The rest of the episode is much more compelling than Wendy’s escape. Its fractured plot allows each character to begin wrapping up their respective arcs, with Kirsh at the center, quietly facilitating from his iPad. “Emergence” opens from a place of genuine tension, with Slightly figuratively lying in the bed he’s made—and under that bed, there’s a facehugged Arthur. There are few things more grimly funny in the Alien universe than hiding a facehugger victim under the bed, but one of them is trying to feed them juice. Slightly sucks at both, spilling the juice and leaving Arthur exposed for Smee to see. Populating the show with adults playing kids was always a risk, but Adarsh Gourav and Jonathan Ajayi are consistently excellent here. These are complex performances that require them to mask their overwhelming fear to reach deliberate aims while never losing sight of the fact that these machines have the consciousness of children.
Smee agrees to help Slightly carry Arthur across the Neverland jungles. As they make their way to the beach, they drop Arthur to avoid an oncoming battalion of Stormtroopers. Alien: Earth is often better at nailing these comedic moments than its scares—a this scene is no different. After the troops pass, Arthur disappears, and a dead facehugger falls out of the tree. Before the boys can figure out what happened, Arthur casually steps back into frame, points at the facehugger, and asks, “What’s that?” Coupled with Slightly and Smee’s obvious guilt and fear for the situation, Arthur’s sincere concern for them makes everything involving the doomed Dr. Sylvia all the more heartbreaking. His desire to patch things up with Dame, so her last memory of him isn’t a fight, and his earnest empathy for the hybrids makes waiting for the inevitable chest-bursting rough stuff. It’s not uncommon to watch an Alien movie and think, “This poor bastard.” Arthur is in the running for the poorest bastard. After the alien emerges, Slightly goes on dragging his hollowed corpse toward a watery grave. At least he stuck it to the man before checking out.
Back at the lab, Tootles’ death has sent Prodigy into lockdown—only someone turned off the hybrid trackers. Boy Kavalier should take a greater interest in his Lost Boys, but he’s too busy making jokes about sending them off to bed without any supper. Lest we forget, this guy’s a Peter Pan podcaster, and even in the future, no subject is too soon for a podcaster to crack jokes about. At any rate, he’s far more interested in what the Eye did to destroy his hybrid. After seeing the clip of the sheep distracting Tootles, Kavalier becomes convinced that the Eye is an intelligent being and does what any normal trillionaire would do upon meeting a space alien: He gives it the Pi test. The mud-pie answer is, perhaps, the happiest moment of Kavalier’s pathetic life. He’s thrilled to connect with an intelligent being, so he asks Atom to bring a mold cleaner for the Eye to kill and infiltrate, allowing Kavalier and the Eye to speak the same language.
And then there’s Wendy, Kavalier’s star pupil, whom he’s pretty much lost all interest in. She always appears at the wrong time, but showing up at the lab to catch a glimpse of Tootles’ insides sends her over the edge. Grabbing Hermit and Nibs, she frees her Xenomorph buddy and flees into the jungle, where she comes across a graveyard. “Emergence” is really a eulogy for Marcy Hermit. Moments after seeing Tootles’ machine innards, she comes across Marcy’s grave and waves bye-bye to whatever remains of her humanity, cutting out the worst parts of a human, as Morrow might say. By the time troops flank her, she’s clicking for the Xenomorph to take care of them.
“Emergence” ends on an interesting note. After weeks of playing voyeur, Kirsh’s plan comes into focus. He allowed Slightly and Smee to lead Morrow right to him. But there are shifting motives everywhere. On the boat, Hermit’s marine buddies ambush the hybrids. After Nibs rips a guy’s chin off for throwing Mr. Strawberry in the ocean, Hermit puts her down, leaving Wendy to yell, “What did you do?” Maybe Hermit is having second thoughts about the whole sister thing. And with one episode left and a Xenomorph in her control, maybe now isn’t the time to turn on her.
Stray observations
- • If Nibs is alive, she should hiss more.
- • “This isn’t over.
“Nothing ever is.”
- • If we consider Predator as a part of the Alien mythos, Wendy and the Xenomorph’s allyship isn’t totally out of nowhere. Amber Midthunder and Sanaa Lathan both teamed up with a Predator to varying degrees of success. We even have a Weyland-produced synthetic played by Elle Fanning playing C-3PO to Predator’s Chewbacca in Predator: Badlands later this year. Somewhere, Badlands director Dan Trachtenberg is extremely pissed about this episode.
- • Given how the Eye fared in the Magniot‘s engineer, it’s unlikely it can talk at all, but it looks likely it will go Prometheus‘ Engineer on Kavalier.
- • I can’t believe Hermit is a family name.
