Spoilers for Episode 7 (“Emergence”) of Alien: Earth to follow.

There’s only one episode left in Alien: Earth‘s first(?) season, and we hate to say that the penultimate episode might be our least favorite yet. It’s not bad by any means, but its abbreviated runtime (45 minutes compared to the full hours of previous episodes) and extensive setup for next week’s finale make “Emergence” feel incomplete. “Finale Part 1”, if you will. Might this have worked better as a super-sized double feature with next week’s finale? Time will tell!

Written by Maria Melnik (Escape Room) and series creator Noah Hawley and directed by Dana Gonzales (this season’s second and third episodes), the aptly titled “Emergence” sees many parts of the whole reveal themselves as Slightly (Adarsh Gourav) and Smee (Jonathan Ajayi) try to move Arthur’s (David Rysdahl) Facehuggered body to the beach to disastrous results, Wendy (Sydney Chandler), Hermit (Alex Lawther) and Nibs (Lily Newmark) try to escape the island to even worse results, and Boy Kavalier (Samuel Blenkin) grows closer to show MVP The Eye.

Some talking points:

• It would appear that Tootles/Isaac (Kit Young) is definitely dead following his encounter last week with the fly. No redownloading this guy! RIP, we hardly knew ye.
• Wendy takes a page out of the Jurassic World playbook and has seemingly tamed the Xenomorph. It makes for a nice pet, though!
• The Eye shows advance intelligence and some rather humorous, shit-related communication skills when Boy Kavalier asks it about Pi (much to Boy’s twisted delight).
• Nibs is seemingly taken out by Hermit after she brutally rips the jaw off of one of Boy’s guards. Is this the end of Nibs? We hope not!
• This is the most Earth we’ve gotten all season, and might be the first good look we’ve gotten of the Xenomorph in broad daylight.

This is an episode that ultimately serves to move things into place for next week’s finale. This is all well and good, but we couldn’t help but feel some metaphorical blue balls by the time the credits roll. Admittedly, we were really hoping the creatures would have been loosed following the events of last week’s episode, so perhaps our disappointment is on us.

And we must ask again (hopefully for the last time): will we find out what that plant pod creature does in next week’s finale? We better!

Listen to Joe and me discuss the episode in full below on the Horror Queers Patreon:

Coming Up Next: Next week we’re discussing the finale, episode 1.08, “The Real Monsters” (wonder who they could be?).

Want to listen? Subscribe to our Patreon for over 421 hours of content including this month’s other new episodes on Cry Wolf, The Long Walk, Him, The Conjuring: Last Rites and, to tie in with that last one: a brand new audio commentary on The Conjuring 2!