This article contains spoilers for Alien: Earth (2025) and references to child sexual abuse and suicidality.
In 2018, a tenth grader named Thomas killed himself in the town of my alma mater. Years later, a more comprehensive account of the event was unveiled. He was the victim of an inappropriate staff-child relationship at school that devastated his well-being and contributed to his eventual suicide. Interview evidence and the child’s phone data showed a pattern of grooming instigated by his water polo coach. The school ignored complaints about his behavior and when they finally had to take action, the coach resigned and the matter could no longer be pursued by the school.
In 2012, my high school had a teacher who was especially personable and friendly to the students. He regularly volunteered for lunch break duty with the students and made a point to strike up conversations with us. Within a year, one of my classmates mentioned he’d been texting her and even showed up at her home address in a bid for her attention. Her father drove him away and made a complaint. He quietly left the school by the end of the year.
In 2013, a teacher at my current girlfriend’s high school was soliciting nude photos from students, including a 16 year-old girl. Someone reported that incident to the school, and he swiftly resigned before it went further. His wife also resigned from her teaching post at the same school and they remained married. In 2012, her school had a staffer who was notoriously touchy-feely with teenage girls despite his job description having no reason for engaging with the students. My girlfriend once mentioned to him she was leaving school early due to back pain. He began giving her an unsolicited lower back massage with other staff present. She was 14. One of the teachers at her school was married to a former student from his previous school. They insisted that the relationship only began after she graduated and was already an adult.
In 2011, my best friend’s high school had a teacher who was married to a former student from that school. By that point, they were long-married with kids. In 2013, a substitute teacher at her school groomed a 17 year-old girl into a relationship. He resigned when the news broke, but his wife continued teaching there.
Oh right. I’m supposed to be writing about Alien: Earth.
Alien: Earth gets many things right. The performances are excellent and are bracketed by robust pacing and editing. The show manages to call back to fan-favourite shots and concepts in the Alien lineage without becoming insistent the way Star Wars has gotten. They also kept a critical theme: Even when there’s a clawed bug thing skulking through the vents, the real monsters are human.
Fittingly, Alien: Earth is a prequel set on Earth. The show begins when a group of ill children are voluntold to transfer their consciousnesses into advanced synthetic bodies. Some of them are terminally ill, and this transfer is their only chance at life. These children become the setting’s first hybrids: human consciousnesses inside synthetic bodies. They’re prototypes for human immortality. If successful, they’ll lead to extreme profits for their corporate benefactors.
These consciousness transfers (pointedly referred to as transitions) result in a group of children living in synthetic adult bodies. They have remarkable senses, strength, and learning potential. They also bicker a lot, struggle to keep secrets, and are more inclined to playing giant Jenga on their benefactor’s private island than heralding the future of human immortality. Said benefactor is also achingly childlike: A child prodigy-turned-trillionnaire CEO who now heads a nation-spanning megacorporation. He has a notably lackadaisical attitude toward everything from scientific ethics to immediate threats to his life.
Meanwhile, the titular alien lifeforms also progress through their life cycles as the hybrid children contend with their new bodies. Venturing beyond the xenomorph, Alien: Earth gifts the audience a menagerie of alien creatures that are all displeased at being captured and studied. Their expressions of displeasure typically result in violent and squeamish ends.
The thread of growing up too quickly in an exploitative environment runs through the whole show. The children of Alien: Earth – even the alien ones – are mistreated, deprived of agency, and exploited for their extraordinary capabilities. And that’s where the trouble starts.
Despite ‘child’ being the first word in ‘child grooming’, the act has much less to do with the child than the people who prey on them. The core of child grooming is the presence of an adult who wishes to exploit them. It’s less to do with child grooming and more to do with adult predation. Predation — intentional, self-serving, and ultimately harmful — is the defining quality of this act. Not the nature of the victim.
Grooming behavior isn’t an anomaly, either. It’s a well-studied pattern of behavior with visible signs. It’s so common there may as well be a handbook for how predators approach it. And Alien: Earth has that handbook of predation down precisely. I was a victim of child sexual abuse. When I was a teen, people tried to groom me online. I eventually did a Master’s in Psychology, so I’ll lay it out as best as I can.
For predators of any kind, the first step to active predation is identifying victims. Victims who have a vulnerability or weakness in relation to the predator are preferred. Power dynamics like lecturer/student, therapist/patient, or police/citizen are ideal for providing access to a pool of victims and shielding the predator. True crime audiences are keenly aware of how often vulnerable people are targeted by attackers who fully understand the risk calculation of committing crime. Only a fool of a serial killer would exclusively target active duty police officers or legislators when there are a thousand street sex workers in the dark.
The hybrid children in Alien: Earth were all ill prior to their transitions, some terminally. Some were plucked from abusive upbringings. The main character, Marcy, was signed onto the project by faking her death. Once transitioned into their synthetic bodies, their benefactor issues them names from Peter Pan. Marcy is dubbed Wendy. Rose becomes Nibs, and so on. Despite their supercharged adult bodies, the series makes it clear they are still vulnerable. They’re deprived of basic freedoms, live with intrusive surveillance, and referred to as company property. It’s (correctly) shown that vulnerability is not a physical state, but a mental and social one. They’ve transitioned from one form of vulnerability to another and it’s not long before predators take notice.
Predators target people. Target being the keyword. They purposefully situate themselves near victims to facilitate their actions. It would take a pretty incompetent lioness to wander into the ocean in the hopes of tripping over gazelle. Clergymen use their respected and near-unassailable position to abuse children so often that it’s become a collective punchline. Boy Scout leaders get time with children on away trips, all set in a culture that promotes obedience. The water polo coach implicated in my old university town? I always wonder if dressing rooms and contact sports in swimming pools had something to do with it. He wasn’t photographed ‘allegedly’ doing semi-nude bodywriting with teenage boys by accident. Those images had to be extracted from a dead child’s phone to see the light of day.
Alien: Earth places its vulnerable characters dead in the path of predation. Predators and victims are enmeshed — literally, when chestbursters get involved. Corporate caregivers use surveillance and therapy to nudge the hybrid children into their roles as humanity’s future. Their discomfort is overcome using an escalating procedure of placation, fear, and threats. The anxiety and disquiet the hybrids experience at the hands of people who should be caring for them is palpably real to those of us who’ve experienced sustained abuse.
Placing oneself near vulnerable people isn’t predation on its own. Things takes shape when the predator exercises their power to bring a victim into their sphere of influence. A teacher sending personal texts to my classmate. A staff member giving a teenaged student a ‘back massage’. This slow overstepping of boundaries serves to desensitize (groom) the victim to their new state of contact while building a pseudo-relationship with the abuser. Acts of grooming can often be passed off as enthusiasm, friendly interest, or love for the job. This makes protecting people against it difficult without compromising the ability to work. Weapons (2025) summarizes its school system’s overprotective response by sanctioning a teacher for inquiring too closely about a student’s well-being. Although admittedly, she is also overstepping her professional boundaries to investigate the show’s central horror. I somehow doubt the principal’s handbook detailed effective responses to blood magic.
At this point, I’m compelled to call out the most central and archetypal child grooming arc in Alien: Earth. It begins when Kumi Morrow, antagonist and agent of Weyland-Yutani Corporation, tasks himself with recovering the menagerie of waylaid aliens from the hybrids’ corporate overlords (Prodigy Corporation). He gets his opportunity after a chance encounter with the hybrid Aarush/Slightly. After introducing himself by way of knifepoint, he establishes contact with the boy and presents himself as a friend to the nervous child. Despite not being in the same organization as Aarush/Slightly, Morrow inserts himself into the child’s life and uses a mix of cajolery, logic, and threats to coerce him into doing dangerous work.
The effect of this non-sexual grooming is swiftly visible. Amidst a dense plot concerned with corporate espionage, coming-of-age, and slimy aliens, there’s still enough time to show us Aarush/Slightly’s deteriorating mental state. Like other victims of child grooming, his personality changes from gregarious and playful to reticent and fearful. His best friendship with fellow hybrid Chris/Smee fractures under the weight of his inappropriate secret. Adults around him begin to suspect that something is wrong with the boy, but healthy intervention is not forthcoming. In a sadly relatable way, the adults are too busy to intervene effectively and the child victim is too afraid to cry out. Aarush/Slightly’s situation is not aided by the fact that the only adults in his new life who can intervene are the abusive corporate employees using him for profit. Morrow chose his victim effectively: a trusting, abused child with access to what he wants and few supporters.
After cultivating a relationship and leaning on acceptable boundaries, the predator eventually takes action. In short, they get what they want out of the victim. Some staff at the schools of my loved ones sought sexual gratification from teenagers. Nursing home staff sometimes abuse their charges who can be isolated, weak, and unable to express their discomfort.
Abuse that stems from grooming can result in the same violence as any other abuse. The difference is that grooming is a sustained effort to adjust boundaries in the predator’s favor and establish a connection with the victim. It’s not a proverbial knife attack from the bushes. Thomas’ suicide eventually led to an award-winning investigative journalism podcast. The host of that podcast (Deon Wiggett) was sexually abused by a teacher who followed this procedure to a tee. My classmate’s victimization was halted by her parents when her teacher showed up at their gate looking for her. Looking back with older eyes, my girlfriend and I both agree that her school staffer was trying to push physical boundaries to gauge her reaction.
The topic of sexual violence is extremely prickly to approach in televised fiction. Game of Thrones’ handling of rape is always on my mind when I think about attempts to depict sexual violence in a work that doesn’t want it to be the main theme. I’ve long-since concluded that it’s far better to avoid depicting sexual violence if there isn’t total commitment to it. Alien: Earth does exactly that to its benefit. All the child grooming that takes place here is non-sexual. The CEO of Prodigy who made the hybrids partly so that he could have literal playmates is completely desexualized. He’s too busy being childlike and avaricious to care about sex. In my view, that’s to the show’s benefit. If Alien: Earth wanted to depict child sexual abuse, it would have to become a show about child sexual abuse with a xenomorph-shaped afterthought or fail to give the topic appropriate gravitas. This is still a show about xenomorphs.
Speaking of non-sexuality, Morrow’s grooming of Aarush/Slightly never turns sexual because Aarush/Slightly can give Morrow what he wants, but it’s not sex. It’s xenomorph eggs. Morrow is an incredible, flat character. I mean that in the best way possible. His character motivations and methods never change. He never develops like characters are expected to. The underlying character is the same in every episode. He’s single-mindedly fixated on his mission to the detriment of everyone around him. It ultimately makes him more compelling because unlike the pliable, uncertain hybrid children, Morrow represents rock-solid conviction.
Alien: Earth’s ending remains true to its fictitious nature. Without going into specific events, the show ends with the hybrid children developing complex agency and taking action against their abusers. In the final episodes, they even seek out those who individually wronged them and avenge the mistreatment. Aarush/Slightly reforms his battered friendship with Chris/Smee and rejoins his peers as a capable member of the team. If you see people complaining about the way the show ended (I’m one of them), it’s mainly because the show ended on a cliffhanger and we crave more.
The outcomes of real-world child grooming are less distinctly inspirational. Of the real accounts of child grooming I mentioned in this article, only Thomas’ resulted in a police investigation. His suicide alone wasn’t sufficient to prompt an effective investigation; the grieving parents had to spotlight their son’s story via journalists to get a case underway. That investigation is ongoing, but the former water polo coach implicated in it has worked hard to silence reporting about it. Every other account in my vicinity ended with a quiet resignation-and-replacement or nothing whatsoever.
It’s appalling but grotesquely familiar to other South Africans. You see, we have two problems in South Africa that intersect in an awful manner.
Firstly, we have a nationwide shortage of teachers. The teaching profession here is critically underprepared, underfunded, and overworked. I’m sure that sounds familiar to US readers, but we’re South Africa, so we always take a familiar problem and make it worse. We have a major shortage of teachers, and those who do qualify are often drawn away by better incentives elsewhere. That’s already bad.
The intersecting problem is that to rectify the shortage, South Africa does everything it can to produce and retain teachers. On the production side, we accelerate entry into the teaching profession via programmes like the Postgraduate Certification in Education (PGCE). The PGCE is a one-year full-time university programme that requires a Bachelor’s Degree. It’s a university-level crash course that converts any graduate student into a teacher in a year. My alma mater offers one of the better examples of the programme, but it still attracts aimless graduates who tack it onto their studies as an afterthought. If all else fails, they can at least be teachers. Not a great attitude to have in a profession that works with children. But it puts more teachers into the country than the more focused Bachelor’s in Education. To support retention, the government hangs onto thousands of unqualified teachers, including student teachers to keep the numbers up. It dumps money into education to stop the leaks at every level. And it shows no signs of taking measures to make it harder for teachers implicated in misconduct to find new jobs.
When a qualified teacher facing disciplinary action for child grooming resigns, they’ve got a whole country looking to recruit them. Resignation takes them out of the school’s jurisdiction. It’s a less complicit version of the Catholic Church quietly reassigning sexually abusive clergymen to new parishes. So long as the disgraced teacher doesn’t use their previous employer as a reference, they’ll almost certainly get a new job elsewhere. We don’t even pursue teachers who are convicted sex offenders effectively. Over 90% of our teachers have not been vetted against the national sex offender registry. Some of the registered sex offenders found in our teaching positions have been left at their posts since their unmasking.
As I reach the end of this film study article, I feel like a character in the satire newspaper The Onion. Specifically, I feel like Peter Rosenthal, The Onion’s head film critic. Each movie review he does rapidly derails into a diatribe about his own psychological issues and hangups. As a victim of sexual abuse surrounded by the same, I’m Peter Rosenthal today. I’m losing my goddamned mind over horrible things that happen to people because a show about clawed stealth predators reminded me the monsters are the people around us. The emotional response it elicited in me is credit to the show’s depiction of child grooming. It’s a great entry into the Alien universe too, but I came away from it with bigger feelings than that.
Give it a watch if you like robust sci-fi horror or remarkably adept depictions of child abuse and its effects. And keep looking out for the people around you.
