Warning! This article contains SPOILERS for Alien: Earth season 1, episode 3.The third episode of FX’sAlien: Earthjust confirmed a disturbing fact about the Xenomorph facehuggers inAlien, and it solved a decades-old debate in the process. Overseven canonAlienmoviesand 46 years, we’ve been introduced to a widevariety of Xenomorph types. The Xenomorph life cycle has also been depicted in great detail, from eggs to terrifying monsters.
Even after all this time and all this content, however, there are still quite a few mysteries about the Xenomorphs. We still don’t know where they came from, for example, or how David (Michael Fassbender) and theAlienprequel films fit into the larger franchise.Alien: Earthhas addressed one lingering mystery about the Xenomorphs, though, and it gave us a very disgusting answer.
Alien: Earth Confirms What Facehuggers Implant Into Their Hosts
For decades,Alienfans have been debating about how exactly the facehuggers implant their hosts with what will later grow up to be Xenomorph chestbursters. Facehuggers, after all, simply latch onto their prey and fall off, dead, once the impregnation process is complete. We never got to see what actually happened in the human body during that process, and theories about impregnation abounded.
There were three main theories about how facehuggers interacted with hosts. The most widely-accepted theory posited that the facehuggers implanted not an egg or larvae, but a mutagenic substance into their hosts. That substance would then force the host’s body to create a chestburster out of their own organic material. It’s why the facehuggers' digits look like human ribs and the air sacs resemble human lungs.
Thanks to Kirsh’s dissection of a facehugger, however, we now know thatXenomorph facehuggers implant their hosts with a small tadpole-like larva. That larva then burrows into the host’s soft tissue; in the case ofAlien: Earth, that was Hermit’s dissected lung. After finding a place to latch onto, the larva then (presumably) consumes the host until it is large enough to burst from the chest cavity.
What Is Prodigy Planning With Hermit’s Organs?
As previously mentioned, Kirsh and Prodigy removed Hermit’s lung while he was undergoing surgery and introduced one of the facehuggers' “tadpoles” to it. It wasn’t entirely clear why they did that, however, or why they removed Hermit’s lung without his consent. The simple answer is that Prodigy is using Hermit and his organs as a lab rat.
Prodigy wants to know how the Xenomorphs interact with humans, but Boy Kavalier clearly understands how dangerous these specimens are. He wouldn’t allow a living human to go in and be impregnated by a facehugger, that would just lead to a huge amount of destruction. So,Kavalier had his people extract Hermit’s lung, since he’s just a low-level employee, and use it as, essentially, an incubator to further study the Xenomorphs.
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Boy Kavalier has already expressed his interest in using the lifeforms he found for his own personal gain. The first step to using the lifeforms, whether to develop a bioweapon or for any purpose, is to understand them. The only way to do that is through experimentation, soKavalier decided that Hermit’s bodily autonomy wasn’t worth as much as the potential profit of the Xenomorphs.
Prodigy’s use of Hermit’s lung doesn’t bode well for him in the rest ofAlien: Earth, though. Prodigy clearly has no regard for Hermit and his well-being, even despite Wendy’s emotional connection to him. Boy Kavalier may decide to have Hermit killed so that Wendy isn’t distracted or compromised by him anymore. He may even use Hermit for more extreme experimentation inAlien: Earth.
