It's difficult to know where to start. There's a lot to talk about. The most striking thing about this show is the aesthetics and tone. Right away this feels like Alien, but with some pretty significant stylistic changes. The director has a very specific style that is quite visually stunning but a bit disjointed. Some of that has to do with the writing as well, because it feels like each story being told was truncated, removing the best parts in favor of skipping to the meatier stuff. I'm also not a fan of the jump flashes of either future scenes or story beats told without context.
As an example, we are introduced to a ship with a crew that practically stepped off the set of the first Alien movie. We get a scene of them eating just like the one from the original, without the chest bursting or really any major character work or information about these people. We barely hear some of their names and then we don't see them again. Well, except for the one survivor, and he appears to be a bad guy. It feels like we missed out on an entire movie that was cut from the series.
Morrow is a hard character to get a read on. As the sole survivor of the crash, he does work, and there could be some interesting stuff for him down the line. But we learn very little about him, save for his devotion to Weyland-Yutani and his cyborg enhancements. It is hinted with visual clues that he let loose the Alien facehuggers which caused the crash. But we don't know for sure. All we do know is that he chose to let one of his fellow crew members die, saving himself instead. We don't know exactly what happened on board, and I don't know if we ever will.
Perhaps the writers felt they were short on time and couldn't fully flesh out that story, or maybe we'll see it over the course of the season. I'm honestly not sure, because it really feels like that part of the story is over. After the crash we do get quite a bit of stuff on the ship. We see the hibernation pods compromised and most of the crew dead (although it's hard to see exactly who died). We see the captured aliens specimens have at least partially escaped, including a bug that will drain a human of all blood in seconds (blech). Plus the titular Alien is lurking out there somewhere, possibly more than one because we do have evidence of at least one dead facehugger. I guess we'll have to be patient to find out more.
The rest of the episode focused on Marcy, a young girl with what feels like terminal cancer, although I don't believe we were told how she was dying. She is under the care of the CEO of Prodigy, one of the five big corporations, a trillionaire (again blech) named Boy Kavalier. How and why she is there is, again, not explained. Yet she has clearly been chosen to undergo an experimental procedure to transfer her consciousness into a synthetic body. We don't get much time with Marcy, but one scene does show she has at least compassion for deadly things, which may come into play later on.
Besides the ethical and moral complications of such a dubious procedure, there is the unspoken question of what exactly is transferred. Is this new Hybrid (which the show tells us to refer to her as) actually Marcy? Or is she someone new? First off she decides to change her name to Wendy, and her behavior afterward is very strange. Kirsh (Timothy Olyphant) who might be a synth but the show doesn't tell us, explains that her emotions are no longer triggered by chemical reactions in her body and brain. So again, it begs the question, does she even have emotions? Wendy seems to be our main character, and I have to give Sydney Chandler who plays Wendy a lot of praise for her performance, but I'm not sure I have warmed up to her quite yet.
Our third main character appears to be Wendy/Marcy's brother Hermit, who is a medic stuck finishing out his contract with Prodigy and working as a first responder. He seems to be a good guy, but we don't get a lot of time with him to form that opinion. I do like the actor and I want to know more about him, but he is also in the belly of the beast and I'm not hyped about his chances of survival. Thankfully by the end of this episode Wendy and her new motley crew of hybrids are heading for the crash and her brother. So maybe the characters will have a chance to interact and grow as the series progresses.
Bits:
Florence Bensberg, who played Marcy, the child version of Wendy, was recently in a Peter Pan adaptation, although she didn't play Wendy.
If you're struggling to place where you've seen Wendy's brother Hermit (Alex Lawther) before, he played Nemik in season one of Andor.
The skull cap makeup on Marcy was painfully obvious, but it was at least seemless.
At one point Wendy scratches her neck, and Kirsh seems to examine this motion intently. Is this a sign that she has human mannerisms? Or was this just a vestigial twitch?
Title Crawl: "In the future, the race for immortality will come in 3 guises:
Cybernetically enhanced humans: Cyborgs,
Artificially intelligent beings: Synths,
and…
Synthetic beings downloaded with human consciousness: Hybrids.
Which technology prevails will determine what corporation rules the universe."
This is a gorgeous production for a property that I love and there is a ton of interesting stuff packed into this premiere. I just wish I felt more attached to the various characters and some of the plots were allowed to play out a bit longer.
3 out of 4 New Alien Species
Samantha M. Quinn spends most of her time in front of a computer typing away at one thing or another; when she has free time, she enjoys pretty much anything science fiction or fantasy-related.
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