Spoiler Alert: This story contains spoilers for “Appearance,” Episode 7, and Season 1 of “Alien: Earth.”
Children are the future, or they are said through FX’s “Alien: Earth.” After consciousness is selected to undergo a procedure in which it is placed inside the adult hybrid body, each child is frothed into Neverland Research Island, where it is considered an immortal future purchased by consumers around the world. For selected terminal children, it is an opportunity to cure from all illnesses, effectively leaving everything they once knew when they began their new life.
As the children begin to get used to the adult body and change their emotions, one of the hybrids, Nib (Lily Newmark), reveals to two leading scientists, Dame Sylvia (Essie Davis) and Arthur Sylvia (David Rysdahl), that she is pregnant. To mediate the situation and prevent more flashbacks, Dame Sylvia erases her memories and puts the nib in a confused state about what she missed after the USCSS Maginot crash. After Wendy (Sidney Chandler) discovers that Nibbs has erased her memory, she reveals to her about a company that erases the past, and Wendy’s older brother Joe (Alex Rother) begins to formulate a plan to drive his sister off the island before she gets hurt.
Alex Lawther as Hermit, Sidney Chandler as Wendy, and Lily Newmark as Nib
Patrick Brown/FX
“For the nib, her turning point is when Carly (Ellana James) comforts her in her bedroom, Wendy tells them that Tootre (Kit Young) is dead,” Newmark tells Variety. “It sparks this new realization that they are not immortal and that the lost boy can actually die. If she stays in Neverland, she is likely to die, and she is not prepared for it yet.”
Wendy claims that adult scientists have slowly begun to erase some of her memories, but Joe sees how his sister finally begins to see the true colours of Prodigy Corporation and how it is beginning to affect the lives of hybrid children. “It all tied to the fact that no one appears to be caring for a hybrid,” says Roser. “Whether they are children or more than humans, they are still not fully developed, vulnerable and do not appear to be responsible for their vulnerability. The damage was probably irreparable with a nib.”
When Nip, Joe and Wendy begin their journey to find an escape from the island, the Hybrid faces a marked grave from past lives. Nebus reveals to Wendy and Joe that her birth name was once Rose Ellis before she received a memory transfer to her hybrid body. When the nibs study her grave, the two brothers finally get to see where Wendy’s body rests, marking her previous name, Mercy Hermit.
By seeing the last remains of her past life as Rose Ellis, the nib accepts her new body and possibilities of freedom. “She feels incredibly empowering in the moment to see her dead because she is alive and seeing herself,” says Newmark. “She is inspired by the prospect of being immortal to this incredibly powerful synthetic adult body, which is why we see this change.
For someone like Joe, who actively laments the loss and return of her sister, Rother reveals that seeing the grave for the first time for his character is an in vitro experience that raises various questions.
“At that moment, Joe finally faced the reality of the last six episodes he was trying to avoid,” says Rother. “There were a lot of questions he overlooked. I include the fact that her physical form doesn’t resemble the sister he once had. Joe knew that she needed to take care of her when her sister is terminally ill. Mercy’s cas?
At the final moments of the episode, the three characters finally make it towards the Neverland docking pier and are stopped by soldiers from Prodigy Corporation. Nebus screams that they will never return to their new home, but one of the soldiers assaulted her and threw her beloved ostrich plush toy, Mr. Strawberry, into the sea. The nib retaliates quickly, indicating how powerful the hybrid is when tearing the soldier’s jaw. It’s the moment when the audience sees the rage that Nib and Wendy are fighting back at the corporations that took their name and who they once were, and oppressing them inside.
“Nebus is so underrated up to that moment,” says Newmark. “People forget that she is not just a child because she thinks she is so fragile, vulnerable and unable to stand up for herself. She is an unprecedented machine in power, and the soldiers deserved to attack.
After NIBS attacks Siberia (Diêm Camille), one of the soldiers of Prodigy Corporation who works with Joe, he effectively blocks her from stunning the nib with an electric gun, causing her to effectively block her from hurting the rest of the soldiers. After Wendy witnesses her brother oppose the hybrid and appearing to stand behind Prodigy Corporation, it shows that the sibling’s dynamics are not the same as before.
“In that scene, Joe reveals what hierarchy of care a biological human has in that moment, where he is prioritized above anything else,” says Rother. “It raises a contradiction because Joe said he was probably the only person who knows how to look after his sister, the Hybrid. But that’s probably not true. If he’s willing to shoot the nib, he makes it very clear that he value a certain life more than the others.
If the three were away from the research island, what would have been the best case scenario for their freedom? “All Neb wants is freedom and safety, so if she can escape, I would like her to go on a very long hike and scream at the top,” says Newmark. “I want her to take all that rage down. I also want her and Mr. Strawberry to go for a swim together in the ocean and scream to Deep by.”
