The penultimate episode of the FX science fiction thriller series, Alien: Earth, is as exciting and explosive as the rest of the season has been, and it sets up an even bigger finale next week. Last time out, Slightly had successfully managed to get a human, Arthur Sylvia, infected by the facehugger alien, just as he had been instructed by Morrow. Now, he makes his way towards the beach, where he had been told to take the infected man to hand him over to Morrow to ensure that his mother would be safe. Slightly’s actions had also led to utter chaos at the Prodigy facility, which is now contained in Alien: Earth episode 7, while an unexpected ending threatens to change the dynamics of the central characters altogether.
Spoiler Alert
How does Smee get caught up in Slightly’s plan?
From the beginning of Alien: Earth, each of the hybrids made by Prodigy, forming the group called the Lost Boys, had been close to each other in pairs, meaning that each of them had one hybrid they were closest to among the other members. Perhaps Wendy is the one true exception, as she is not terribly close to any of her fellow hybrids, and yet maintains a friendly relationship with all of them. For Slightly, this best friend had always been Smee, whose childish innocence and personality made him a good match for the young man. Now, at the beginning of Alien: Earth episode 7, Smee senses something odd about his best friend, and particularly about how Slightly has not left his room for many hours now. Naturally, he goes to check on his friend and almost barges into the room to see what Slightly has been hiding from him.
Meanwhile, Slightly had been spending every minute worrying about what he had just done, the consequences he might face for his actions, and also the horrific things that Morrow would do to his mother and other family members if he cannot execute the next stages of the plan. His only companion was the strange and eerie whirring and gurgling noise made by Arthur and the facehugger alien completely covering his face. Slightly had even tried to feed Arthur a liquid to keep him nourished and alive for the next steps, but it had not worked, as the alien only wound tighter around his face, not allowing the liquid to drip into his mouth. When Smee comes knocking at his door, Slightly hurriedly pulls his bed over Arthur’s alien-infested body, but his panic-stricken carelessness means that the man’s arm is visible from the doorway.
Thus, as soon as Smee enters the room, he is able to spot a human arm sticking out from under the bed, and realizes that his friend has done something terrible. He immediately demands an explanation, and Slightly cannot help but reveal what Morrow was making him do. Both the hybrids are extremely scared of the situation they have gotten themselves into, but Slightly soon pulls himself together and thinks ahead, since he is driven by the urge to protect his family as well. He asks Smee to help him out, and despite knowing that hiding an alien creature in this manner is totally against the law and the ethics at Neverland, Smee decides to help his friend out, only for the sake of Slightly’s original family.
But Smee agrees to be a part of the plan only upon learning that Arthur will be safe even after the alien creature has been handed off to Morrow, as the latter had claimed to Slightly. It has been quite clear throughout the season that Arthur had been loved by the hybrids just as much as he had loved and cared for them, and so Smee is naturally even more shocked and worried at the fact that it is Arthur who is in such a predicament. Thus, he agrees to be a part of Slightly’s plan also because he wants to help Arthur out and ensure his safety. The two young men, or hybrids, embark on a long and sneaky journey through the Prodigy facility, heading towards the beach on the island, where the hand-off is supposed to take place. They are even helped by Kirsh on the way, which we come to later, and all seems to go well until the Xenomorph youngling bursts out of Arthur’s chest, killing the man in the process and making Smee realize that he is already too deep in terrible trouble to do anything about it.
How does Boy Kavalier react to the mess at his facility?
Meanwhile, the Prodigy authorities, headed by Kirsh, visit the laboratory where the alien specimens had been housed for so long in order to assess the extent of the damage caused at the place and to try and understand what had gone down. After two guards bring down the rogue alien flies, which had escaped from their chamber, Kirsh enters the lab and glances at the corpse of Tootles, who had been killed by the flies in the previous episode. Soon, Boy Kavalier comes to the lab as well, only after others have ensured that it is totally safe for him to step in, and there is a sense of glee in the CEO, as if he is kind of impressed by the chaos at his facility, because it will teach him something new about the aliens.
Although Kavalier initially believes that Tootles must have made some mistake while feeding the specimens, which must have caused his death, Kirsh shows him the footage from the security cameras, which clearly reveals that the T. ocellus-infected sheep had played an active role in distracting the hybrid. The CEO is immediately intrigued at why the sheep did something like this to help other alien species feed on hybrid flesh, or metal, even though it had nothing to gain from the situation. This indeed makes the T. Ocellus closer to humans in terms of our fiendish ability to plan and manipulate situations, than any animal beings, which kill and feed only out of need for nourishment. Thus, Kavalier now grows obsessed with the sheep, and he has the infected animal moved to a different chamber, seemingly inside his own cabin, to carry out further experiments on it.
Here, Boy Kavalier shows the sheep the symbol of pi and talks about what it is, with the hopes that the animal, which has been turned far more intelligent because of the alien burrowed deep in its brain, would identify it. Much to his joy, the animal not only identifies it but also successfully communicates the next three numbers by itself, through hoof stomps and then by excreting, as if to demean the low IQ of the human in front of it. This is when Boy Kavalier comes up with another maverick but potentially dangerous plan, which will surely be executed in the season finale next week. He decides to let the T. Ocellus alien infiltrate the body of a living being more intelligent than a mere sheep—a human.
In fact, he even has a subject in mind on whom to carry out this cruel experiment. Although Kavalier does not mention who he is thinking of just yet, it seems likely that he would want to infect Dame Sylvia with the alien. Not only is she a supremely intelligent scientist who can be enhanced even further by the T. Ocellus, but Kavalier also seems to be angry at Dame Sylvia, as he believes that she has let her husband escape the island after wreaking havoc.
How does Wendy cause even more chaos at the place?
Someone who is not at all impressed by the incidents at the laboratory is Wendy, who cannot believe that a hybrid has died, for she had always known that all hybrids are ‘premium’ and, therefore, immortal. She is also extremely angry at the fact that those who were meant to protect her and the other Lost Boys, like Boy Kavalier, are now totally aloof towards the fact that they can die at any moment now. The alien flies had managed to kill and feast on Tootles because they were used to digesting metals, given the conditions on their home planet. Wendy fears that more such strange discoveries can be made about the other alien species, and that Boy Kavalier is way more interested in making such discoveries than ensuring the safety of those living on Neverland Island.
She finally realizes how the CEO has been only taking advantage of her and the other hybrids, who are nothing more than scientific curiosities to him. Thus, Wendy decides to step up and inform the other hybrids about what has just happened. When she is initially not allowed to leave the lab, Wendy does not hesitate to communicate with the Xenomorph and make it threateningly slam the side of its chamber as a sort of warning that she can very easily set the alien against the humans. She then returns to her room, where Hermit meets her and tells her of his plan to escape the island with her, aided by the multiple acts of assistance by Arthur and Sylvia earlier. However, Wendy doesn’t want to leave the island without the other hybrids, as she really them her siblings and feels responsible for them.
However, not everyone is ready to leave, as Curly refuses to be a part of the escape plan, since she has known Neverland Island as the best place on Earth for her. She is also later revealed to be much closer to Dame Sylvia than the rest of the hybrids, and Curly even calls the scientist her mother. If Dame Sylvia is indeed forcefully infected with the T. Ocellus, Curly can be expected to take revenge for the cruel act. At present, Curly decides to stay back, while Nibs is more than happy to accompany Wendy and Hermit, as she too does not find the humans to be that helpful. But before leaving, Wendy decides to do something that would both create a distraction to help them escape easily and also punish the Prodigy scientists for keeping the aliens, and also the hybrids, in a way, trapped for their selfish research. Using her ability to hack devices through cameras (the same way she had communicated with Hermit back in episode 2), Wendy unlocks the chamber of the Xenomorph at the laboratory, making the alien escape and immediately kill all the guards and scientists there before escaping the facility through the pipelines.
Why Does Kirsh Help Slightly And Smee?
During their attempt to sneakily smuggle Arthur’s body out of the Prodigy facility, Slightly and Smee accidentally run across Kirsh, who now reveals that he had known everything about Slightly’s supposedly confidential communications with Morrow. We had earlier seen Kirsh listening in on these conversations but not taking any action against them, because his true intentions are revealed now, in episode 7. Kirsh basically knows all too well that an alien is going to burst out of Arthur’s chest and kill him, and he also understands that it is this alien that Morrow wants from Slightly. Therefore, Kirsh now helps Slightly and Smee smuggle the body out of the facility, only to keep an eye on them and have them followed for two very specific reasons.
Firstly, following Slightly and Smee would alert Kirsh about the exact time the chestburster exits Arthur’s body, which would mean that he would have access to the alien being. This is exactly what happens, as the Xenomorph youngling slithers into the forest right after its escape from Arthur’s body, and although it eludes Slightly and Smee, Kirsh gets hold of it and has it trapped. Whether Kirsh would want to use the Xenomorph for his own research or remain a loyal scientist under Prodigy by handing it over at the facility remains to be seen. But the second part of his plan was to get Morrow and his Weyland-Yutani soldiers to walk into the trap set by him and capture them. When Morrow realizes that Slightly has lost the alien specimen, he and his soldiers take the hybrids captive and take them back to the Prodigy facility, where Kirsh is waiting for them with Prodigy soldiers. Thus, at the end of Alien: Earth episode 7, Kirsh saves Slightly and Smee by having Morrow arrested, and the Weyland-Yutani cyborg is also clearly a prized possession for Kirsh and Prodigy.
Why does Hermit shoot Nibs in the end?
The most shocking moment in Alien: Earth episode 7 comes at the very end, when Hermit, Wendy, and Nibs are held hostage by the military unit of Prodigy when they try to escape the island on a boat. As soon as Boy Kavalier had realized that Arthur had helped Hermit by disabling the tracking system on all the hybrids, he had realized that Hermit would try to leave the island with his sister, and so he had ordered his soldiers to stop them. But as the soldiers use sheer force against them, Nibs flips and turns rogue, finally deciding to let her violent instincts overwrite her respect for the humans, which had been taught to her. Nibs uses her brute force, which is naturally way higher than any of the soldiers’, to rip the humans apart and kill them, and at the same time, Wendy is also about to alert the Xenomorph in the forest and ask it to help them out, but she is stopped by Hermit.
Despite all the long time that he had spent with the hybrids at Neverland Island and the experiences that he had had with them, Hermit has always been doubtful about the true purpose of the hybrids, and had even questioned their existence a number of times. Therefore, it is probably not too strange that he still chooses to side with the humans and shoots Nibs with the pulse gun, killing the hybrid in the process. In this intense moment, Hermit has to choose between Nibs, a hybrid, and his best friends, Siberian and Rashidi, both of them humans, and he chooses the latter, almost instinctively. This clearly confirms that Hermit’s allegiance and priorities still lie with the human beings.
However, this is obviously not taken well by Wendy, who is enraged by his decision, as seen in the very last scene of the episode. This moment also proves to Wendy that her brother ultimately distinguishes between humans and hybrids, meaning that he, just like the oppressors at Prodigy, does not truly believe that hybrids and humans are equals, no matter what he says. As someone deeply driven to fight for the hybrids’ cause, Wendy can be expected to cause even more chaos in the Alien: Earth season finale next week and even take action against her brother out of rage.
