SPOILER ALERT: This story contains spoilers for “Emergence,” Episode 7, Season 1 of “Alien: Earth,” now streaming on Hulu.
Children are the future, or so they are told throughout FX’s “Alien: Earth.” After being selected to undergo a procedure where their consciousness is placed inside of an adult hybrid body, each child is whisked away to Neverland Research Island, where they are considered to be the future of immortality for consumers around the world to purchase. To the terminally ill children chosen, it’s an opportunity to be cured from all disease, effectively leaving behind everything they once knew as they start their new lives.
As the children begin getting accustomed to their adult bodies and changing emotions, one of the hybrids, Nibs (Lily Newmark) reveals to two of the lead scientists, Dame Sylvia (Essie Davis) and Arthur Sylvia (David Rysdahl) that she is pregnant, revealing signs of past trauma from her previous household. In an attempt to mediate the situation and prevent more flashbacks, Dame Sylvia erases her memory, leaving Nibs in a state of confusion on what she has missed after the USCSS Maginot crash. After Wendy (Sydney Chandler) discovers that Nibs has had her memory erased, she confides with her about the corporation erasing her past, while Wendy’s older brother, Joe (Alex Lawther), begins to formulate a plan to get his sister off the island before she is harmed.
Alex Lawther as Hermit, Sydney Chandler as Wendy, Lily Newmark as Nibs
Courtesy of Patrick Brown/FX
“For Nibs, her turning point is when Curly [Erana James] is consoling her in her bedroom and Wendy tells them that Tootles [Kit Young] is dead,” Newmark tells Variety. “It triggers this newfound realization that they are not immortal, and that The Lost Boys are in fact capable of dying. If she stays at Neverland, there’s a high potential that she could die, and she’s not prepared for that yet.”
While Wendy confides in Nibs that the adult scientists have slowly begun to erase parts of her memory, Joe watches his sister finally begin to see the true colors of Prodigy Corporation, and how it’s beginning to affect the lives of the hybrid children. “It is all tied up with the fact that nobody seems to be taking care of the hybrids,” Lawther says. “Regardless of whether they’re children or more than human, they still are clearly not fully developed and are vulnerable, and nobody seems to be taking responsibility for that vulnerability. The damage has been done with Nibs, perhaps irrevocably.”
As Nibs, Joe and Wendy begin their journey to finding an escape from the island, the hybrids are confronted with the graves marked from their past lives. Nibs reveals to Wendy and Joe that her birth name used to be Rose Ellis before undergoing the memory transfer to her hybrid body. As Nibs studies her grave, the two siblings finally get to see the where Wendy’s body was laid to rest, marked with her former name: Marcy Hermit.
By seeing the last remnants of her past life as Rose Ellis, Nibs comes to terms with her new body and the chance of freedom. “She finds it incredibly empowering in that moment to see that she’s died, but not truly, because she is alive and watching herself,” says Newmark. “She’s inspired by the prospect of being immortal in this incredibly powerful synthetic adult body, and which is why you see this shift. By being up there [on Neverland Research Island], she’s going to be a new person with a much better life.”
For someone like Joe, who is actively mourning the loss and return of his younger sister, Lawther reveals that seeing the grave for the first time for his character is an out-of-body experience that brings forward various questions.
“In that moment, Joe is finally confronted with the reality for the last six episodes that he’s been trying to avoid,” Lawther says. “There have been many questions that he has overlooked, including the fact that her physical form no longer resembles the sister that he once had. Joe had understood that his sister needed caring for when she was terminally ill, and that care was related to a 12-year-old little girl. The reality is that there is a child’s body buried in the earth, and there was a funeral that he thought he went to for her. But, that means that there was a body that was buried at that funeral, so what was inside Marcy’s casket? It’s quite a thorny situation and nevertheless, he’s chosen to care for this Wendy hybrid.”
In the final moments of the episode, the three characters finally make it toward the Neverland docking pier before being stopped by the Prodigy Corporation soldiers. While Nibs exclaims that they’re never going back to their new home, one of the soldiers lashes out at her, throwing her beloved ostrich plush, Mr. Strawberry, into the ocean. Nibs immediately retaliates, showcasing how powerful the hybrids are as she rips the jaw off of the soldier. It’s the moment the audience sees the rage that Nibs and Wendy have been suppressing inside, as they fight back against the corporation that took away their names and who they once were.
“Nibs is so underestimated up until that very moment,” Newmark says. “People think that she is so fragile and vulnerable and incapable of standing up for herself that they forget that she is not just a child. She’s a machine whose powers are unprecedented. Also, the soldier completely deserved the attack, because nobody throws Mr. Strawberry in the water.”
After Nibs attacks Siberian (Diêm Camille), one of the Prodigy Corporation soldiers who works alongside Joe, he takes the moment to stun Nibs with an electric gun, effectively shutting her down from harming the rest of the soldiers. After Wendy witnesses her brother turn against a hybrid and seemingly stand behind Prodigy Corporation, it shows that their sibling dynamic will never be the same as it was before.
“In that scene, Joe reveals that he does have a hierarchy of care at which biological humans for him take precedence over anything else in that moment,” Lawther says. “It poses a contradiction, because Joe has been saying he’s the only one that knows how to probably look after the hybrid who is his sister, but perhaps that’s not the truth. If he’s so willing to shoot Nibs, he makes it very clear that there’s an order in which he values certain lives over others. He’s lacking in a way that Wendy needs him not to be, and she needs him to not shoot her friends with an electric machine gun.”
If the three had gotten off the research island, what would’ve been the best case scenario for their freedom? “All Nibs wants is freedom and safety, so if she was able to escape, I would want her to to go on a really long hike up a mountain and scream at the top,” says Newmark. “I just want her to unload all of that rage. I would also want her and Mr. Strawberry to go for a swim together in the ocean and to scream into the abyss.”
