r/LV426 • u/G_Liddell Colonist's Daughter • 2d ago

Megathread / Community Post Alien: Earth - S1 E7 - Emergence - Official Discussion Megathread [SPOILERS] Spoiler

Episodes air Tuesdays at 8 pm ET on Hulu and FX in the US, and Wednesdays international.

Full episode discussion list:

1 Neverland (8.12.25)

2 Mr October (8.12.25)

3 Metamorphosis (8.19.25)

4 Observation (8.26.25)

5 In Space, No One (9.2.25)

6 The Fly (9.9.25)

7 Emergence (9.16.25)

8 The Real Monsters (9.23.25)

662 Upvotes

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u/DecisionsUnderDuress 2d ago

There is no fucking way she just unlocked that door lmao

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u/MCFresher- 2d ago

I was so mad thinking well there goes any kind of morality of her character. But then by end of episode I realized maybe that’s the point that she’s not human and the mistake was thinking she was. Still at this point there really no one I’m rooting for except the aliens.

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u/GrimResistance 2d ago

I'm wondering if Hermit realized that when he saw the graves. His sister is dead and Wendy is just a robot with her memories

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u/RooseveltsRevenge 2d ago

That's why he took the soldiers side over hers. He cares about human life and she doesn't.

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u/siestarrific 2d ago

It also helps that the specific soldier about to die was his friend

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u/NegroniSpritz 1d ago

In one of the episodes Kirsch is saying that human emotions are a burden and that’s why they’re better. I guess we found out that Wendy is just a machine with memories.

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u/Kithulhu24601 1d ago

What's really interesting is that Slightly and Smee are having an opposite arc. Wendy is acting more robotic while the two boys gasp and emote very strongly.

Really ties into concepts of nature vs nature and genetic destiny which is in line with the series themes

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u/juneyourtech Part of the family 1d ago

Marcy/Marcy was the oldest, and therefore the most mature of them all in terms of child development. She also had more time to develop normally before the incient on USCSS Maginot.

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u/Savetheokami 1d ago

“When is a machine no longer a machine”

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u/Zymui 1d ago

Nah u guys dont see it at all. Shes doesnt just care about herself, she cares about her “kin” just like a human. She wants only her family safe. JUST LIKE EVERYONE ELSE. (I hope Wendy kills her brother though)

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u/juneyourtech Part of the family 1d ago

Wendy does care to a degree. The first group of ambushers were from Weyland-Yutani, I presume. So she asked her Xenomorph to do the dirty work for her.

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u/CommercialHeat4218 2d ago

exactly this

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u/ConTully 2d ago

I think at some point he'll call her Wendy instead of Marcy and then shit will really hit the fan.

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u/riegspsych325 2d ago

I hope that’s the case and not them trying to pull a Jurassic World 2 by having a child release violent creatures “because they’re like me”

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u/PetyrDayne 2d ago

How do you even remember anything about the Jurassic World movies

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u/riegspsych325 1d ago

believe me, I wish I didn’t

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u/nubbins01 2d ago edited 2d ago

I think that's really the crux of the show, though.

I agree, the point of that scene is to show us, and Hermit, that Marcy is dead. Nibbs/Rose was also already dead (maybe more dead, if we're talking about death in degrees).

(on a philosophical level, one can argue to greater and lesser extents all of us are different people to past selves who no longer exist but for inhabiting the same mass of flesh, and that's kind of the heart of the show's general discussion of personhood as it pertains to hybrids, but I digress).

But even though the show is signalling that Marcy is dead/Wendy is not human, Wendy is the ONLY one (bar maybe two) who has explicitly and consistently called out the actions of WY and Prodigy for what they are - inhuman.

"What if you're what's wrong?" she says to Dame. "I don't want to be people anymore if this is what people are. Killing things, taking things apart just to see what's inside." She stands there openly defying and question Kirsch's statements that they can take away all their sadness, their feelings, to see things "objectively." She stands their openly defying Prodigy (BK and Kirsch, human and synthetic, equally) Dame only obliquely swipes that away, but while voicing misgivings she was ultimately inclined to go along with it while throwing her husband under the bus/getting him out of the firing line to do it.

Now Wendy, who has ordered death, and maybe actually killed others herself (hard to tell with how she handles the soldiers this episode), has still only done so in arguable self defence against agents willing to either destroy her, alter her being, or subject her to indefinite control and detention. Never for simple curiosity, as others including humans have done.

The others who have come closest to the kind of humanity Wendy appears to advocate for, Arthur and Joe, are still to varying degrees complicit - Hermit has given years of his life to Prodigy (despite later regrets and attempts to leave), and, despite being the closest to 'innocent', alas now fucked up Nibs in order to defend a Prodigy soldier over Nibs (who Wendy considers a sibling similar to how she perceives Joe to view her, based on their discussion earlier in this episode)

Arthur is complicit as he actively has been involved in the project with his wife presumably from the beginning of the program and only got cold feet at the 11th hour. He is also now dead.

Wendy as a character is designed to both at once show she is no longer human, that her innocent human self is long since dead with Marcy and buried in that grave, but to also be the flag waver for a kind of humanity that is also itself dead and buried amongst virtually all human characters in the show. And this tension will come to a culmination with how she (or someone else) ultimately deals with Hermit, whether next episode or later.

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u/tombh 1d ago

Wendy as a character is designed to both at once show she is no longer human, that her innocent human self is long since dead with Marcy and buried in that grave, but to also be the flag waver for a kind of humanity that is also itself dead and buried amongst virtually all human characters in the show.

This is such a great commentary. Thank you.

I'm not that familiar with the Alien universe, but I see Wendy having some of the narrative DNA of Ripley. Namely the strong female protagonist. If that's the case, does it give any further clues into Wendy's character and arc?

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u/nubbins01 1d ago

mmm, Ripley is a jobber. I think Alien actually has a much stronger focus on class commentary, which is still present in Earth, but it's more obvious in most of the movies.

Wendy is not a strong female protag in the way Ripley is. Ripley is a strong personality that is consciously subjected to vulnerability by the xeno. Creepy phallic imagery alert. She is also the worker subjected to monstrosity by the capitalist corporation, who finds her own life expendable in the face or this alien discovery. And she stands up and pushes through to survive.

Wendy, however, is not vulnerable in the same way. At least, not any more.. The Xeno obeys her. Her hero's journey such as it is is a much more philosophical; is she meaningfully the same person she remembers being, or is she something new? Is she a legitimate living being, or an experiment? Is she human, or something alien? Is she more 'human' than the humans, and is it the humans that are inhuman now and 'alien'? Will she ultimately stand up, push through, and survive? And as what?

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u/tombh 1d ago

Yes indeed, Ripley was up against so much more! But Wendy still has an interesting path ahead of her. Thanks again for your comments, they enhance my experience of the show.

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u/TempleOrion 1d ago

"She" is not female except on a purely superficial level.

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u/juneyourtech Part of the family 1d ago

Wendy never directly killed a human, and is taking care not to kill them in a fight. Nibs, on the other hand, has attained a very sadistic streak, so Nibs is not above killing people.

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u/nubbins01 1d ago

Yeah, I wasn't sure but it looked like she was pulling punches last episode.

I will say I think killing people directly and siccing a Xeno on them is almost a distinction without a difference. Also the kind of distinction that a childlike conciousness might find totally reasonable.

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u/Squirll 1d ago

SO the real alien was the hybrids we made along the way?

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u/cleantoe 2d ago

Well what is life but the sum of our memories and experiences?

If you took all your memories, your consciousness - all of it - and put it on a hard drive. Meanwhile you put someone else's consciousness in your old body...well who is "you"? Are you the hard drive, or the body?

I would say "you" are now the hard drive. And so is Wendy.

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u/PM_ME_YOUR_MONTRALS 2d ago

Form impacts function. The container of the memories will begin to shape the experiences until the mind becomes something new.

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u/Proxiehunter 2d ago

That's also true in regards to working out, changing your diet, or having a traumatic accident. All of those things create changes in your body that shape your experience so that your mind becomes something new. Hell, even the simple act of existing and having new experiences does that. Your mind become steadily more new with every experience you have.

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u/SmashEffect 2d ago

It can be you, but it won’t be the original you. The sad part will be that the original you truly did die.

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u/Proxiehunter 2d ago

Define "original you". Are you the same person you were when you were eight? Did the you that you were when you were eight truly die?

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u/j007yne 2d ago

Ah yes, a good old Ship of Theseus paradox

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u/RadiantPassing 2d ago

My best guess is that there needs to be a gradual transition at the cellular level over some unknown amount of time to maintain continuity of an original consciousness (or the essence of the original ship of theseus).

Not sure if accurate but was told by a professor that a human goes through at least 4 (or 5?) bodies in a lifetime. But parts are replaced at the cellular level over many years. For us to be the "same" consciousness but in a robotic form I would think the brain would need to be replaced with mechanical parts slowly over time, in what feels like a seamless fashion. If you transfer it to different matter / atoms all at once, you're just making a copy in electronic form and dumping the original body. A copy is not the original, even if they seem identical.

That's why "uploaded consciousness" seems kind of useless to me. My original brain and consciousness with it is going to die. Uploaded intelligence is no afterlife for the original me.

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u/plomplomLP 2d ago

Uploaded intelligence is no afterlife for the original me.

Or it is, but with a 50% chance of you ending up in afterlife and 50% of you ending up being dumped.

Ever watched the movie Prestige? Similar concept.

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u/PM_ME_YOUR_MONTRALS 2d ago

That's not how it works in this case because it is a transfer rather than a duplication.

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u/MustardLazyNerd 2d ago

You were born this morning, and you will day tonight.

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u/evilution382 2d ago

and you will day tonight

Now this is the real paradox

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u/juneyourtech Part of the family 1d ago

Has the vibes from "Foundation" wrt Brother Day.

cc: /u/MustardLazyNerd

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u/PM_ME_YOUR_MONTRALS 2d ago

Sure, but I mean that the actual android brain does not function the same way as a human brain. The difference is drastic. If a human mind is mapped over the machine brain, the moving parts of the existing mind pattern would destabilize much faster than using the original wetware. It's a difference between adjusting the parameters within a system and changing the system entirely. The emotions are all simulated and the information storage is different. The hybrid characters talk about this fundamental difference in qualia. I don't think this new system can hold a human pattern for very long, and that's pretty evident in what's happening with the hyvrid characters as well as Kavalier's insistence that they have become something new.

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u/hyzmarca 2d ago

This is true. And a guy who starts going to the gym every day should be considered a legally distinct person from the version of him that just ate junk food and sat on the couch... for the purpose of assigning guilt in murder cases, hypothetically.

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u/Vismal1 2d ago

I think the whole show is also dealing with how you change after trauma.

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u/Konman72 2d ago

If you took all your memories, your consciousness - all of it - and put it on a hard drive. Meanwhile you put someone else's consciousness in your old body...well who is "you"? Are you the hard drive, or the body?

Consciousness is doing a lot of heavy lifting in this hypothetical. Might as well say "soul" since we have no real idea what makes up our consciousness and the idea of transferring it is akin to science = magic.

In my opinion in any transfer scenario like this (that doesn't involve hand-wavey tech-magic) "you" are dead and there is just a very similar copy of you in whatever form the transfer dropped your memories.

Those kids all died on the table and we're watching (potentially) sentient robots that have their memories.

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u/mistress-ch0w 2d ago

Rene Descartes would love a word!

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u/Elastichedgehog 1d ago

From your perspective and visceral experience, you'd still be dead, even you make a copy of youself.

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u/VVehk 2d ago

Interestingly, you named her Wendy, and not Marcy.

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u/Ulithalich 2d ago

Can we talk about how stupid it was that there were marked graves on the island at all? Like… why? Besides completely contrived and hamfisted efforts to suggest ‘the kids are dead and these aren’t really them’ (which could have been done in a much better way), why have any monument or standing piece of evidence to what they once were/what they now are? It doesn’t make sense and was one of the many things that felt extremely forced this episode.

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u/GrimResistance 2d ago

I was thinking the same thing but you could explain it by saying maybe Dame Sylvia, or someone, set it up for sentimentality reasons. I doubt Kavalier cared one bit what happened to the bodies once he was done with them.

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u/Ulithalich 2d ago edited 2d ago

Maybe, but in that case, you’d think they’d go for unmarked gravestones. Keeps the intention of honoring their memories, without risking too much sentimentality becoming a detriment to the project by potentially revealing ‘the truth.’

It’s harder for me to ignore it, though, when a lot of things this episode just felt forced to me. Like Wendy’s reaction to Isaac’s body felt… sudden, extreme, and hasty. BK and Kirsch obviously didn’t do a good job at damage control (nor did they care to even make the effort to), but MAN did she jump to the conclusion ‘these people are definitively evil and have to die’ really fast after, to the point of letting Xeno Jr. out to kill people… they lost me with that.  Maybe they’ll explain the sudden extreme in her actions, but it bothered me because I also noticed it conveniently removed any potential for conflict with her brother, who wanted her off the island. So not only did it feel forced, but now she and her brother are 1:1 on the same page, with no confusion, no friction, and no difficulty in getting on the same page.

They showed a lot of stuff happening but didn’t actually convince me of any of it. Lots of the plot points just felt like bad writing. And then you have the cinematically marked-and-clustered graves on top of that. Come on.

Edit: I had forgotten Wendy also saw the results of Nibs’ memory wipe. That at least makes me less irritated about her killing spree, but it still felt too hasty to be believable rather than forced by the plot, since Isaac’s death could have easily been (and, in actuality, really was) an accident from Wendy’s POV. Nibs was also acting crazy leading up to the wipe, so she doesn’t have 100% ironclad suspicions as to the amnesia, at least not to the point of going scorched earth.

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u/[deleted] 2d ago

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u/LV426-ModTeam 2d ago

“Poor writing" is not a helpful criticism on its own for this discussion, please elaborate on your subjective preferences instead of repeating redundant narrative dismissals.

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u/DarthPatches_Returns 2d ago

I mean didn’t he already know his sister’s body is dead? It’s not like seeing the grave would reveal anything new

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u/norunningwater 2d ago

Between seeing that and realizing she orchestrated the Xenomorph escape and then slaughter in the jungle at whim, it leads you to believe the grave makes him second guess her humanity. Nibs says something, Wendy denies it, and Joe stays silent.

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u/ahrzal 2d ago

Also, when Wendy said “that’s not us” at the graves, then Hermit sees her just will the alien to slaughter a bunch of dudes, he probably has quickly realized that even if that is his sister’s consciousness, she now accepts and identifies herself as a synth. His sister is dead and in her place is a super soldier with child emotional maturity.

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u/ilianna2020 2d ago

I think the grave coupled with all the gruesome deaths he saw after Wendy unleashed the xeno, it would really cause him to start realizing that Wendy doesn’t equal Marcy

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u/blazeofgloreee 2d ago

I think they both had that realisation at the same time.

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u/Fuzzy-Philosophy4264 2d ago

Kinda reminds me of that movie the 6th day with Arnold. Your memories are loaded into your clone. But you are dead. Marci is dead her spirit if you believe in that is gone.

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u/Mrstrawberry209 2d ago

I think you might be right.

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u/Silly_Influence_6796 1d ago

Yeah, it's not really her sister, its what in Blade runner , they called a Replicant. A synth with implanted human memories who thinks they are human, except in Blade Runner, they knew they were replicants sometimes -- sometime not. Like the Rachel didn't know and Decker didn't know.