‘Alien: Earth’ Ends With Turning Protagonists Into Psychopathic Murderers and Megalomaniacs

FX Channel’s Alien: Earth certainly took a strange turn with its final episode last week. One of the series’ themes revolved around a group of children—human-robot hybrids, with human minds uploaded into robotic bodies—trying to determine who and what they really are. Surprisingly, in the finale, the main protagonist, Wendy, decides that she is a psychopathic megalomaniac destined to rule the world—or at least one of Earth’s megacorporations—and her fellow hybrids follow her lead. At her command, the Xenomorph creature born from her brother’s lungs begins killing all of the corporate security on the island headquarters of Boy Kavalier’s company.

By the standards of classical literature, this could work as the first act of a morality play portraying the rise and fall of the wicked (Wendy)—but there is no indication that this is the intention of the producers.

There is no news yet on whether Alien:Earth will return for a second season.

Girl Boss Wendy’s Villainous Transformation

There is very little chance that the producers intend for girl boss Wendy to transform into a villain and receive a villain’s recompense. She is not portrayed as a villain despite her actions. The theme of the first season ultimately turned out to be that the pursuit of power in and of itself is justified by whatever means necessary, and that those who currently wield power should be overthrown. Even this could hypothetically work as some sort of Trotskyite parable involving endless revolution, or a tale inspired by the continuous overthrow of consecutive corrupt governments in the late Roman Empire—but it is unlikely that the story will ever reach a point where Wendy herself will become viewed as a villain by the show’s producers and then be replaced by whoever she has been oppressing. Modern ‘girl-power’ narratives of the modern entertainment industry would not allow it.

Viewers were also expecting a resolution to the bizarre behavior of Timothy Olyphant’s enigmatic android character, Kirsch—perhaps that he was secretly working for an enemy megacorporation, or had some hidden directive causing him to sabotage the work being performed by his own company. Kirsch’s bizarre and sinister behavior throughout the first season remains unexplained.

There is one satisfying scene in the final episode involving Kirsch and the cyborg character Morrow duking it out and smashing each other up—but the fight is far too short.

Marxist Oppression Narratives and the Lust for Power

Ultimately, Alien: Earth turned out to be a very badly written parable involving a Marxist oppression narrative. The tyrannical Boy Kavalier is overthrown and replaced by another tyrant: Wendy. Now, you might expect the show to portray the people who replaced the tyrant as being more virtuous—but Wendy has demonstrated herself by the end of the first season to be a murderous psychopath, using the weapons at her disposal (Xenomorphs) to just kill everybody. There is no difference between her and Boy Kavalier except perhaps in scale. In fact, out of the two, Wendy is considerably worse—at least as far as we know, because Boy Kavalier is never portrayed as just callously and indiscriminately murdering innocent people who are in his way. Or rather, the one time we see him considering such a thing, it’s only after Wendy has already begun her killing spree, and the only other murder he admits to was of another tyrant.

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