Alien: Earth’s finale picks up pretty much where we left off last week, where everything is coming to a head, and the integrity of Prodigy as a company seems to be crumbling around them. But did the finale stick the landing after an otherwise promising and intriguing season?

Sort of. I confess that I was a bit let down by the finale, titled The Real Monsters. For a show that seemed to be about doing something new and breaking the rules, the finale felt shockingly safe relative to what’s come before it. There weren’t a lot of surprises, and there didn’t really seem to be any consequences, save for the deaths of a lot of red shirts, which happened largely off-screen or in quick insert shots. For a show with such interesting questions on life, consciousness, and free will, there wasn’t any real revelation by the end, no philosophical point to be made, other than hybrids can be just as intense as synths, I guess.

Likewise, we didn’t really get any answers on Wendy and her bag of powers. How she ended up learning to speak Xeno and how she can access the mechanical networks are never divulged, making Wendy feel more like an overpowered MacGuffin than a person with an arc. Nothing, then, feels earned with Wendy, making it hard to sympathize and relate to her. She even blasts Joe, telling him, “I’m not powerless” during their argument, to really hammer the point home. Their fight was rather manufactured, I’d say, with Wendy being furious at Joe for incapacitating Nibs at the end of last week’s episode after she ripped off someone’s jaw. Wendy doesn’t seem to empathize at all with her brother’s reaction to stun someone to save lives; thus, her arguments seemed to fall flat, despite the show making it seem like she was in the right when it really should be asking if she’s the villain of this story.

The rest of the episode felt very safe. As mentioned, no one died who wasn’t a red shirt, really. The show continuously teased that Joe would become the host of the octoeye, but that didn’t come to fruition (it went into Arthur’s corpse). Morrow and Kirsh had a throwdown, but both survived, and by the end, the Lost Boys had captured all the important adults on Neverland and declared that the hybrids and aliens would now rule. The episode also ends on a bit of a cliffhanger, as Weyland-Yutani forces are in the midst of invading the island with their gunships, so things do seem like they’re about to get heated. With season two yet to be confirmed (it’s conditional on the streaming and cable numbers for Alien: Earth), we have to contend that there’s a possibility that this show doesn’t get the answers and resolutions it deserves, or needs.

Which is a shame, as I overall quite liked Alien: Earth. While not perfect, it was marred by inconsistent writing, it was still engaging, with some great set and creature effects (especially as it went on), and some interesting questions on humanity. Episode five, in particular, stands out as the best of the season, along with the premiere (which, ironically, are the two episodes written and directed by Noah Hawley, the showrunner). It couldn’t quite stick the landing, to answer my question in the opener, but the show isn’t bad and thank goodness it opted to do something different instead of rehashing what came before it the whole time. Would I watch a second season? For sure. But that doesn’t mean I was content with how the show ended, which, for my money, was a surprisingly safe and seemingly low-stakes finale. But what did you think of FX’s Alien: Earth? Let us know in the comments; we’d love to see what you thought.