Unquiet
Things

Here’s a thing about me that you’ll learn pretty quickly if you spend any amount of time with me. I am kind of a ditz. Maybe a complete airhead. Yesterday, I said these exact words, and I was being absolutely sincere: “You mean…it’s called Alien Earth…because the aliens COME TO EARTH??”

It’s a weird thing to be, honestly. I’ve read widely enough that I can make connections between disparate ideas when I’m writing them down. But in actual conversation? All of my salient points fly out of my head the moment I need them. My intelligence lives almost entirely on the page, where I have time to consider my thoughts and arrange them properly. In real time, my head is often somewhere else entirely. I’ll be nodding along while my brain is three topics away, or I’ll start explaining something and halfway through completely lose my train of thought, just gone, no idea where I was going with it or how to finish what I started. I can write thoughtful analyses about complex themes in horror, but then miss entirely an obvious plot point because I wasn’t paying attention. It’s not that I’m not intelligent; it’s that my intelligence needs space to breathe, to wander, to come back around. In the moment, I’m perpetually a little bit lost. People assume I’m being ironic or making a joke when I ask about something that should be completely obvious, but no, I genuinely just didn’t put it together until that exact second. I’m a space cadet.

…which brings me to what I watched last night.

I love the Alien movies. I have seen most of them multiple times. The xenomorphs, the facehuggers, the corporate greed, the slow creeping dread in the void of space! So when I heard there was going to be a series, I was of course intrigued. The trailer looked dark and a little bit weird, which is exactly what I wanted.

The show opens with a spaceship full of alien specimens crashing into Earth. Standard Alien franchise stuff: facehuggers skittering around, a xenomorph stalking through corridors, people dying in brutal ways ways while the corporation prioritizes profit over survival. But what kept circling back in my head all day yesterday wasn’t the monsters. It was the other thing happening in this episode.

In 2120, Earth is divided among five mega-corporations competing in what they call “the race for immortality.” Prodigy, one of these corporations, has figured out how to transfer the consciousness of dying children into synthetic adult bodies. The first one is a twelve-year-old girl named Marcy, who becomes “Wendy” (all very Peter Pan, complete with Lost Boys and a place called Neverland) in her new grown-up form.

And I cannot stop thinking about that. A child’s mind in an adult body, capable of adult things but still fundamentally a kid inside. How disorienting that must be. How strange to suddenly have strength and height and capabilities you don’t understand, when just yesterday you were small and sick and powerless.

I feel like that every single day. How am I trapped in here? How did this happen? I know I’m almost 50, but I need a frikkin’ adult!

I haven’t formed a full opinion on the show yet. But that idea has taken root in my mind, and I want to explore where it leads.

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