After watching the latest episode of Hulu’s Alien: Earth, I posted on social media: “Every single plot point in Alien: Earth is built on characters making stupid choices, often while in circumstances that even the tiniest bit of security, oversight and communication would avoid. It’s the worst kind of lazy writing.” Spoilers ahead.
The response to this from fans of the show has been (mostly) “People are stupid in real life, buddy.” (A few have resorted to the age-old canard, “I’d like to see you make a better Alien show!” which is a silly way to dismiss criticism, as though anyone with an opinion about anything should first have access to A) the rights to a franchise and B) a budget and production company).
Of course, the claim isn’t wrong. People are, in fact, quite stupid much of the time. This is in fact the exact reason why organizations set up fail-safes and safeguards and redundancies in the first place. We know the likelihood of human error, so we implement systems of mitigation. We know that humans are greedy and power-hungry and duplicitous, so we create checks and balances. These can all be circumvented, of course, but it takes effort. That effort can create friction and tension and lead to really interesting stories. Stupid people making stupid choices is not a particularly compelling story choice.
In the latest Alien: Earth episode, Tootles (Kit Young) is working in the Prodigy lab where all the alien specimens are kept from the crash of the research vessel, the USCSS Maginot. This includes the eyeball alien that’s possessed the sheep, a rapidly growing Xenomorph, and large, flying bug-like creatures that have made a little hive for themselves.
Tootles is one of Prodigy’s hybrid synths. These were created by transferring the consciousness of young children into adult synth bodies. Tootles is, for all intents and purposes, a child. Somehow, he’s allowed to work all alone and completely unsupervised in this top-secret lab filled with dangerous aliens known to be extremely deadly. His task is simple: Feed the aliens. There is a process for this, but when one of the feeding doors jams he accidentally breaks it off.
Since Tootles is just a kid, he doesn’t really know what to do, and since nobody is accompanying or supervising him, he has noone to ask. So he disarms the lock on the main door of the cell and takes the food tray in by hand. The sheep alien bangs its head on the glass in the nextdoor cell, startling Tootles, who falls over and spills the tray. The door shuts and locks behind him, leaving him trapped in the cell with the bug-like creatures. One of these lands on his arm and sprays a weird metallic goo into Tootles’s face. It’s some kind of powerful acid that quickly melts his skull, killing him (though I’m not sure if a hybrid synth can die, or if they can just transfer his consciousness to a new body).
Now, I completely understand why Tootles screwed up here. He’s a kid! My frustration with this scene isn’t with Tootles at all. When the scientist on the Maginot was eating in the biolab and then failed to secure the eyeball alien’s container, that was pretty unforgivably stupid. A grown adult should know better (and who eats in a biolab?) But Tootles is just a kid.
The common factor in both these scenes, however, is the lack of any sort of even rudimentary security in place. On the Maginot, why are people allowed to eat in a biolab filled with dangerous specimens? When she failed to secure the container, allowing the eyeball alien to escape, why did no alarm go off, alerting security? This all followed an alien specimen escaping and killing the ship’s captain – why wasn’t the crew more alert and on guard after this fiasco?
The Prodigy lab is equally unsecure. Even aside from the lack of alarms, why is Prodigy allowing children to work in this lab totally unsupervised? Why are there no security guards stationed here? There’s a scene earlier in the episode when Morrow (Babou Ceesay) tells his boss that Prodigy has drastically increased security, but there’s no evidence of this at all. Why are there no basic comms at play or careful monitoring of the Lost Boys?
When Dame Sylvia (Essie Davis) deletes Nibs’s (Lily Newmark) traumatic memories that had her basically going haywire in an earlier episode, no steps are taken to deal with potential complications. When Nibs wakes up, it isn’t a staffer there to greet her, but Wendy (Sydney Chandler) who immediately asks her about all the traumatic stuff that happened and her claims that she was pregnant. Basically, all the stuff Prodigy just worked so hard to delete is the very first thing that Nibs hears about upon waking, because no steps were taken whatsoever to either brief the other hybrids or isolate her for observation. It’s genuinely bizarre. Wendy is super upset with Sylvia about all this when she finds out the truth, but the entire exchange feels forced. Why would she want Nibs to be saddled with trauma that was basically driving her insane? Oh yeah, to create character conflict.
The other character who protests Prodigy wiping Nibs’s memory is Arthur (David Rysdahl). He’s fired for disobeying a direct order, but before he can leave he notices that Tootles is offline. Finally, someone pays attention to the two most valuable and dangerous things in the facility: The hybrids and the aliens, both of which seem to be largely ignored by literally everyone.
He races down to the lab where he runs into Slightly (Adarsh Gourav). Slightly is a double-agent, an inside man working for Morrow. Arthur finds Tootles in the cell and instead of calling for backup or sounding an alarm, just decides to open it up and try to retrieve the body. I don’t know about you, but if I saw this grisly scene, where a powerful hybrid synth had clearly been killed by a dangerous alien species, I wouldn’t just open the door and rush in. I’d call for security. I’d put on a hazmat suit. I’d do just about anything other than what Arthur, who is not stupid, by the way (he has seven degrees!) does. Maybe if Tootles was being attacked, fighting for his life, desperately screaming for help, maybe then I could see Arthur rushing in to save him. But Tootles is clearly dead and he was clearly killed by dangerous aliens, and Arthur just throws caution to the wind.
This gives Slightly the chance to unlock the cell with the Xenomorph eggs, which we know respond to the presence of humans. When Arthur notices the cell open, instead of immediately running to shut it or just get away, he fumbles with Tootles for awhile longer. He only runs when it’s too late. Slightly has locked him out. He calls for help on the phone, but the facehugger gets him.
Basically, the entire plot of Alien: Earth relies on characters behaving in the most uncharacteristically stupid way possible. This is unfortunate, because it’s much more dramatically compelling when smart characters act with intelligence and are still undermined by the bad guys. It’s so much more satisfying when characters mostly act with the right impulses and make intelligent choices, and are still betrayed or face genuinely impossible choices that leave them no clear path forward. We know that Morrow is working against them, but it’s not very compelling since they’re all so stupid.
It’s also clear that the synth Kirsh (Timothy Olyphant) is working against Prodigy – perhaps because he is jealous of the hybrids and fears they’ll make him irrelevant – as he observes many of these events taking place and does nothing to intervene. That’s a cool twist, but it would be so much better if we saw him undermining actual security measures rather than simply watching as nonexistent security measures fail to deploy. Have an alarm go off and security rushing to the lab, only to be stopped by Kirsh who tells them it’s all under control. Or show him turning off the alarms. Have him accompany Tootles to the lab and then purposefully leave him on his own. There are lots of simple ways to make this work other than the idiot ball trope.
The fact is, I keep trying to like this show and failing. I really want to enjoy the time I spend watching it each week. It’s so well-produced and there are some great actors doing their level best with this script and all its goofy Peter Pan nonsense, but basically every character not named Kirsh or Morrow is competing for Darwin Awards and it’s hard to care about their fates or find anyone to actually root for. That includes Wendy and her brother, neither of whom has really clicked for me. Episode 5 was filled with idiotic plot holes and one of the least satisfying “twists” ever (the reveal of the saboteur who we had never met before the reveal). Episode 6 was more of the same. I’ll cross my fingers for this week’s episode, but I’m not optimistic. What a shame.