We are halfway from season 1 of “Alien: Earth”, and so far, I have had a good time. The conception of production is fantastic, the science fiction scenarios are really interesting, and there are a ton of great performances through the cast. But one thing continues to bother me, and halfway through the season, and it does not improve.
I’m talking about this barefoot cartoon character, Boy Kavalier.
Now to be clear, I don’t come for the actor Behind the character, Samuel Blenkin. This is the kind of role that is so bizarre, I can only imagine that the actor does exactly as he said. Blenkin manages the strange ways, the childish explosions and the versatile oddity as well as him, but the problem here is how the character is written, directed and positioned in the series.
It is not only his obsession with Peter Pan, or the fact that he never carries only pajamas, or his incessant superiority complex, or the fact that we do not really understand his age, or his motivation as a first role of “Everyone is that boring“But yes, it is all these things and others. I waited for it to reveal a new dimension that makes it all suitable, and in the meantime, I did my best to give showrunner Noah Hawley the benefit of doubt and find a way to put myself behind these characters.
But in this mission, I failed. And I’m tired of looking at this little man complaining in a differently brilliant show.
The story of Boy Kavialier is full of holes
I promise that I not only hate pleasure or fantasy. I like the other bizarre choices a bit on “Alien: Earth”, like endless crosses (sometimes sometimes three Immediately), or CJ’s obsession for baseball matches played over 100 years ago, or the fact that he and the main shared love of his sister is, uh, the fourth film “ice”? It’s confusing, yes, but also somehow charming – the kind of answer that I imagine that I am also supposed to have for Kavalier boy.
The problem is that, unlike these other things, which are more for the flavor, the so-called “genius” character is a massive piece of history. We are told that his prodigy company is one of the societies of the five large people who will functionally govern all the earth, but we are also told that he is a young man. It seems impossible that around a fifth of the globe could have fallen under the control of this man. Boy? Teenager? He never clarified his age. We see entire cities and a massive corporate infrastructure under its control, including long -term business contracts with characters who seem to be older than Kavalier. How does this chronology make sense? For me, this is not the case. Maybe you picked up something I missed.
It would be good if the thing we got to have this strange character, instead of a more traditional villain of science fiction corpo, was interesting or significant. But I do not have the impression that it is.
Alien: the earth could easily have occurred without the Kavalier boy
I do not necessarily like all the analogy of Peter Pan who crosses “Alien: Earth”, but I like that Noah Hawley took a large thematic swing. What I don’t think is that the Kavalier boy was necessary for everything to work. You may have your Neverland installation, your lost boys, your Wendy, all like corpo code names for their evil scientific projects. Did we really need the CEO to be also a character of fairy tale too so that all glue?
It becomes particularly frustrating in episode 4 when the Kavalier boy has a video call with the CEO of Weyland-Yutani Corporation to negotiate who can keep foreign specimens on board his crushed ship. The Yutani of Sandra Yi Senindivier is the exact kind of bidded science fiction but anchored that you expect from this kind of story, and it looks so strange positioned in front of Pajama Sam. The fact that it treats it with all kinds of respect as an equal is wild, since it does not demonstrate any behavior at another moment of the series to win this same credit.
We are told that he is a genius, but the science of his laboratories is led by other scientists. He says that no one else is at his level, but everyone is more interesting by a simple virtue of not being fully unbearable. I really believe that you could have thrown any actor of an average age character in this role, rewrite it slightly, and the rest of the series would be entirely the same, in the absence of boring interjections of Kavalier. And as a writer, I hate to be this normative, but what can I say? I just hate this boy’s king.
