Earth Season 1’s Finale Has Two Giant Cliffhangers – And Both Are Bonkers

This article contains spoilers for the season 1 finale of “Alien: Earth.”

It’s been a wild ride through “Alien: Earth” season 1. Over the course of the eight episodes on FX, we’ve had a deluge of Peter Pan analogies, hard-rockin’ needle drops, Sid the Sloth jump scares, and MLB highlight reels. Oh yeah, and I think here might have actually been a Xenomorph in there, too.

Seriously, though, I don’t think anyone could have predicted the bizarre hodgepodge of vibes we got from the first live-action “Alien” TV show. Yet, it’s kind of fantastic, even more so because this season has dared to carve out its own unique identity, parallel to but different from the films. It makes it even more exciting to know that showrunner Noah Hawley has a plan in place for a potential season 2. And given how season 1 ends, there are two storylines in particular that we need to see continue.

The first and most obvious is the escalating clash between Boy Kavalier’s Prodigy Corporation and longstanding powerhouse Weyland-Yutani. We know at this point that the Wey-Yu vessel that crashes on Prodigy land at the start of the show was intentionally sabotaged and diverted by agents paid off by Kavalier, all so that he could steal his rival’s alien specimens. At the end of season 1, Weyland-Yutani sends an entire military deployment to Prodigy’s Neverland facility to get the specimens back, leading to a major showdown between the two corporations.

So what are the big cliffhangers? The first is the real star of the show, the actual alien of “Alien” — that dastardly little eyeball gremlin, who’s now roaming free.

Species 64. Trypanohyncha Ocellus. That little one-eyed bastard who will bring about the end of times.

These are all things you could call the tiny eyeball squid creature in “Alien: Earth.” At first, the creature seems to be just another one of the show’s various “supporting aliens” — new species meant to provide some variation from the franchise staple. But let’s be real: Everybody’s here for the Xenomorphs.

What’s wild about the eyeball alien is that over the course of the season, it rises above the other new species until it’s practically on the same level of the Xenomorph in terms of the threat it poses and its narrative intrigue. This thing knows pi to more digits than I do. It’s sentient and logical in a way that Xenomorphs clearly aren’t, which raises a whole set of new questions. Where did Weyland-Yutani find this particular alien? Does Species 64 come from an advanced society? It’s a parasite that gains strength from possessing larger organisms, so it’s hard to imagine it building a proper society, but maybe its kin have conquered other advanced civilizations before.

The eyeball escapes at the end of the season, now hidden in the dead body of Prodigy scientist Arthur Sylvia (David Rysdahl). That could gain the creature access to all kinds of advanced technology and data, even opening up the possibility for it to somehow contact the rest of its species. The possibilities with this little devil are massive, and it’s fun to have real alien intrigue around something that isn’t a Xenomorph.

Though I’m clearly more fixated on the threat of total eyeball domination, the bigger cliffhanger in the “Alien: Earth” season 1 finale is the growing conflict between Prodigy and Weyland-Yutani. Both desperately want the alien specimens for their own research purposes, and the potential of Prodigy’s hybrid program adds another wrinkle. At the end of the season, Prodigy successfully stops the stealth-invasion of Neverland led by Wey-Yu’s Morrow (Babou Ceesay), but Boy Kavalier (Samuel Blenkin) is then quickly overthrown by Wendy (Sydney Chandler), her loyal Xenomorph, and the other hybrids. The last thing we see is a much larger Weyland-Yutani military deployment arriving on the island, promising violence on an even larger scale.

The audio snippet we hear over the radio says the Wey-Yu forces are there for “invasion and recovery.” It’s clear that Wendy and the hybrids no longer have any love for Kavalier, but they also have no reason to get along with the rival company, especially since they themselves are proprietary technology that Weyland-Yutani might be interested in stealing for itself.

With two Xenomorphs on her side, Wendy is already a force to be reckoned with, and Weyland-Yutani and Prodigy both are likely to get more than they’ve bargained for if we get to see the story continue in an “Alien: Earth” season 2.