Episode Details

The Alien franchise is finally dead

Published 11 months ago

Alien has always been a story about…

…go on…take a guess…

…the alien. The xenomorph. The terrifying other.

The non-human.

Alien Earth is a story about the Alien finally arriving on Earth.

And fighting it out with humanity 2.0 – cyborgs, synths and hybrids.

If Alien was a story about the non-human.

Alien Earth is a story about the posthuman.

Watching Marcy become Wendy

We’re in the territory of characters like Motoko “The Major” Kusanagi of Ghost in the Shell, Altered Carbon’s Takeshi Kovacs and Battle Angel Alita

Humans who have transcended the human

To the posthuman

But as we watch the bleak process of killing a girl so a facsimile of her mind can inhabit a new synthetic body

All the questions that haunt the posthuman haunt us.

Is a copied mindstate real, or just a copy? Is killing the original murder, or just like deleting a backup?

Is the new posthuman human at all?

And what even is human?

But as the imagery of Peter Pan flashes past, Alien Earth hints at an answer we haven’t heard before,

That the human dream of transcending beyond pain and suffering to the near immortality offered by posthumanity.

Beyond the reality of being just food.

Is just a fantasy.