Alien: Earth Season 2 Needs To Keep Exploring The Show's Greatest Rivalry

This article contains spoilers for the season 1 finale of "Alien: Earth."

The protagonist of "Alien: Earth" may be Wendy, aka Marcy (Sydney Chandler), and the main villain may be Prodigy Corp. CEO Boy Kavalier (Samuel Blenkin), but the most interesting character dynamic on the show arguably involves neither. Most of the story of "Alien: Earth" season 1 follows the hybrid children of the Neverland facility, whose minds are transferred from their terminally ill prepubescent bodies to immortal synthetic adult bodies. Over the course of this season, we've seen many of the unsettling ramifications of that procedure play out, but the finale escalates the conflict to show a full-on military conflict between Prodigy and the rival Weyland-Yutani Corporation.

That corporate rivalry has been personified throughout the season by the individual rivalry between two supporting characters: Prodigy android and scientist Kirsh (Timothy Olyphant), and Weyland-Yutani loyalist and cyborg Morrow (Babou Ceesay). The two cross paths early in the show, and it's clear from the jump that they don't like each other. This is partially due to their respective corporate loyalties, but it has more to do with sci-fi racism. The cyborg hates the android, and the android hates the cyborg, both declaring their own supremacy as the future of the human race.

In the season finale, this ideological rivalry becomes physical, with Morrow and Kirsh duking it out in a brutal hand-to-hand brawl in the Neverland lab, which leaves both of them close to death. Though they only spend a handful of scenes together over the course of the whole season, this climactic battle is one of the finale's most interesting components, and the show should absolutely continue exploring the rivalry in season 2.

More than aliens themselves, as the name of the show would suggest, "Alien: Earth" is about human consciousness. It's a very classical sci-fi story at its root, showing several different ideas of what a futuristic "human" could look like. The androids — or synthetics, as they're called in the show — have incredibly strong bodies and highly advanced minds, which are also capable of certain forms of emotion, but they are entirely man-made, and therefore lack certain ineffable elements of humanity. Cyborgs are the opposite — humans who allow their bodies and minds to be altered by robotics and computers until they become something very different, but still retaining their origins as fully organic humans.

"Look at you," Kirsh says to Morrow in episode 6. "The almost human, self-hating machine. How you must envy me." Morrow fires back quickly, calling Kirsh "yesterday's model, the incredibly irrelevant robot," and later an "old toy." The conversation, conducted in the elevator after a meeting between the leaders of Prodigy and Weyland-Yutani, quickly devolves into grotesque jabs and counter-jabs about how much each character enjoys killing members of the other's race.

So clearly, there's no love lost there.

With Prodigy's hybrids possibly making both cyborgs and androids obsolete, it's as if Morrow and Kirsh are both fighting the tide of history, trying to assert themselves as the necessary thing for the future. Morrow even references how he could theoretically get one of the fully synthetic bodies for himself, since he has a human mind — something that would not really be possible for a full synth. And yet, both men are still the same sort of servant to a corporate ruling class, left to fight against each other while richer interests see them simply as tools.

While they both get some great moments in season 1, culminating in their frenetic brawl in the season finale, Kirsh and Morrow deserve more spotlight in "Alien: Earth" season 2. For one thing, Olyphant and Ceesay deliver two of the best performances, with Ceesay in particular stealing the show every time he's on screen. There's also so much fun thematic material tied up in that particular character relationship, from the tension of differing paths of artificial human evolution to the lifelong loyalties demanded by Earth's megacorporations.

"This isn't over," Morrow says to Kirsh after being captured by Prodigy soldiers at the end of episode 7. "Nothing ever is," Kirsh replies. It's a vague, somewhat confusing response. Perhaps he's just saying that he enjoys holding grudges, but with the artificial longevity possessed by both characters — exemplified by them literally beating each other to death in the season finale and still surviving — the line can also be read as a sort of declaration for hope things will go toward an era when death is optional ... at least for some.