Alien: Earth
This column is a reprint from Unwinnable Monthly #192. If you like what you see, grab the magazine for less than ten dollars, or subscribe and get all future magazines for half price.
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Elsewhere, here.
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The eyeball monster in Alien: Earth is babygirl; a burrowing cutiepie pivot from the slobbering rough carnality of the franchise’s Xenomorph. I loved the lil’ guy as much as anyone, but I never found him very scary. The relationship we had was more intriguing than chilling. Why did he stare, so? What animated his hatred? Whadda card. It’s difficult to be scared of something that you’re maybe rooting for.
Television, more so than movies, is sustained by these kinds of flirtations between character and viewer. It’s a medium meant to take you along to the next thing, and getting to know Eyeball along with everyone else was such a fun surprise, the kind of breakout character you need to carry you through familiar territory. Fear is harder to sustain across episodes, although individually they can creep and tense as well as a movie (the number of friends I have who watched Buffy’s “Hush” too young and won’t watch it again…). Perhaps this is why Alien: Earth is domesticating the Xenomorph. As an enemy combatant it suffered in comparison to the time we’d spent with it before; too known and looking too much like Green Man to make you squirm. Turning it into an attack dog rejiggers its familiarity from a bug to a feature with potential to be interesting.
The humanoids are really scaring me though. Morrow’s nihilistic rage, Wendy’s cocksurity, and whatever the fuck is going on with Kirsh all stir more discomfort than the creepy crawlies brought planetside do. The most horrifying moment bar none was when Nibs – a little girl in an adult synthetic body – announced her pregnancy. My whole body responded to that, it was so fucked up. Horrible because – despite the sci-fi circumstances – the hysterical pregnancy as trauma response is perhaps too plausible to blink away from. Gadgets aside, this is a little girl who has seen terrible things inhabiting a body that makes people treat her like an adult. That neglect is a violation. Then when her response to that trauma threatens them, they erase her memories. Another violation.
The horror of the Alien movies is violation. The Xenomorph infests: first in your throat, then in your chest, then in the walls of your ship. Its tail in your gut. Finally, it is in your brain, your sense of safety and trust. The other violence Ripley is forced to endure reinforces this. She is betrayed by the company that she works for and assaulted by a colleague. You are never safe. The world outside your body is always fighting to make its way in.
The other aliens of this new TV show are invaders in their own ways. They are sucking blood, they are burrowing in your sockets, they are taking the controls of your body from within. It’s grisly stuff, but the repetition dulls the shock in the same way being the 8th or 11th piece of IP in a franchise will. Oh god it never stops! Slips easily into Oh god, does it ever stop? For poor Nibs the horror is that she has to continue, and that she is in a television show and not in a movie. This is true for the cyborg Morrow as well – who outlived his family and his crew and now has only his employer as a reason to carry on. With Nibs the story picks up the thread of non-consensual pregnancy from the original and gives it to someone who survives. When her pregnancy is questioned, she threatens the therapist. It is as if by trying to become Ripley she becomes the Alien Queen.
I was sorry the false-pregnancy storyline was dropped so quickly, although it would have been difficult to continue it. Many of the most interesting things on this show felt incidental, although they may have lost their potency if drawn out too far. Still, the embodied complications of an accelerated puberty are more interesting, and more frightening to me, than the well-trodden sci-fi abstractions of what makes a human. It is ironic, maybe, that Alien: Earth is most reminiscent of the horrible queasy-pleasures of Alien the further it gets from the flesh, but at this point the franchise has made it abundantly clear how weak and penetrable the body is. The soul though, is ripe for probing, and we should be scared to see how fragile we might be.
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Natasha Ochshorn is a PhD Candidate in English at CUNY, writing on fantasy texts and environmental grief. She’s lived in Brooklyn her whole life and makes music as Bunny Petite. Follow her on Instagram and Bluesky.
