After seven full weeks, Noah Hawley’s Alien: Earth is coming to a close, and with the release of the trailer for its final episode, the end is officially upon us.
The trailer for the finale, titled “The Real Monsters,” packs a lot of stuff into a thirty-second runtime, all of which promises to see the full extent of the series’ running themes, characters, and narratives brought to a dramatic conclusion.
The prior episode, “Emergence,” leaves viewers on a cliffhanger ending, in which Alex’s attempt to smuggle himself, Wendy, and Nibs is thwarted by his old Marine colleagues.
Furthermore, as things escalate and Nibs proceeds to kill several of those Marines, Alex uses an electro-pulse rifle on her, seemingly decommissioning her as a result. This sends Wendy into a blind rage, which is especially bad for anyone in the vicinity, considering she has developed a maternal relationship with a nearby Xenomorph who is poised and ready to strike upon her command.
Even just the name of this final episode, “The Real Monsters,” indicates that Wendy’s full arc across the series is going to reach completion here with the character realizing that in her less-than-human state (Wendy and the Lost Boys are hybrids; androids who have had the consciousness of sick children uploaded into them), she has more in common with other synthetics and the ‘monsters’ that were aboard the Maginot than she does the humans, including her brother.
This is fantastically encapsulated in a beat early in the trailer in which Joe, her brother, says, “We’re food to them,” presumably speaking of the creatures, to which Wendy responds, “No, you’re food to them.” Not only does this illustrate just how much Wendy has changed as a character, but it also ties nicely back to Kirsh’s monologue from their very first episode about the food chain.
Elsewhere, it looks like things will truly hit the wall here in the final stretch, as we get glimpses of both Boy Kavalier and Dame Sylvia taking shelter within a seemingly powerless Neverland base, hiding from the various loose creatures roaming the area, possibly including Wendy. She further hints at this with her final line, “All this time we’ve been afraid of them, but I think they should be afraid of us.”
The trailer also features the pronounced use of the iconic and infamous Alien scream, utilized to such bristling and unsettling effect in the original trailer for the first film all the way back in 1979.
Considering that this is the trailer for the final episode of Alien: Earth and that the show itself is set a mere few years before the events of that first film, this is an extremely fitting way to bring the whole thing full circle.