As much as the Alien franchise concerns itself with the horrors inflicted by Xenomorphs, there’s a reason humans keep crossing paths with them: corporate greed. Time and again, we see what happens when power-hungry corporations deem their own employees expendable pawns in pursuit of a biological gold mine. In Alien, the android Ash (Ian Holm) is under company orders to bring the Xenomorph to Earth for scientific study, putting the rest of the crew’s lives at risk. In Aliens, we learn that a Weyland-Yutani executive ordered space colonists to investigate a derelict ship containing Xenomorph eggs, leading to the deaths of everyone on the planet with the exception of one little girl. I could go on. No matter how often companies like Weyland-Yutani attempt to control—and profit from—Xenomorphs, shit always hits the fan in the far reaches of space. As a result, blue-collar workers like Sigourney Weaver’s Ellen Ripley are the ones who suffer most.
Are things any different back on Earth? One of the most fascinating elements of the first live-action Alien TV series, Alien: Earth, is seeing how humanity has become completely, alarmingly corporatized. By the year 2120, world governments no longer exist, replaced by five megacorporations that have split the planet among themselves and colonized the solar system. One such company is Prodigy, run by a self-described boy genius named, incredibly, Boy Kavalier. As played by English actor Samuel Blenkin, Kavalier recalls the impetuous tech billionaires of our time who aspire to achieve incredible scientific breakthroughs with little to no consideration of the consequences. Case in point, for both Earth and the real world: artificial intelligence.
Before Xenomorphs enter the picture, Prodigy is working on a new synthetic hybrid that allows them to transfer human consciousness into a robot body. Because adult minds can’t make the transition, Prodigy’s first test subjects are a group of terminally ill children who are given new names inspired by the Lost Boys from Peter Pan. (To keep the Peter Pan theme going, Prodigy’s research facility is an island called Neverland.) Setting aside the ethical implications of this procedure, the company’s young CEO has a reckless—one might even say cavalier—attitude that, in Blenkin’s view, stems from his character having an embarrassment of riches at his disposal. “One of the things that I love is that there’s a big trait in this character, which is about boredom,” Blenkin says. “When you have everything, the meaning starts to dissolve from your life, and so you have to go bigger and bigger and bigger. And he’s got to the point where he’s got so much power, the next thing, it’s moving into self-destructive territory.”
That self-destructive territory leads us back to the Xenomorphs, which are being transported to Earth on a Weyland-Yutani research vessel, the Maginot, at the beginning of the series. As we learn in Earth’s fifth episode—which is basically showrunner Noah Hawley doing an hour-long homage to the original Alien—Kavalier convinced one of the crew members to crash the ship in a Prodigy city in exchange for transferring his consciousness to a hybrid body. (Kavalier conveniently omitted the fact that they’ve yet to crack the code on turning adults into hybrids.) But while Kavalier orchestrates a way to acquire Xenomorphs from a corporate rival, there is no master plan—he just wants another shiny new toy to play with. As Hawley told The Hollywood Reporter, Kavalier is akin to one of those “ADHD billionaires with impulse control issues.”
Being an impulsive person isn’t inherently dangerous, but when you’re in charge of a trillion-dollar corporation that’s experimenting with hostile alien life-forms and AI, that becomes a recipe for disaster. It’s even more alarming when nobody has any agency to stand up to Kavalier, whether it’s due to their employment status or because it’s part of their programming. As Blenkin tells me, one of Hawley’s biggest reference points for the character was an episode of The Twilight Zone, “It’s a Good Life,” in which a little boy with telekinetic powers controls a small town. If anyone has a negative thought, they’re banished into a purgatorial cornfield. Everyone is constantly walking on eggshells in the boy’s presence.
“[Noah] wasn’t giving me a note about acting; he’s giving me a note about the atmosphere about what it’s like when [Kavalier] walks into a room,” Blenkin says. “That told me so much about the fact that the character sees himself as young and having no responsibility to grow up, but also the way that he has grown up with absolutely no moments where he's been humbled in any way. … There hasn’t been a moment when he hasn’t had the people close to him affirming that he’s doing the right thing—because he built them.”
By the season finale, however, the hybrids rebel against their corporate overlords. Led by Wendy (Sydney Chandler), who develops a maternal bond with a Xenomorph birthed on the island, the Lost Boys set the alien specimens free and ultimately imprison everyone who’s tried to control them, Kavalier included. Just as he named the hybrids after the Lost Boys, Kavalier had fashioned himself as Peter Pan—all the way down to wearing pajamas and strolling through Neverland barefoot. (“What I love is the fact that he's totally misread the story of Peter Pan and turned it into his own hero story,” Blenkin says.) But Wendy sees through the facade of someone who, despite his best efforts, is less of a boy genius than a petulant man-child. “You’ve always been a man,” Wendy tells Kavalier in the finale. “An angry little man who decided to hate everybody.”
Now, Earth has arrived at a familiar juncture in the Alien franchise: The once-powerful corporation has gotten the rug pulled out from under it. But while the Alien movies are largely self-contained, Earth has the narrative runway to continue its story, provided that FX renews the series for a second season. For Blenkin, that means the potential to explore new sides of Kavalier. “The conversations I’ve had with Noah have made it very clear that [Kavalier] isn't, in Noah's eyes, a sociopath,” Blenkin says. “And that's great for me because that means that underneath all of these motivations, there’s a second life of this character—clearly from when he was very, very young—that’s locked away in a backdoor somewhere.”
More on ‘Alien: Earth’
While we don’t know where Kavalier’s story is headed, one of the overriding motivations for the character was having, in his own words, “an interesting fucking conversation” with an intellectual peer—something he apparently can’t find among other humans. Setting aside that Kavalier’s overly inflated ego probably couldn’t accept someone else being smarter than him, the entire season has illustrated that having a lot of money doesn’t equate to possessing a lot of intelligence. Blenkin, for his part, hopes there will be more opportunities for Kavalier to be humbled. “That's the kind of stuff that, as an actor, you dream of: when a character with that size of an ego gets into a situation like that,” Blenkin says. “I know that [Noah]’s going to be wanting some really crazy stuff to happen if we do go on to do a second season.”
Honestly, I’m praying for things to go even more sideways. The highest compliment I can give to Blenkin is that you love to hate watching him. With his perpetual shit-eating grin and devil-may-care attitude, Kavalier is the sort of character you’re actively rooting against. Thankfully, the history of the Alien franchise suggests that Kavalier will get his comeuppance: In Prometheus, for instance, Weyland’s billionaire founder spends his entire life hoping to meet humanity’s otherworldly creators, only to get callously murdered by one of them within a matter of moments.
In the meantime, we can appreciate that Blenkin approaches the role with such curiosity and introspection. Like the hybrids, Kavalier should continue to evolve before our eyes—even if it’s not for the better. “Does he actually have an ability to empathize with anybody?” Blenkin asks. “When the layers get peeled back, what’s actually driving this character? Those are still questions for me, and maybe that’s just the hallmark of great writing as well: The answers aren’t necessarily clear.”
