In the middle of “Metamorphosis” Boy Kavalier and his loyal synthetic assistant Kirsh advise in a debate about whether it is wise to bring the creatures recovered from the rubble of Maginot to the headquarters of Prodigy in Neverland.
Kirsh does not wrongly point out that Kavalier risks a ten -year work on the technology with which the Lost Boys were created “for something new and shiny”. The answer disappointed Kavalier, the Shakespeare quotes and says that these monsters are “like an undiscovered country. And here you are – a scientist”.
From the decades of history of the “Alien” series, we know that Kirsh is almost certainly right and that it is a terrible idea to bring Xenomorph eggs-not to mention the changing eyeball and the other “Maginot” exemplaries-to a remote island base, which with a lot of security demands many fatalities and bring the expensive soles and their mighty boss in great danger becomes.
But the blind hybris of one of the most powerful people in the world is less important than what happens later in the scene: Kirsh has already deciphered the entire life cycle of the Xenomorphic and thus mastered something, for which the characters took much longer in several alien films.
First fight with the Xenomorph
On the one hand, it is probably a good idea from Noah Hawley and Co. not to leave the audience too much ahead of the characters. We all know how it works and it could be frustrating to wait several episodes for the two geniuses Kirsh and Kavalier finally catch up.
On the other hand, the quick and almost casual nature with which Kirsh presents its findings is characteristic of an awkward episode, which seems to hurry to accommodate many things, especially when it comes to Xenomorphic.
We continue where we stopped: Wendy dipped deep into the intestine of the crash site to save her brother from the Xenomorph. What follows should theoretically be exciting, since the series takes its most dangerous monster against a figure, which is basically a superhero.
But the staging of the struggle is awkward and seems to show himself to protect Wendy, who is super strong and quick, but does not have an apprenticeship or the killer instinct of your opponent. In several places, it seems clear that the stinging tail of the alien Wendy could rip off within seconds, but it is not used. And finally she defeats and kills him outside of the image section after leaving Hermit back while fighting in a elevator shaft.
Similar to Morrow last week, the Xenomorph was effortlessly stunned and captured, the early act here illustrates the challenge of the “Alien: Earth” when it comes to building a continuous series about a species that only lives to kill others so that it can reproduce, and which is also incredibly powerful and difficult to kill.
In order to come back to Noah Hawley’s comment that he sees the films as a story about the White Walkers, while he wants this series that this series is “Game of Thrones”, you have the feeling that the Xenomorph is the Trojan horse for the other stories that he really wants to tell in this universe.
This is largely okay, since there are many fascinating ideas in this series, many of which are implemented well in later episodes. But this episode begins deeply in the familiar alien territory and ends with Kirsh tries to breed a new Xenomorph by planting the seed of the Facehugger into the lungs, which has been operational. Therefore, it is much more difficult this week to ignore all of this to the title figure.
Jealousy and other human emotions
After the first Xenomorph was killed and Wendy and Hermit are out of action after the brutal struggle, the focus of “metamorphosis” is on the rest of the group – especially on the other Lost Boys. Wendy was the first of them and is so obviously preferred by Boy Kavalier that he put everyone else in danger because she wanted to help. Some of the others take the evil. NIBS is jealous that Wendy took the only normal name, and still seems to be traumatized by her encounter with the eyeball creature. Curly doesn’t like playing the second violin and tries to convince Kavalier that she is the special one.
Slightly and Smee have an encounter with Morrow on the Maginot, and because they have no inhibitions, they reveal that they are real people with synthetic bodies. Later Morrow somehow succeeds in communicating directly with Slightly and claiming to be his friend, although we know that he is only interested in getting the stolen property of Weyland-Yutani back. After being away from Earth for 65 years, Morrow no longer has a family – not even the daughter of whom he tells Slightly – so that the cargo of the ship is now all his life.
All of this is necessary to build the world for the remaining stories of the season after the first two episodes have turned so much around the siblings. But it cannot always hide the hurry with which one wants to pass from all these preparations to the coming larger stories.