Is Boy Kavalier really the genius he claims to be? It’s one burning question posed by Alien: Earth episode 4. Our review: NB: The following keeps things spoiler free for Alien: Earth episode 4, but does go into plot details from prior instalments. One week on, and we can finally talk about some of the ... Alien: Earth episode 4 spoiler-free review | Stop getting Asimov wrong
Is Boy Kavalier really the genius he claims to be? It’s one burning question posed by Alien: Earth episode 4. Our review:
NB: The following keeps things spoiler free for Alien: Earth episode 4, but does go into plot details from prior instalments.
One week on, and we can finally talk about some of the more spoiler-y things that happened in episode three. The xenomorph had its head hacked off by Wendy and her trusty purloined guillotine blade; meanwhile, the Maginot’s precious cargo – xeno eggs, plus all those other weird critters – were dragged back to Prodigy HQ for prodding and general experimentation.
The sight of Kirsh dissecting an egg, extracting the facehugger inside, and then pulling that parasite apart, felt like an apt metaphor for the Alien franchise as a whole. Once every aspect of a once mysterious lifeform has been cut open and laid bare, can it truly inspire fear again?
At the time of writing, it’s impossible to say what series fans will say about one small yet striking detail revealed here: the tiny spore that facehuggers lay in their victims’ throats – the one that impregnated John Hurt and so many others – looks like a tadpole or a silvery minnow. It’s a bit… mundane-looking, isn’t it? Swiss artist and Alien designer HR Giger would have surely come up with a more unsettling concept.
But on to episode four. After the action and splatter of the previous two chapters, things necessarily settle down here. Think of it as a chance to breathe out and get to know the characters a little better, as showrunner Noah Hawley provides the connective tissue that will lead us into the series’ second half.
It’s perhaps a good time, then, to reflect a little more on how roundly effective the cast has been to date. Timothy Olyphant’s Kirsh is a fascinatingly cold, slippery character – a pleasingly against-type contrast to the earthy lawman types Olyphant’s played elsewhere. There’s a splash of Michael Fassbender’s David to his performance – the ram-rod straight posture, the faint air of passive aggression. Our gut tells us that Kirsh has his own hidden agenda that probably won’t emerge until it’s too late for his human superiors to do much about it.
Read more: Alien: Earth episodes 1 and 2 | Spoiler-free review
Adrian Edmonson’s Atom Eins, a rather peripheral player earlier in the series, also gets some standout moments in episode four. Better known on these shores as a comedy actor, he really gets to display his sinister side here; he exudes a quiet air of villainy, running counter to Boy Kavalier’s grandiose narcissism. If Kavalier’s a toxic Peter Pan (an allusion the series rather beats us over the head with), then Eins is more quiet and insinuating. Captain Hook without the theatrics. Edmondson’s matter-of-fact delivery of a simple line: “not anymore” carries a devastating amount of dramatic weight.
On the subject of Kavalier, there’s a moment in episode five worth mentioning, particularly since it’s small enough to not constitute a spoiler as such. In one of his rambling monologues, Kavalier alludes to the familiar phrase, “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic,” and attributes it to Isaac Asimov. The problem is, Asimov never said this – it was Arthur C Clarke.
Noah Hawley’s too smart a writer to make such an obvious mistake, so the error must be Kavalier’s. Perhaps it’s a sign that he isn’t quite the infallible boy genius he’s marketed himself as – certainly, there have been plenty of instances of real-world tech CEOs getting their sci-fi completely wrong. And tech CEOs revealing themselves to be less smart than the hype would have us believe.
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In more pressing events, Morrow (Babou Ceesay) continues to manipulate Slightly (Adarsh Gourav) into helping him smuggle out some alien specimens from the Prodigy lab. The plan they hatch is… daring, let’s put it that way. We’re sure it can’t possibly go awry.
There are certain other developments in episode four, too, that pay off something hinted at earlier in the season. Again, we suspect it’s a plot point that will divide fans. And once again, we can’t mention it here for fear of spoiling things. Rest assured we’ll return to dissect the implications of it all, like Kirsh picking at his facehugger, in a future review.
Alien: Earth is streaming now on Disney+.
