I had been hoping for more of a finale than what feels like the pause in a two-part feature-length episode, but this was otherwise excellent. The fact that it moved so quickly that I didn't realize until about five minutes from the end that they weren't going to wrap it all up was a good sign.
As suspected, Dame Sylvia does appear to have been involved in creating the kids' graveyard, which speaks to both her humanity and her complicity, with Wendy certainly believing Sylvia has children's blood on her hands.
And Atom is not just a synth, he appears to be Boy Kavalier's first synth, created to both kill Kavalier's actual father and then be a figurehead and surrogate father for Kavalier's ascension. Just like on our world, the origin story of a lot of these screwed super-rich guys comes down to terrible childhoods. And after his father's murder, there was literally no one to tell Kavalier no for most of his life, which certainly explains a lot.
Meanwhile, Wendy is not handling coming to terms with not being a human in a synthetic body, but rather a synth with human memories, pretty poorly. Sylvia and Arthur clearly hoped that imprinting a synth with the memories and personality of a human would shape the synth's behavior going forward. That clearly isn't the case since we have no reason to believe that Marcy would have behaved anything like Wendy is now. Her brother seems deeply freaked out, for one. (Also, is she stuck with that dumb haircut for eternity? That would certainly set me off.)
As for the other post-human figures, Morrow and Kirsh's battle was as violent as expected -- ouch to Kirsh getting his back broken -- although inconclusive. We still aren't sure what Kirsh is up to, but we get to see he has a bit more parental role for Boy Kavalier than expected (reminding him about managing his ADHD symptoms was a nice touch). Maybe Kirsh is his first synth, although he doesn't have the patriarchal air that Atom ("Adam") does. I do hope we learn more about Kirsh's agenda next season, as it would be disappointing (especially for Kirsh) if his entire existence was just about serving the whims of a manchild. (Sabrina Carpenter would approve of her single being a needle drop in this series, I'm sure.)
We now know that Morrow looked as at peace with getting captured as he did because he expected there to be more Weyland-Yutani forces coming, and coming in force. WY locking down Neverland isn't as drastic as nuking them from orbit, but we'll see if either of the xenomorphs gets away to evolve into a queen and start laying eggs. I expect we'll see a cave or forest glad be converted to a hatchery in season two.
At the moment, though, no one on the island -- except for the poor security personnel -- are properly scared of the xenomorphs, who are just one horror among many on Neverland. I really hope the xenos are able to sneak away and scale up, so they can show everyone who they should be really scared of, and set WY on an obsessive path to turn them into weapons.
That will also likely require Wendy discovering that she's not in control of the xenomorphs and that she was just a means to an end -- an enemy of my enemy situation, and no deeper bond than that.
And with Wendy apparently abdicating the hero role, it'd be nice to get a sense of who, if anyone, we're supposed to root for. Hermit is too passive, literally hanging back behind other characters in most scenes. Sylvia is similar, as well as deeply morally compromised. We'll see who's standing after WY, Prodigy and the Lost Boys come to blows.
Also a little frustrating is Eyeleen's decision to climb into Arthur's body, which it has to recognize is a very short-term solution. (Honestly, it's a little amazing that it can sit up at all, as rotting in the tropical sun can't be good for the tissues that weren't destroyed by the chestburster.) Hopefully it'll upgrade soon, if only so Boy Kavalier and it can have the heart to heart chat BK has been craving.
I would have liked a more apocalyptic finale that left only a few characters surviving for a potential second season. I understand the temptation Hawley is facing, with so many compelling toys that still haven't worn out their welcome. But I also remember the finale of the first season of Heroes, and the showrunners' apparently being afraid to kill off popular characters at the natural endpoint of their stories. Fingers crossed he has more of a plan for season two than "more time with these folks." Earth is a really compelling setting in the Alien universe, with a lot to say about our contemporary world, and it'd be a shame if season two is just a remix of Predator, Prometheus and more damned Peter Pan. (Seriously, if anyone is still a fan of Peter Pan after this show, I have to wonder how closely you were paying attention.)
In the end, Alien: Earth (on the off chance it doesn't get renewed) is a middle of the pack Alien franchise entry. I would put it ahead of Romulus, as its "nudge-nudge, catch that reference" stuff is less egregious. But Romulus had more moments of genuine suspense, and its opening sequence on LV-410 is more effective at showing us just how ground-down everyone other than trillionaires is in this dystopian corporate future, which I'd hoped to have more of in Alien: Earth.
My hope for season two would be that the war on Neverland is bloody and over quickly, with a small handful of survivors escaping into Prodigy City/New Siam, incorrectly believing the xenomorphs are dead, only for us to know that a future queen swam to New Siam and is filling a subbasement with eggs. Then we could get a season like I had hoped for, showing the awfulness of life on Earth, with the bars of the gilded cage in New Siam very obvious to the viewer, while the threat of the xenomorphs spreads with a headless Prodigy unaware of the threat until it's too late. Give us a city-wide massacre and have the Five nuke the island from orbit, reducing the megacorps down to four and turning the xenomorphs into terrifying boogeymen that the other corporations know little about other than to know them as a potential superweapon.
The Alien franchise is about tied with Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy for my favorite science fiction franchise (sorry, franchises starting with the word "Star") and this felt like a worthy entry, much better than most of the Alien stuff over the years (a full rewatch of the series last year really undescored how much wasted potential there is here). I'm optimistic that Hawley can refocus his vision and give us something with more bite and more scares next time.
And until then, there's Predator: Badlands, which I suspect will feel like canon in a way the two AVP movies do not.
