Old School. Biblically Independent.
By Mike Redmond | News | September 3, 2025
WARNING: Spoilers for Alien: Earth Episode 5 below.
I’m going to put my cards on the table. Alien: Earth is one of my favorite TV series of the year. I’ve been fighting back the urge to call it the Andor of the franchise, but Tuesday nights have become the highlight of my week thanks to this weird gem of a show. I’m here for all of it. Timothy Olyphant, the hybrids, Timothy Olyphant, the new creatures, Timothy Olyphant, the Peter Pan-obsessed dipsh*t, you name it.
Speaking of Boy Kavalier (Samuel Blenkin), the inevitable flashback episode arrived, revealing what went wrong on the Maginot that sent it crashing into Earth. In a nutshell, the series got a chance to make its own mini-Alien movie. I could lose an entire day on this topic, so I won’t get into how well Episode 5 did at subverting old ground. However, I will note that Babou Ceesay’s Morrow is in a neck-and-neck competition with Olyphant to be the show’s MVP. Ceesay may have honestly pulled ahead after this one. He was that good.
Anyway, we now know that Boy was behind the sabotage on the Maginot. It was his “brilliant” plan to crash the ship into Prodigy territory on Earth. If that scheme seems dumb as hell, welcome to the point. Turns out, Noah Hawley is not pulling his punches on the “geniuses” coming out of tech.
Via THR:
“I don’t look at our tech billionaires and think these guys are orchestrating some master plan,” Hawley replies. “I think you have a lot of ADHD billionaires with impulse control issues. And we always look to impose a certain logic on our fiction that doesn’t apply to real life. For me, it’s a way to tie everything together and as the show plays out in the rest of the season, we find that the boy genius is not a terribly thoughtful and calculating guy. He has all these ideas. He chases all of them at the same time. And he has never failed. So he thinks failure is impossible. He’s trying to launch this immortality product, so why would he do this other stuff? He thinks, ‘Oh, I could do everything.’”
Our tech overlords are over-stimulated children play-acting at being scientists? Gosh, why does that sound familiar? I guess we’ll have to content ourselves with this very vague hint from Hawley. He doesn’t drop a name, so we may never know who he means. It’s a true mystery.
“It’s a statement, on some level, about the hubris we’re seeing around us by people who think they can go to space, re-invent travel, drill in the earth and enter politics,” Hawley said. “They’re doing all of these at the same time when none of them are necessarily being done well. They’re just all being done a lot.”
Jokes aside, we’re apparently going to see an Elon Musk-proxy get ripped in half by a Xenomorph (or try to become one), killed by literally anyone on the island because they all hate him, or overtaken by a supposedly super-intelligent eyeball creature that thought it could just… bite a Xenomorph with human teeth? I’m guessing that peeper was the tech lord of its planet, which probably explains how it got caught.
God, I love this show.
