Warning: this article contains spoilers for episode four of Alien: Earth, “Observation.”
The newest episode of FX’s Alien: Earth has established new aspect of the terrifying Xenomorph’s biology, marking new territory for Ridley Scott’s iconic sci-fi horror series (via Comicbook). The end of episode four, “Observation,” saw hybrid being Wendy accomplish something never before achieved within the franchise: communication with the Xenomorph.
For those lacking context, the plot of Alien: Earth has largely centered on Sydney Chandler’s (Pistol, Don’t Worry Darling) Wendy, an untraditional kind of protagonist for the Alien series. Having uploaded her consciousness into an artificial body to escape her terminal illness as a young girl, Wendy is a “hybrid”, a new kind of posthuman entity that joins the franchise’s previously established cyborgs and androids. As the first to undergo the process of hybridization, she leads the “Lost Boys”, a group of children in synthetic adult bodies who are dispatched to the Xenomorph-infested USCSS Maginot as part of a search-and-rescue operation by the Prodigy corporation at Wendy’s behest.
But from the moment Wendy stopped onto the Maginot, she began exhibiting a strange connection with the Xenomorphs that neither she nor Prodigy, her creators, seemed to fully understand (via Comicbook). What was first written off as static soon proved to be a kind of psychic connection with the killing machines, one strong enough that when one of her Lost Boys killed a facehugger at the end of episode three, “Metamorphosis”, it caused her to physically collapse. After waking from her coma in “Observation”, Prodigy successfully engineers a way for Wendy to tune her vocal chords to a frequency that allows her to not only understand the creatures’ language, but fully converse with them.
As this moment acts as the conclusion of “Observation,” audiences will have to wait a week to see how Wendy’s ability to communicate with the aliens affects the narrative of the series (according to Comicbook). Given that the unscrupulous Prodigy corporation only discovered Wendy’s ability while attempting to create their own Xenomorph, it seems likely that the megacorp will waste no time exploiting Wendy and her remaining Lost Boys to further their research. On a more personal level, Wendy’s relationship with the newborn “Xenopet” (as fans are calling it) seems to be hinting at a kind of friendship with the creature, which would be heavily uncharted territory for the series. No one in the Alien universe has ever managed to befriend or even tame a Xenomorph before; then again, has anyone ever had the chance to try?
Episode five of Alien: Earth will premiere next Tuesday night on Hulu, while the first four episodes are streaming now.