Alien: Earth is a richly-produced and suspenseful show, perhaps an illustration of the Chinese curse “May you live in interesting times.” The actors who play its two antagonists each have a slow burn sexiness that’s erratic and takes some time to notice.
British actor Samuel Benjamin Blenkin is a jolie laide Timothee Chalamet, scrawny and intense, sexier than Chalamet at points in the story, though not as conventionally good looking. Blenkin plays Boy Kavalier, the trillionaire head of one of the five mega corporations that rule the future earth in place of governments, his corporation focused on AI, robots (“synths” as the synthetic humanoid robots he produces are called), and a new venture, robot bodies into which the minds of live human beings can be uploaded, giving them an approach to terrestrial immortality. The uploading—which he hopes to sell as a service to wealthy clients—is as yet a prototype: he can only upload the minds of children. So he offers free uploads to a handful of families whose children have terminal illnesses. And it works.
The first of these uploaded kids “Wendy” (Kavalier thinks of himself as Peter Pan), played by Sydney Chandler, a sort of Audrey Hepburn type who isn’t blonde or bosomy, develops a number of special talents over time, but she also has the soul of a pre-teen, and in particular a pre-teen girl.
An interstellar ship belonging to one of the rival mega corporations—Asian-owned—that’s collected specimens in deep space for 65 years that its corporate owners hope to sell to whatever remains of government militaries (or corporate militaries) as weapons, crashes in a terrestrial city, after a cyborg (human with mechanical upgrades) in the pay of the corporation kills the crew to override safety protocols against bringing dangerous species to earth. Among these specimens are the “Aliens” Ripley had to fight in the first film back in 1979, sought again by corporate arms merchants. But the crash is in Boy Kavalier’s territory, not controlled by the Asian corporation, so he seizes the specimens and takes them to a secluded island where his corporation conducts research.
Kavalier’s self-understanding is that he’s seeking someone as intelligent as him, so that he can finally have a decent conversation. Uploading a human mind into a robot body that’s AI-empowered to have superhuman processing speeds is his plan for finding this perfect friend. Wendy and the other uploaded children throw a wrench into all this. Wendy doesn’t like the idea of anyone hurting an animal, even an Alien, and when she learns to communicate with them, a kind of pre-teen girl suicidal altruism leads her to rank them equally with or morally above human beings, because humans and Aliens are carnivorous predators, but at least the Aliens are honest. At the end of the season finale Wendy and her human brother (whom she’s rescued from his own rescue mission as a medic searching for victims in the crashed ship) and her uploaded friends have domesticated (for now) the Alien as a guard dog, and subdued the humans of both corporations. Standing together in almost the exact same tableau as the series finale of Buffy, the Vampire Slayer—where a member of Buffy’s Scooby Gang asks her what they will now do (having eliminated Sunnydale’s Hellmouth), and Buffy says “Live!”—Wendy’s uploaded friends ask her what they’ll now do and Wendy says “Rule!”
A lot of this has already been in the television and streaming zeitgeist. Amazon’s Upload has humans paying for digital immortality; NBC’s great but cancelled Debris showed bits of advanced and dangerous extraterrestrial tech crashing to earth; and FOX’s Next (and dozens of other fictions) have shown the problems of robots and androids living among us.
The mega corporations in Alien: Earth are supposed to represent a critique of people like Elon Musk. But what if our current near-trillionaires, who are interested in AI, immortality and space exploration, adopted more popular and ameliorative goals. What if instead of immortality, the technology they sought was to restore to wholeness the severely disabled who currently will never live a full and independent life. What if the neural implants being developed now could not only allow a disabled person to move a mechanical limb, but would allow someone with Down or Angelman or other syndromes to approach average normal intellectual functioning?
I’m cheered by Trump’s and RFK Jr.’s research into acetaminophen and other environmental insults that may be behind the explosion in autism. Disabilities impose huge costs on the families of the disabled and society at large, besides radically reducing the human flourishing and quality of life of the disabled. But if someone produced technological restorations of the missing or shrunken abilities, including cognitive abilities, they should be acclaimed as such heroes that the usual Hollywood depictions of the evils of technology and its corporate purveyors might be laughed out of court.