Alien: Earth Star Exposes Devastating Truth Behind Joe’s Episode 7 Betrayal

Alex Lawther breaks down the gut-punch scene that rocked Alien: Earth Episode 7 — spoilers ahead.

Alien: Earth just dropped its coldest gut punch yet. Episode 7 turns a tense escape into a brutal character reveal, and yeah, one of our favorites crosses a line you can’t uncross.

Warning: Spoilers ahead for Alien: Earth episode 7.

The escape that wasn’t

After Tootles (Kit Young) dies, the hybrids finally accept what we’ve all been thinking: they’re never going to be safe inside Prodigy’s Neverland facility. So Joe (Alex Lawther), Wendy (Sydney Chandler), and Nibs (Lily Newmark) make a break for it. It does not go as planned.

• They reach the docking pier and run straight into a Prodigy Corporation squad.
• One genius soldier tosses Nibs’s teddy into the water. RIP Mr Strawberry.
• Nibs snaps. She yanks the soldier’s jaw clean off, then pivots toward Siberian (Diêm Camille), Joe’s fellow soldier.
• Joe reacts by stunning Nibs with an electric weapon. He takes the human side in front of Wendy’s face.
• Wendy watches her brother choose humans over hybrids in real time — including her.

Joe’s line in the sand

Alex Lawther didn’t dodge the why of this in Variety, and his answer is as chilling as the scene:

"Joe reveals that he does have a hierarchy of care at which biological humans for him take precedence over anything else."

That’s the crack that splits the siblings: Joe’s been insisting he’s the one who can protect his hybrid sister, but if he’s willing to drop Nibs with a trigger pull, the priority list is obvious. As Lawther puts it, there’s an order to whose lives he values, and it’s not the order Wendy needs from him. Or as he bluntly adds, she needs him to not shoot her friends with an electric machine gun. Hard to argue with that.

Why this hits so hard

Episode 7 is exactly what Sydney Chandler was getting at when she talked about the power of putting kids — the most raw, unfiltered version of humanity — into Alien’s moral blender. As she told RadioTimes.com:

"Kids are, like, the most human, the most innocent ... And so to throw that into the world of Alien — morality, consciousness, innocence lost, identity — it adds a very eerie and powerful factor."

Nibs going feral over a stuffed bear and Joe answering with a stun blast is the show’s thesis in one scene: Who counts as human here, and who gets to decide?

One episode left. Family meeting incoming.

There’s only one episode left in this Noah Hawley-penned season, so expect Wendy to confront Joe about that betrayal. The bigger question is simpler: can she ever trust him again?

When and where to watch

New Alien: Earth episodes drop Wednesdays on Disney+. In the UK, Disney+ currently runs £4.99 a month or £89.90 a year.