In “Emergence”, All Hell Breaks Loose And ‘Alien: Earth’ Is The Better For It

The title of this episode — “Emergence” — can be applied to multiple things, both literal and figurative. There’s the emergence of the chestburster from Arthur (David Rysdahl), the emergence of the xenomorph from its cage, the emergence of Morrow (Babou Ceesay) and his team from the waters surrounding Neverland. There’s also the emergence of Wendy’s (Sydney Chandler) fully radicalized, anti-Prodigy sentiment, that finds her both acquiescing to Joe’s (Alex Lawther) plan to leave the island and setting her xenomorph friend on any opposition in the face of her dawning sense of vulnerability: both Nib’s (Lily Newark) lost memories and Isaac’s (Kit Young) death showcase the way, for all her superhuman Hybrid abilities, she is not immune to having harm inflicted on her my outside, powerful forces. Yet for all the wide range of possible applications of the title, “Emergence” is a much more focused episode, benefiting from both that focus and the narrative momentum of its upcoming finale.

For all that a lot of significant plot stuff happens in this episode, it can all be largely broken down into three major plotlines: Wendy and Joe’s attempted escape, Slightly (Adarsh Gourav) and Smee’s (Jonathan Ajayi) attempted delivery of Arthur to Morrow, and the fallout from Isaac’s death. In doing so, “Emergence” is knocking down a lot of dominoes setup by earlier episodes, from the mounting invasion of Morrow and Weyland-Yutani to Wendy’s rapport with the xenomorph to Nib’s PTSD to Arthur’s sad, sad fate. That this all largely works here is the result of all the effort put in by the previous episode, which exhausted itself flitting from character to character to finish the setup of many of these episodes (it almost makes that sweaty episode worth the way it races past meaningful character interactions, but it still seems like there’s ways to structure these episodes so all the business isn’t happening exclusively on the front end). As a result, despite how busy “Emergence” is with plot happenings, the positioning of the various characters (both in physical proximity to each other and in terms of shared goals) allows more or less everyone to coalesce around one of the three main threads, resulting in a much tighter, focused episode.

Because of that coalescence, the episode is also able to slowdown in a way the previous one couldn’t: stuff like Slightly trying to feed a facehugged Arthur, or Wendy, Nibs and Hermit coming across the graves of the Hybrids’ human bodies, or Arthur’s agonizingly-sad pep talk to Slightly and Smee about how they’re shitty liars but it’s all okay, because they’ll figure it out together (moments before an alien explodes out of his lungs). Those are the kind of beats missing from the previous episode, the kind of beats we need to make the moments of alien (or angry Hybrid) horror land harder, because they have stakes (Arthur’s demise is also another example of the show’s mastery — also on display in “In Space, No One…” — of reverse suspense, where the tension comes not from not knowing what is going to happen next, but from knowing what is going to happen next. From every moment after Arthur wakes up in the jungle, we’re taut, waiting for the inevitable to happen).

All of that, combined with the narrative momentum of being the penultimate episode of the season, of knowing there’s at least some payoff coming to these moments in the near future, leaves the series’ on a strong footing heading into that finale. We are back where we started, with a focus on Wendy as a principal driver of action, only now fully arrayed against the kind of hubristic humanity Alien stories delight in shredding, with a powerful biological weapon in her back pocket and plenty of wild cards (Morrow, Kirsh, the big alien plant that still hasn’t done anything cool) on the table to make things interesting. It’s good place to be, and “Emergence” did a good job of getting us there.

Stray Thoughts

• In terms of the Peter Pan metaphor, this episode seems to cement Kirsh (Timothy Olyphant) as Tinkerbell to Boy Kavalier’s (Samuel Blenkin) Pan, a figure with some loyalty to the protagonist but also someone who isn’t afraid to act on their own/not loop in their boss on all the details (as opposed to a figure working secretly in opposition to Boy).
• Slightly trying to hide Arthur under his bed (which is where monsters live, of course) was also very sad.
• That said, did Slightly and Smee build the raft they were using to float Arthur’s body downriver? Find it somewhere?
• Nibs saying she doesn’t want to be a ghost and then walking past her grave later in the episode was haunting.
• Also, apparently “Hermit” is Joe and Marcy/Wendy’s last name. Despite looking at the cast list fairly regularly, I assumed “Hermit” was more of a nickname/call sign.
• So Mister Octo knows Pi, and is capable of enough motor control of their host to at least stamp/poop out various digits of it.
• Boy’s candidates Mister Octo’s new host, in descending order of likelihood: Joe, Dame (Essie Davis), Curly (Erana James), Morrow, Isaac, Atom Eins (Adrian Edmondson) — only because he’s probably secretly a synth.
• This is the shortest episode of the season thus far in terms of runtime, which likely adds to its tighter feeling as well.
• As far as I know, no second season of the series has been announced (though it has been pitched as an actual series and not just a done-in-one); it will be interested to see how the creators addressed that nebulousness in their construction of the finale (ie will we get some measure of scorched earth that could stand as a final finale, something with a big cliffhanger to dare FX into not renewing it, or something in the middle?).