Hot on the heels of the release of the fifth episode, “In Space, No One...,” the trailer for next week’s new episode of Alien: Earth has been unveiled, and it is teasing entirely new terrain for the science fiction horror series.
The trailer for the next episode, titled “The Fly,” sees the series returning to present-tense action following its flashback-centered fifth episode, resuming the in-progress development of Wendy, her brother Joe, the Lost Boys, the crew of Prodigy’s Neverland compound, and a brand-new baby Xenomorph.
As fans will undoubtedly remember, the end of the fourth episode of the series, titled “Observation,” saw Wendy (as played by Sydney Chandler) realizing that she could not only understand the high-pitched language that the Xenomorphs use to communicate, but also that she could duplicate it, effectively speaking to the creatures herself.
That episode closed out on a shot of a very content-looking Wendy using this ability to soothe the infant Xenomorph that had just hatched out of the freshly removed lung of her brother, Joe (played by Alex Lawther).
In the new trailer, we get a few good looks at the Xenomorph, and to the surprise of no one who is even remotely familiar with the Alien franchise, it seems to be growing fast. While the creature is in containment alongside the other species in Prodigy’s holding cells, the trailer begs the question of exactly how long any of that will hold.
Not only do later shots in the episode showcase a character being attacked by a freshly hatched facehugger, but as the stakes are raised and tensions escalate, there’s even a beat of Joe telling Wendy they need to leave, only for Wendy to pose the question, “What if I don’t want to go?”
This pairs well with an earlier line in the trailer, in which Wendy equates the way in which Prodigy is watching her and the Lost Boys (all of whom are synthetics who have had the consciousness of sick children transferred into them) to how they’ve been observing the alien specimens, and hints toward the bond between Wendy and these creatures deepening in surprising ways.
Showrunner Noah Hawley and his team have done an exemplary job thus far of not only delivering the kind of red-blooded horror and action that Alien franchise fans expect, while also subverting and extrapolating fascinating readings from those beats in equal measure. This trailer teases an episode that is very much in keeping with this theme, escalating the traditional tension of monsters-on-the-loose, and a much more existential one simultaneously.
One of the other notable things about the trailer is actually what is absent from it: Morrow (played by Babou Ceesay). The prior episode ended with a present-set epilogue, which saw him meeting with Yutani (played by Sandra Yi Sencindiver) and essentially getting her blessing to take a small army to Prodigy and get these specimens back. It remains to be seen if that thread or character will actually play a role in this next episode, or if it will be saved for one of the final two installments.
Regardless, this trailer for “The Fly” promises more exciting developments from Alien: Earth. Don’t miss the new episode when it premieres on Tuesday, Sept. 9 on FX and Hulu.