By Alan Sepinwall
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September 16, 2025
Patrick Brown/FX
This post contains spoilers for this week’s episode of Alien: Earth, “Emergence,” now streaming on Hulu.
The amount of time it takes a Xenomorph to gestate from face-hugger to chest-burster to full-sized monster has varied from film to film in the Alien series. In some movies, the chest-burster can take days to make its disgusting appearance; in others, it happens very quickly, as later directors assume the audience knows the whole life cycle and would like to get to the point already.
Though Noah Hawley is most reverent towards the first two films — particularly Alien, where it takes a while for Kane to die — he definitely falls in with the later movies on the timeline question. Arthur got attacked by a face-hugger at the end of last week’s episode. “Emergence” covers what seems like only a couple of hours in the aftermath of Isaac’s death, yet Arthur is back on his feet by the episode’s midway point, and his chest has been split open by a baby Xeno by the end. With the first season almost over, Hawley has no interest in dilly-dallying on a biological process that many in the audience have seen play out many times before.
That level of haste can be found almost everywhere in “Emergence.” At 45 minutes without commercials, it’s by far the shortest episode to this point. And while there are several notable plot developments, all of them come at a fast clip. The result is an episode that has some exciting moments but feels more like an extended setup for the season finale than a satisfying installment in its own right.
Slightly ropes Smee into being his accomplice in smuggling Arthur off the island. But the Xenomorph makes an appearance before the two most immature Lost Boys can connect with Morrow. And while it briefly appears that Kirsh is working against Boy Kavalier’s interests by helping Slightly, it turns out he’s just been baiting a trap for Morrow and his Weyland-Yutani soldiers the whole time(*), capturing them all when their guard is down.
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(*) There’s still the matter of Kirsh not telling Kavalier about Isaac late in last week’s episode. You can just write that off as shameless misdirection by the creative team, or as an example of how confident Kirsh is. He’s so sure he can nip this attack in the bud that he’d rather wait until his plan has succeeded before bothering the boss with the details.
Kavalier is understandably upset about Isaac’s death — not the loss of life, of course, but the loss of a multibillion-dollar asset. But he’s soon distracted by everybody’s favorite alien/animal hybrid, the eyeball sheep. Even though Kavalier is dealing with a dead Lost Boy, Wendy’s rebellion, and other problems, he just can’t let go of his fascination with the eyeball, and can you blame him? While other aspects of Alien: Earth can be dodgy, the eyeball (or, as Hawley calls it, “the eye midge”) is the show’s most vivid, fiendishly simple creation. The sheep mostly just stands stock still, and here releases its bowels as its only means of responding to Kavalier’s attempt to make conversation. But that stillness, the clear signs of intelligence even when it’s doing nothing, and the gory design of how it looks (both within and without its hosts) have made it mesmerizing. The danger it poses is much scarier than what Kavalier himself is up to, because he’s such a cartoonish extrapolation of a tech bro that there’s no real menace to anything he does, even when he begins plotting with Atom to find a human host for his new best friend.
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Arguably the biggest developments involve our heroine, who is understandably fed up with everything Prodigy has been doing to her and the other Lost Boys. Isaac is dead. Nibs has had her memory altered, to the point where even she isn’t sure she’s the same person as the little girl from the first episode. Meanwhile, Wendy has developed a bond with the Xenomorph not unlike that between a pet and its owner, and can give it basic commands that it either has to, or chooses to, follow. When Kavalier tries to stop her from telling the other hybrids about all that’s been happening, she openly defies him, then later turns off the island’s security systems and sets the Xenomorph loose. Joe teams up with her to try to get off the island, but when Wendy’s pet and Nibs start killing his pals from the search-and-rescue team — Nibs by tearing the jaw off one of them — he panics and hits Nibs with an electro-shock. Unlike Nibs, Wendy still thinks of herself as the little girl who lay down in Arthur’s lab, and looks at Joe as her brother. But when he attacks Nibs, it doesn’t matter that he was doing it to protect other people from an out-of-control Lost Boy. In that moment, he becomes yet another grown-up who has let her down, and yet another reason to feel more loyalty to the Xenomorph than to the people trying to examine it.
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All of this happens quickly, arguably too quickly in several cases. Hawley has the finale to find a satisfying conclusion to this phase of the story, and then we’ll see if FX wants to make more of this very expensive-looking show.
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