2025 has been a major year for sci-fi television on the whole, with major returning shows like Severance and Invasion on Apple TV+ and Star Trek: Strange New Worlds on Paramount+. Even with fan-favorites coming back for new episodes, the year has also been defined by brand new TV series within the genre. Apple TV+ continues to rule the roost in terms of sci-fi by delivering their hit new show Murderbot while Netflix made a surprising drop into the genre with The Eternaut. Even Marvel got in on it, delivering the highly anticipated Ironheart and Eyes of Wakanda TV Shows. The biggest new sci-fi show of the year however come from another franchise, and it’s one that is setting itself up for a gigantic final episode.
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Back in August, FX and Hulu debuted the first episode of Alien: Earth, the new TV series from Fargo‘s Noah Hawley. Since its debut, the series has delivered major changes and brought fresh ideas to the long-running Alien franchise, even outshining many of its counterparts that were produced for the big screen. This week saw the premiere of Episode 7 of the series though, and with only one left to premiere, Alien: Earth is setting itself up to a super-sized finale because a lot of plot threads are coming to a head. Naturally, Spoilers follow.
Alien: Earth Weaponizes the Xenomorphs, But Where Is It Headed?
A key idea that has become a major plot point for Alien: Earth is the fact that Wendy (Sydney Chandler), a hybrid with a human consciousness inside a synthetic body, is actually able to communicate with the xenomorphs. This was revealed after the aliens were brought to Prodigy’s island base earlier in the series, but Episode 7 confirmed that Wendy can also command the xenomorphs to do her bidding, using the fully grown alien to attack and subdue the Weyland-Yutani forces that surround her. The full extent of how and why Wendy is capable of doing this hasn’t been fully revealed, and with one episode left, it may remain a larger mystery that isn’t answered at all this season.
The Hybrids Are Going Rogue
Episode 7 of Alien: Earth saw Boy Kavalier’s slew of hybrid “children” each hit a pivotal moment in their existence. Wendy and Nibs (Lily Newmark) attempted to escape the island with her brother, Joe (Alex Lawther), only to be apprehended by Prodigy security before they could go. In addition, both Smee (Jonathan Ajayi) and Slightly (Adarsh Gourav) attempted to handover a xenomorph to Morrow and the Weyland-Yutani security forces, only for that plan to go belly up and get “grounded” by Kirsh (Timothy Olyphant). Finally, Curly (Erana James), once seen as the most steadfast and confident of the hybrids, showed a moment of major vulnerability to Dame Sylvia (Essie Davis), perhaps hinting at the make-up of the hybrids not being as sound as the Prodigy team thought they would be. What this seems to be setting up is that the hybrids are not the kind of entities that Prodigy thought they were creating, and they’re no longer eager to follow orders, making their future even more uncertain in the big picture.
The Weyland-Yutani vs Prodigy Cold War Gets Hot
Since the first episode this conflict has been brewing, with every new episode of Alien: Earth making it clear that the Weyland-Yutani corporation (the long-standing “company” from the Alien movie franchise) is on a collision course with Boy Kavalier’s Prodigy Corporation. It started with the USCSS Maginot crashing into Prodigy City, which was later revealed to be an inside job so that Prodigy could collect the specimens from deep space that Weyland-Yutani had been after.
Even though a settlement was reached in a previous episode between the two companies, with an expectation that Prodigy would hand over their specimens after a delayed window, that didn’t stop Morrow and a strike team of Weyland-Yutani soldiers from invading Prodigy island to try and capture one of the xenomorphs. That, naturally, didn’t go well, with some of them eliminated by the alien creature, but then the rest captured by Prodigy to boot. This war is about to get even bigger, and probably explosive.
The Brand New Aliens Are Still a Mystery
It’s no surprise that Alien: Earth would deliver not only facehuggers, chestbursters, and xenomorphs, but the actual surprise came in the form of all the other aliens that they introduced into the franchise. To date the only real alien bests seen throughout the films have been the ones we’re all familiar with, though Prometheus did introduce the race of Engineers into the equation (and in theory, the Predators are out there, somewhere). Alien: Earth however delivered new alien species that are really unlike anything else seen in the films.
Among those that they’ve revealed are giant moth-like bugs that eat minerals and avoid organic matter (killing one of the hybrids to feast on his mechanical insides), a giant flower-like anomaly that hangs from the ceiling and has a pointed tongue it uses to lure in prey, and also small, leech-like beasts that grow to enormous side after slurping up blood from their victims. The biggest, and arguably best, new alien introduced however is the tentacled eye-ball alien. This creature can split its eye into multiple pieces, but also has shown extreme measures of intelligence, including problem solving and cause-and-effect understanding.
In the latest episode of Alien: Earth, Boy Kavalier took extreme interest in the eye-ball alien, realizing how intelligent it really was. It remains to be seen where that plot thread will go in the next, and final, episode of Alien: Earth, but it’s one that cannot be ignored.
One episode remains of Alien: Earth, and it will premiere next Tuesday, September 23rd, on Hulu and FX at 8 PM ET.
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