crew immediately find the laboratory, where they spot a dead woman lying on the ground with her mouth open wide like she died at the dentist. "Looks like suffocation," Joe suggests. That’s probably a decent guess in a future where space travel accidents are more common, but this woman has clearly died in an otherworldly way. She’s bleeding from her eyes, for God’s sake! Then, Joe turns around and spots a guy on a surgical table with his whole stomach cut open. "He had some kind of foreign bodies lining his GI tract," he says. Alien fans, you know what that means. "What do you mean foreign?" one of Joe’s crew members asks. Of course, he responds, "Alien."

Afraid of the horrifying surgery death room, another team member is ready to roll out. "Let forensics Agatha Christie this shit," she jokes. This is the search and rescue team, and these two are clearly beyond saving. Fire rages as they make their way through the spaceship, choosing to jump one by one across a demolished staircase. It was only a matter of time before the Xenomorph struck, and the monster decides that this is the more vulnerable moment to pounce. Joe is the last one left to make the jump, and he almost falls to his death when the Xenomorph emerges from the shadows and bumps him down to a lower floor. He’s able to hide in an elevator as he attempts to make a distress call. "There’s a creature loose, approximately eight feet tall, and armored," he says. Sadly, he’s only met with static on the other end.

Can you tell that Boy Kavalier is one of my favorite characters so far?

Back at the remote Neverland Research Island, trillionaire Boy Kavalier (Samuel Blenkin) munches on an apple and revels in his AI achievement. "The fear with artificial intelligence is that we will build a smart machine that will build an even smarter machine," he says. "So on… until so long, us. What we’re doing here. You and me. We’re exploding human potential. It’s an intelligence race."

His strategy makes sense on a surface level: Beat the robots at their own game before they can wipe us all out. But what if they don’t stay human? These robot children are simply transferred consciousnesses into an AI brain, with not a speck of flesh or blood left in them. Other than the fact that their memories are real, they’re not any more human than the theme park attractions from Westworld.

Dame Silvia (Essie Davis), one of Prodigy’s leading analysts in this secret AI child program, warns Kavalier that she hopes this experiment does more for humanity than "make consumers immortal." But if you ask me, this technology reeks more of immortal robot soldiers and military contracts than the opportunity for humans to buy toilet paper and toothpaste for eternity. "It’s not about money," Kavalier replies. "You know what I really want? I want to talk to somebody smarter than me… I want to climb to the top of the mountain and debate with someone who blows my mind." And he thinks he might achieve that goal by putting sick children’s minds into robots’ bodies? Someone, please check and make sure that this guy actually possesses any intelligence.

Props to Blenkin, though. Kavalier is easily the most pretentious and punch-worthy "tech genius" since Jesse Eisenberg played Mark Zuckerberg in The Social Network. The way he holds his video tablet up with his feet during his business call with Weyland-Yutani’s CEO is diabolical. He’s like an evil chimpanzee who fell into a diamond mine.

What’s a child robot to do?

Series crator Noah Hawley takes some time in episode 2 while Joe is trapped in an elevator to flash back to his attempt to leave the planet in the past. He's likely thinking, If only! after that attack from the Xenomorph. He asked his employer to void the seven months remaining on his contract so that he can finish medical school on Mars. His request is denied. Wendy (Sydney Chandler), our main AI-human hybrid, is watching her brother plead to the robot kiosk on her tablet when she somehow hacks the network and briefly talks to him with a quote from one of their movies growing up: Ice Age: Continental Drift. I don’t know why Hawley went with the fourth Ice Age film over literally any other famous animated movie in the now-expanded Disney vault, but it’s funny imagining Continental Drift as a film that is reappraised a hundred years from now on a burning Earth because the film talked about global warming. Either way, Wendy somehow rewrites the robot’s code to deny her brother's leave and trap him on Earth so that she doesn’t lose the chance to meet him one day.

So, Wendy orchestrates the plan for her team to provide search-and-rescue help solely so that she could finally leave the island and find him. She’s accompanied by Kirsch (Timothy Olyphant), who has a secret side mission: collect as many foreign specimens and intelligence as he can to bring back for Kavalier at Prodigy.

The first non-terrestrial species they spot is some sort of giant hanging plant. Then, the group finds those disgusting blood-sucking bugs from the premiere. Honestly, the less I see of those monstrosities, the better. I already stray away from every video on TikTok about some massive creature I never knew about from Australia. Do not show me any more blood bugs.

Luckily, we make our way to the coolest monster in Alien: Earth outside of the Xenomorph: the sentient eyeball with octopus tentacles. I could talk about this creature all day. After crawling its way out of a zombified cat’s cranium, it lunges at Nibs (Lily Newmark) before one of her fellow Lost Boys can trap it under a bucket.

What’s this cyborg’s deal?

Back at the fancy party I was talking about up top, Joe enters the room and finds the bloody carnage. He’s almost eaten by a Xenomorph who crashes through a glass pane in slow motion before the cyborg Morrow (Babou Ceesay) blasts the creature with a stun gun. But since they’re on opposite sides of this corporation war, the Weyland-Yutani officer stuns Joe as well. Then, he wraps up the Xenomorph in special webbing like Spider-Man capturing the Green Goblin and carries him away. The alien escapes again, of course, but Hawley teases an intriguing development in its killing spree this time. The Xenomorph doesn’t attack Morrow—because he’s not human. Is this foreshadowing? Maybe our human AI hybrid children will have a leg up in this fight.

Meanwhile, Wendy finally reaches Joe and secretly reunites with her brother. He has no idea who she is, let alone that she’s a robot. Joe finds a rare Reggie Jackson-signed baseball from the 1977 World Series in the lavish apartment. It’s an interesting wrinkle for Joe; he’s a guy who knows baseball facts from over 120 years ago in his time. He reminisces about simpler times with his late father, not knowing that his sister just appeared. Then, he joins them on their quest to find the alien eggs.

I thought that the mystery might have dragged on a bit longer, but Slightly (Adarsh Gourav) reveals all their secrets right away. "When I was sick, the boy genius came to visit me, and he told Daddy that he could help me. But I had to go away," she eventually tells Joe. "So, they took me to live with Kirsh and Dame Silvia." Naturally, Joe doesn’t understand. I wouldn’t either. He doesn’t know who any of those people are. Instead, he’s stuck processing that his presumed-dead sister was taken from his home and experimented on. He quizzes her on niche stories that only she would know, and she passes with flying colors.

It just might be too late. The Xenomorph appears and grabs Joe before falling off the side of the broken apartment building. Wendy leaves to rescue him while "Stinkfist" by Tool plays in the credits. The premiere episode ending with Black Sabbath was rad, but I don’t think there’s a band more fit to close out an episode of Alien: Earth than Tool.

Good luck, Joe!

I have just one last scene to mention before we wait a whole week until episode 3. What is that man in the hazmat suit cleaning in the Neverland hallway? After a brief and unexplained appearance in the beginning of the premiere episode, the second installment shows him airbrushing a giant dent in the wall once again. Did I miss something? Did something terrible happen here and now he’s cleaning it up? Are there other experiments here in Neverland that failed horribly? Please, let me know your theories before Alien: Earth returns next week.