The Baby Was Screaming

Tia Glista examines the pro-child paranoia that fuels FX’s new series “Alien: Earth.”

By Tia GlistaNovember 4, 2025

• Television

• SF

SINCE ITS FIRST INSTALLMENT in 1979, the Alien franchise has been a central text in feminist studies of science fiction. Not only did its androgynous heroine Ellen Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) challenge expectations about gender in cinema; the film also questioned the boundaries of the body more broadly, since the titular aliens (popularly referred to as “Xenomorphs”) implant themselves and gestate in men and women alike. Pregnancy in these films is violent, nonconsensual, and vampiric: the relationship of parent and child is represented as one of host and parasite. In this way, Alien spoke to a growing body of literature and philosophy in the 1960s and ’70s that expressed ambivalence about motherhood, arguing that it robbed women of autonomy. Rather than a pure, uncorrupted innocent tenderly incubated, the “baby” of the Alien franchise colonizes its parent’s body within hours and then is born by exploding from the womb or chest, bloodthirsty and voracious—not a miraculous cherub but a rapacious murderer.

Like the creatures for which it is named, the Alien series has spawned innumerable offspring: six stand-alone films, two crossovers, several video games, numerous novels and comic books, a web series, and, most recently, a prequel TV show on FX, this summer’s Alien: Earth. But whereas the franchise began by subverting the sanctity of normative gender and childbearing roles, its newest iteration tilts toward conservatism, stoking contemporary paranoia by putting the innocent, threatened child at its center. In so doing, it subtly traffics in anti-trans and pronatalist conspiracy theories.

The show inherits its opening sequence from the original film: a crew aboard a deep space vessel (operated by the computer known as “Mother”) awakens from their sleep pods in a reenactment of the scene that film theorist Barbara Creed once characterized as an antiseptic simulation of rebirth—a naive techno-fantasy of embodiment without blood or mess. Of course, the blood comes, as it always does, and the ship crash-lands on Earth into a building operated by the tech giant Prodigy, which sends in a team to recover the contraband cargo: lethal alien life-forms, including the Xenomorph, smuggled in from off-planet.

This is no ordinary recovery crew, however. The team itself is a Prodigy product: the result of the company’s latest attempt to download human consciousness into artificial bodies. In its beta version, the procedure can only be performed on children, since their minds are more pliable. Prodigy has thus selected six terminally ill children who are “saved” by taking on synthetic forms with superhuman capabilities that already resemble adults, since these synthetic bodies cannot grow. Therefore, despite Prodigy founder Boy Kavalier’s (Samuel Blenkin) obsession with Peter Pan and perpetual youth, the preteens he rescues are at once fragile children in nearly indestructible adult bodies, mercenaries, prototypes, souls, and machines.

They are also, per the language of the show, children who have undergone a procedure referred to as “transition.” And after they have survived a Xenomorph attack at the crash site and transported it back to Prodigy’s secure island lab, the effects of becoming a synthetic body harboring human consciousness, or a “hybrid” (as the show names this group to distinguish from fully AI-powered android “synthetics” and human “cyborgs,” who only have some technologically modified parts), begin to appear as various maladjustments. As one of the lead scientists, a psychologist named Dame Sylvia (Essie Davis), explains to them: “In all the busyness of trying to make sure that everything went right with transition, […] we never really talked about your new bodies, how they work, how they’re different.” Much of the language here is lifted from the vocabulary of gender transition, though trans communities tend to use that term to encompass a spectrum of nonmedical social updates beyond just surgery as well (name, clothing, pronouns, etc.). The show instead presents transitioning as a one-time, surgical event with a distinct before and after: an abrupt and irreversible change that demands the children leave everything from their old lives behind, including their family members and their names (they are christened with new ones that Boy K. has drawn from Peter Pan).

As the series proceeds, this sense of regret and confusion deepens. Wendy (Sydney Chandler), the show’s protagonist and the first child to undergo transition, enjoys her confident, strong new body but misses her old life. The scientist-guardians debate how best to help: Therapy? Increasing or decreasing hormone levels to mimic or dull the effects of pubescent mood swings? Allowing some hybrids to visit with their families? Meanwhile, Prodigy staff also begin to question whether the hybrids are machines to run tests on or people in their own right, as well as whether these children—who look like adults, can jump off cliffs, scale walls, and learn new languages and skills instantaneously, but still cuddle stuffed toys and get scared of monsters in the dark—are in fact children at all. Can they consent to these procedures? Is their naivety what makes them such useful prototypes, who can be “used” by the company without fully realizing it or objecting?

Alien: Earth thus banks on a fear not only of invasive Xenomorphs but also of a future that robs children of their innocence, forcing them into adult decisions and bodies and preventing them from growing up “naturally.” In this vein, it mimics the anti-trans panic that has swept politics across much of the world. In 2023, when Texas lawmakers passed a bill banning puberty blockers and hormone therapy for trans youth, State Representative Tom Oliverson argued that Texan children would be “officially protected from harmful, experimental medical and surgical treatments for gender dysphoria,” with others calling it a measure to protect children from making adult decisions they might later regret. This rationale has been repeated in the 27 states where gender-affirming healthcare for youth is now banned, several of which have also classified the provision of such care as a felony. Elon Musk—one of transphobia’s loudest, wealthiest voices—has likewise called for “any parent or doctor who sterilizes a child before they are a consenting adult [to go to] prison for life.” Healthcare practitioners have repeatedly demonstrated that treatments like puberty blockers and HRT are safe, and that without them, many trans youth would die—a response to which anti-trans legislators have been unsympathetic. Likewise, in Alien: Earth, the “transition” is eventually posited not as life-prolonging treatment but as itself a kind of death. In one telling scene, the hybrids come across curiously macabre, Victorian-looking tombstones in the island’s underbrush that are marked with their original names—Musk has similarly referred to his daughter Vivian’s transition as her having been “killed” and made “dead” in his eyes.

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Alien: Earth’s framing of transition, not as a vehicle for bodily autonomy but as its inverse, aligns itself with anti-trans propaganda that portrays transgender children as the victims of untested medicine inflicted by ruthless elites, misguided parents, and overzealous doctors. This rhetoric—and the onscreen villainy of the Prodigy scientists—therefore relies upon the figure of the child as wholly vulnerable: in flashbacks, the protagonist Wendy (née Marcy) is doe-eyed and bald from intensive treatment, making her look more like an infant than a preteen. She and her fellow hybrids can be seen throughout the series skipping down the hallways at Prodigy headquarters, asking each other to “come and play,” throwing tantrums, collecting toys, and watching cartoons, activities that at times seem too juvenile even for their mental ages of 11, 12, and 13. (When the hybrids do act out, their extreme violence is presented as further evidence of their underdeveloped capacities for rational decision-making.) As Madeline Lane-McKinley writes in her urgent new book Solidarity with Children: An Essay Against Adult Supremacy, the effort to induce empathy with children by accenting their naivety or helplessness in fact furthers the sense that they are not-quite-subjects, lacking agency or capability. Such language thus tends to shore up not the rights of children themselves but their status as the private property of parents, who must serve as their “protectors.”

This fragility is most fully embodied by one of Wendy’s peers in the program, Nibs (Lily Newmark), who also has flashbacks to her transition. Nibs asks Curly (Erana James), another hybrid, why their names had to change, and why Wendy gets to have a girl’s name while she and the others have to be named after the Lost Boys. While the show otherwise steers clear of explicitly discussing transition in terms of gender, this moment flags it clearly: a powerful adult has forced a child into a new body and imposed a gendered name with which the child feels at odds. This is just one of the anti-trans fantasies that Alien: Earth indulges. When Nibs discovers, to her great disappointment, that she cannot bear children, the conservative fear of a transgender future fuses with its pronatalist counterpart. Clinging to a stuffed toy, Nibs tells Sylvia that she is pregnant with a baby girl: the insinuation here is that, in spite of becoming inorganic, Nibs still harbors an irrepressible, organic urge to mother—even at the age of 12. Sylvia tells her this is impossible, but she also suggests it would be antithetical to the “biological” miracle of male-female sexual reproduction: “a man and a woman, their bodies fit together, and the man’s sperm fertilizes the woman’s egg.” Becoming a nonhuman hybrid has thus denied Nibs her destiny in this normative, binary reproductive matrix, aligning transition with forced sterilization, as so many in the anti-trans camp have done, and in the process reducing the female child to little more than a potential womb.

This iteration of Alien does not exhibit its reproductive politics as openly as its predecessors, but they nonetheless remain important. At one point, Wendy observes the fully synthetic scientist Kirsh (Timothy Olyphant) dissecting an alien recovered in the crash, picking at an egg with a scalpel and withdrawing a creature from the incision. The cold separation of offspring from parent is presented in a series of quick shot/reverse shots, alternating close-ups of the frantic, wiggling life-form with those of Wendy’s pained face (she can hear its cries at a frequency none of the scientists can). When asked about her reaction, Wendy later says that “it was screaming […] The baby. The baby was screaming.” As the fetal alien, which Kirsh elegantly calls a “proto-creature,” evolves from an object (“it”) to a sentient person (“baby”), the experiment likewise slides from extraction to potential abortion. Alien: Earth stresses Wendy’s kinship to the Xenomorphs through their kinesthetic tether, and the basis of this likeness is their shared exposure to nonconsensual scientific experimentation: both are merely innocent children, or, perhaps, beings denied the right to be children in the first place.

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Science fiction almost always has reproduction in its sight lines, since it is a genre saturated by speculative anxiety about what the advancements of now will mean for then. It is therefore often skeptical about how the effort to repress nature will result in its rabid return, or will incur cataclysmic effects to which we are naive. Alien: Earth associates pure, unspoiled nature with youth, and the misguided workings of culture with adults—with the cadres of psychologists, doctors, and engineers who were blinded by ambition or money, all at the expense of the innocent child.

Thus, when the hybrids rise up to claim their freedom, they reclaim their original names—as if these were monikers they themselves chose and weren’t also once ascribed to them by adults. The fetishization of the natural then is not only problematic but also sloppy: as feminist and trans theorists have insisted since the 1980s, humans are never pure, but are constantly being modified, connected to, and upgraded. Whether in Donna Haraway’s reclamation of the cyborg or Susan Stryker’s trans reading of Frankenstein’s monster, we are taught by these thinkers that enforcing an opposition between human and inhuman, or “natural” versus “unnatural” ways of being a human, is used to objectify, pathologize, and erase. There is no universal nature to be protected, and what tends to be described as such is an ideal crafted in the image of the dominant class. Gender is no more natural: as a cultural system, habit, and practice that organizes and hierarchizes bodies to make them socially and legally legible, it is always already an additive technology unto itself.

To that end, perhaps it is time to retire sci-fi’s reliance on the nature-versus-culture binary, one that Alien: Earth leans into through its obsession with the child. The heroes and villains here are overdetermined: who among us would side with the all-powerful adults and against the hurting children? Herein lies the obvious and yet rhetorically powerful workings of conservative child-welfare movements: they correctly identify that adults wield power against children, but such movements consistently and often deliberately obfuscate how and when this power is wielded. Indeed, in contending, albeit metaphorically, that trans healthcare and abortion disempower youth, the show joins the many efforts that distract from actual threats: climate crisis, the omnipresence of school shootings, the genocide in Gaza where most of the dead are children, the quiet but steady rollbacks of child labor laws across the United States, the defunding of schools and libraries, the legality of child marriage, the adultification of Black and Brown youth surveilled and killed by police, and the kidnapping and detention of children by ICE—not to mention the widespread effects of long COVID, social media addiction, and online extremism. Though Alien: Earth wants us to worry about the effects of our present actions on future generations, it in fact buys into myths that endanger youth and help to downplay the ways that children are “forced to grow up” every day.

Whether consciously or not, the show may forecast Hollywood’s right-wing turn, one seen through “anti-woke” reboots in development pipelines, increased coziness with tech and weapons firms, and the muzzling of even the most banal, centrist Trump critics by media conglomerates. Alien: Earth’s account of a world in which democracy has literally been replaced by Big Tech sovereignty contains the seeds of a more compelling show—one in which corporations infantilize us and seize control of our bodies and minds through militarized monopolies on land, healthcare, mobility, labor, and information. Instead, the show distorts our real political trajectory, one in which tech billionaires rail against trans liberation and reproductive rights. Thus, where science fiction asks us to imagine a more terrifying future by stimulating contemporary anxieties, the latest Alien offspring is all too mired in misguided speculation at the expense of the very “children” it so reveres.