We're halfway through "Alien: Earth" season 1, and so far, I'm having a great time. The production design is fantastic, the sci-fi storylines are really interesting, and there are a ton of great performances across the cast. But one thing keeps bugging me, and midway through the season, and it isn't getting any better.
I'm talking about that barefooted cartoon character, Boy Kavalier.
Now, to be clear, I'm not coming for the actor behind the character, Samuel Blenkin. This is the sort of role that's
so bizarre, I can only imagine the actor is doing exactly as he's told. Blenkin manages the strange mannerisms, childish outbursts, and all-around weirdness as well as he can, but the issue here is in the way the character is written, directed, and positioned within the series.
It's not just his obsession with Peter Pan, or the fact that he only ever wears pajamas, or his incessant superiority complex, or the fact that we don't really understand how old he is, or his first-draft motivation of "Everyone is so boring," but yes, it's all of those things, and others. I've waited for him to reveal some new dimension that makes it all fit, and in the meantime, I've tried my best to give showrunner Noah Hawley the benefit of the doubt and find a way to get behind this characters.
But in that mission, I have failed. And I'm tired of watching this small man prance about in an otherwise great show.
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Boy Kavialier's Story Is Full Of Holes
I promise that I don't just hate fun or whimsy. I kind of like other bizarre choices on "Alien: Earth," like the never-ending cross-fades (sometimes three at once), or CJ's obsession with baseball games played over 100 years ago, or the fact that he and his sister's main shared love is, uh, the fourth "Ice Age" movie? It's baffling, yes, but also sort of charming -- the kind of response I imagine I'm also supposed to have to Boy Kavalier.
The problem is that unlike those other things, which are more for flavor, the so-called "boy genius" character is a massive piece of the story. We are told that his Prodigy company is one of the big five corporations that functionally rule all of Earth, but we're also told that he's a young upstart. It seems impossible that roughly a fifth of the globe could have fallen under the control of this man. Boy? Teen? It's never made clear how old he actually is. We see entire cities and a massive corporate infrastructure all under his control, including long-term corporate contracts with characters who appear to be older than Kavalier is. How does that timeline make any sense? To me, it doesn't. Maybe you picked up something that I missed.
That would all be well and good if the thing we got from having this strange character, instead of a more traditional sci-fi corpo villain, was interesting or meaningful. But I just don't feel like that's the case.
Alien: Earth Could Easily Have Happened Without Boy Kavalier
I don't necessarily love the whole Peter Pan analogy running through "Alien: Earth," but I like that Noah Hawley took a big thematic swing. What I don't think is that Boy Kavalier was necessary to make it all work. You could have your Neverland facility, your Lost Boys, your Wendy, all as corpo codenames for their evil science projects. Did we really need the CEO to be a fairy tale character too to make it all stick?
This becomes particularly frustrating in episode 4 when Boy Kavalier has a video call with the CEO of the Weyland-Yutani corporation to negotiate who gets to keep the alien specimens aboard her crashed ship. Sandra Yi Sencindiver's Yutani is the exact sort of elevated yet grounded sci-fi villainess you'd expect from this kind of story, and she looks so strange positioned opposite Billionaire Pajama Sam. The fact that she treats him with any sort of respect as an equal is wild, considering that he doesn't demonstrate any behavior at any other point in the show to earn that same credit from us.
We're told he's a genius, but the science in his labs are conducted by other scientists. He says that no one else is on his level, yet everyone else is more interesting by simply virtue of not being entirely unbearable. I truly believe you could have cast any middle-aged character actor in this role, rewritten it slightly, and the rest of the show would be entirely the same, absent Kavalier's annoying interjections. And as a writer, I hate to be that prescriptive, but what can I say? I simply detest this boy king that much.
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