Episode 3 of Alien: Earth opens with Wendy bolting down a broken corridor of the USSCS Maginot, searching for her brother. Steam emits from unseen places, and debris pokes at her from the darkness. It could be a jungle path from eons before, or the timeless chambers of a broken heart – two other places where, for humanity, horror has traditionally lived. But this place is ripe with brand-new scares for mortals and hybrids alike. Take it from Kirsh, who’s still speedreading the Maginot data logs. “Five previously undiscovered species collected – but the crew lost containment.” We love that as he’s saying this, there’s a sound bed of chittering, squelching, and slurping. In that lab, Kirsh, Nibs, Curly, and Tootles are literally surrounded by lively new forms of a potential demise. (And in her mind, Nibs equates her conscious-transfer procedure with the tentacled eyeball’s recent attack.) But these hybrids and their synthetic monitor have one directive, coming down the comm link from Boy Kavalier at Neverland. Bring it all home, so we can fuck with death some more.    

That’s gonna take a second, because Wendy’s still running. And when she locates Hermit, he already knows what we feel Boy Kav and his recovery team have not taken seriously: the xeno’s tactical capabilities. Like a beast out of folklore, the alien lured them to this cargo unit in the sublevels, proceeded to toy with them, then separated them, then attacked them. We get A:E’s first instance of acid blood disintegrating metal. And amidst a funny exchange – when he says “I’m a soldier, you’re a kid” she’s like “Not anymore” – Wendy valiantly drives a metal hook through the alien’s grabby internal mouth, uses her strength to confine it in a freight elevator, and emerges leaking synth fluid. At her feet lies Big Xeno, slain like a dragon.  

Wendy will need a hardware reset, and Hermit is badly wounded. But it’s still not time to go home yet, because elsewhere at the crash site, Slightly and Smee are trying to out-bro each other about the alien lifeform horrors they’ve witnessed. (“It was full-on sci-fi” – so, science fiction exists in the 22nd century as fictional media.) Adarsh Gourav and Jonathan Ajayi are also particularly good at acting like kids, and though we’re not sure real adolescents would be so indifferent about the nearby alien egg pods, their banter’s cut short when Morrow emerges from the drippy dark. 

The cyborg is ready to shoot them until their dismissive kid attitude confuses him. He decides to download the ship’s data while seeming to lament his role in the deaths of its crew. As Mother told him, only the specimens mattered. Not human lives. And as the ultimate Weyland-Yutani company man, or “the worst parts of a man” anyway, the cyborg obeyed. Would these newfangled synthetics do the same? (Keep in mind this guy hasn’t been on Earth in six decades.) Would they obey the same order? They speak of protecting friends, protecting parents – do they even know what they are? “When is a machine…not a machine?”

Alien: Earth tables the larger philosophical questions of existence, trust, and whether robots can have friends, because it’s a show where yet another type of synthetic – Kirsh – can show up to scare Morrow off. The eerie ten-minute juggernaut of Funkadelic’s “Maggot Brain” is cued up on the soundtrack, and we see the xeno carcass’s innards as it’s loaded on a forklift for exfil. Hermit’s pals from his unit, Siberian and Rashidi, accompany the Lost Boys and Kirsh and a shutdown Wendy back to Neverland. The eggs are in a chamber, and the rest of the found species are being pushed on a cart. They’re just skittering around in their tubes! Nobody bats an eye! Boy Kavalier, his gathered science team, and the staff should really be listening to the bent notes and wah pedal effects of Eddie Hazel’s guitar. Because to us, in this context, “Maggot Brain” sounds like an impossibly huge warning. 

Safely back at Neverland, Slightly is content and watching another A:E reference to 20th Century Fox Animation (Epic this time instead of Ice Age) when his conversation with Morrow unexpectedly continues. Inside his head. “Did you figure it out? My riddle. When is a machine not a machine?” Morrow is still in New Siam, and has spoken with Yutani, his boss. He’s determined to recover the specimens; after being in space for a lifetime, his job is all he has left on Earth. And his cyborgian powers also include sleight-of-hand. Back on the ship, when he downloaded Mother’s data, he also pressed a filament-like data chip into Slightly’s neck. With a little internet research at a New Siam techno club – behind him bodies move in thrusting silhouettes against plastic sheeting; they look like shadows of the xeno, or its victims – Morrow gently taunts Slightly. “I figured you out,” he says. What the hybrid is, even if the hybrid himself still isn’t sure. “Will you be my friend?” 

Let the experiments begin. Boy Kavalier at least restricts access to the lab. Synths only, once Kirsh explains how “the proto-creatures must have gestated inside a human host. (Even a trillionaire smarty could become one of those.) Kirsh further examines what his delighted but still crazy boss calls their acid-blooded “undiscovered country,” with Curly and Tootles as lab assistants. Elsewhere, Nibs continues to dissociate after being accosted by Eyeball Tentacle. And after coming back to full power, Wendy wakes up just as this gross shit is happening:

She hears that whining again. Can’t escape it. The high-pitched trill she sensed while at the Maginot crash site. Wendy walks through another corridor, this time at Neverland, drawn to the source of the sound as Kirsh takes a scalpel to the facehugger in the lab. With the alien’s organic material splayed open on the table, as he extracts a squirmy and tailed protozoa-like insectoid thing, the whining in Wendy’s head becomes a piercing invader. She passes out. At least for now, she will not be vanquishing anymore dragons. But that doesn’t mean they’re not here.

Johnny Loftus (@johnnyloftus.bsky.social) is a Chicago-based writer. A veteran of the alternative weekly trenches, his work has also appeared in Entertainment Weekly, Pitchfork, The All Music Guide, and The Village Voice.