Alien: Earth's Wendy is more like David than Ripley after all

And then there’s Wendy, the first hybrid. If Morrow is a human with machine parts on the outside, Wendy is a machine with human parts on the inside. The first season had lots of fun alien action, but it was really about Wendy’s ascension to becoming the most powerful being in the show’s universe. Not only can she control technology in a way that basically allows her to shut down the villainous Atom Eins like she’s a Jedi, but she can speak to the xenomorphs, and they seem to follow her instructions. At the end of the first season, she’s completely turned the tables on her very own Peter Pan, locking Boy Kavalier, Kirsh, Morrow, Dame Sylvia, and Atom Eins in the pen that once housed her and the other Lost Boys, with xenomorphs on the edge of it like dogs waiting to unleash hell at their commander’s order. Her last line is “Now we rule.”

So how will Wendy rule? The question that will define the future is whether she chooses humanity or transcends it, giving in to her godlike control. Will she align with the little girl inside her or abuse the power she’s discovered she holds? 

Which brings us back to David. Played by Michael Fassbender in Prometheus, David was a stand-in for a being who has become more powerful than its creator. Much of sci-fi history has been conceived around the idea of what happens when men become gods, reversing the hierarchy in a way that usually leads to disaster. Creation is generally considered a godlike act, so the arc of David overtaking his creators has parallels to man thinking himself a god. By the end of his two-movie arc (which, now, sadly looks unlikely to be completed), David has full control of his ship and its cargo, including humans and alien embryos, playing interstellar god. He is, in many ways, where Wendy is at the end of Alien: Earth: getting ready to rule. And don’t forget that he too was created as a step on an evolutionary ladder, much like Wendy exists as a quest for immortality that has overtaken its creator.

Of course, Wendy has more human connections to provide moral quandaries, including her loyalty to her brother and the other Lost Boys. But we saw her question Joe’s actions in the season’s penultimate episode and, crucially, see her exerting hierarchy over the other Lost Boys in the final chapter. She’s not one of them anymore. She’s Wendy Darling, the favorite. 

At the end of J.M. Barrie’s book, Wendy returns to Peter a year after their adventures in Neverland, but he doesn’t remember her. It’s a common theme in children’s literature in that Wendy has to grow up and put Tinker Bell, the Lost Boys, and Hook in her memory. It feels like Hawley’s Wendy has done the same at the end of “The Real Monsters,” although it’s interesting that he and episode co-writer Migizi Pensoneau nod to the epilogue that Barrie wrote. In When Wendy Grew Up, An Afterthought, Peter comes back to Wendy, but she’s got a daughter named Jane, and Wendy is the one who doesn’t remember. In Alien: Earth, the Lost Boy known as Curly becomes Jane, furthering the idea that Wendy is now superior: She’s a “mother,” another word that has weighted meaning in the Alien universe.

And none of the above speculation even touches on The Eye taking over Arthur like a crab entering a new shell and what that says about evolution (and the badass potential of that subplot). One of the great joys of this first season has been how unpredictably Hawley has woven the themes of previous Alien lore into something that feels both connected and new. What if Wendy isn’t Ripley or David? She could be something altogether different, a blending of things fans know and love about both characters. An evolution. A real hybrid.