Joe Hermit was a medic and tactical officer serving with the soldiers of the Prodigy Corporation in Alien: Earth, and the older brother of Marcy, the girl who became the hybrid Wendy. He was told his sister had died of her illness, and in 2120 he was trying to leave the army for medical school when the USCSS Maginot fell on Prodigy City. Among the wreck he found Marcy alive in a synthetic body, and he spent the days that followed on Boy Kavalier's island of Neverland, signing away his future to stay at her side and trying to take her home.
Biography
Earlier Life
Joe grew up with his father Frank J. Hermit and his younger sister Marcy. His father loved baseball and kept an old World Series ball from 1977, and father and son used to sit together watching the highlight reels of the game in which Reggie Jackson hit three home runs. Frank called the ball proof, telling his son that sometimes the world gives a person a moment to shine, and he called Jackson Mr. October, a memory that stayed with Joe long after his father was gone. When Joe grew up he went to work for Prodigy, joining a unit of soldiers who carried guns, while Marcy fell seriously ill at home.
She wrote to him while he was away, telling him about the nurses, the cherry Jell-O and the radiation treatments, about their father's worsening cough and his bad leg, and that she was lonely and scared at night and wished he could come home. Joe never visited her during her illness, and the company later told him that she had died, so he went to her funeral believing he had lost her. Their father died on January 16 of the year before the crash, and Joe made him a promise that he would go back to medical school. He carried another instruction from his father with him as well, that he had to take care of his sister, a duty he believed he had already failed.
Medical School
By 2120 Joe served as the medic of a Prodigy tactical squad alongside Sergeant Rashidi, Siberian and Bergerfeld, part of the crisis response team led by Colonel Nagg, and he had been wounded twice in the line of duty. He had won a place and a scholarship at a medical school on Mars, with classes starting the following month, but seven months still remained on his contract with the company. After filing his resignation forms he stood before a Prodigy HR bot and asked for special dispensation to leave early, explaining his promise to his father and that he was the last of his family. He asked whether there was a human he could speak to instead, but the request was denied, and the robot told him he would complete his contracted time where he was.
What Joe did not know was that Wendy had been watching him through the screens of Prodigy City, sometimes two or three times a day, and during the meeting she slipped into the system and made the HR bot recite a line from the old cartoon her family had watched together. That evening he ate dinner alone at home with the same film playing, while Wendy recited the line along with it and wished him good night without his knowing. The next day on the rooftop, when his squad asked what the robot had said, he admitted that he had to serve out his contract. His comrades teased him about medical school and told him they were stuck with him, moments before the sky above Prodigy City changed everything.
The Maginot Crash
From that rooftop the squad watched the Maginot, a Weyland-Yutani deep space research vessel, plunge out of the sky and tear into a tower in Prodigy City. They called it in as a downed spacecraft with multiple casualties and raced to the crash site, where the ship had buried itself in a hundred-story tower with twenty of its floors below the street. The unit chief, Nagg, laid out their orders by the book, to locate survivors, evacuate the wounded and secure the site, and sent Rashidi with four soldiers to the ground floor. In the chaos of screaming residents and wailing sirens, Rashidi called Hermit forward to assist the wounded, and he moved through the crowds asking who was injured while his comrades shouted for search and rescue.
Inside the ship he examined the frozen bodies in the cryochamber and judged from the coagulation of their blood that they had been dead a week or more, long before the impact. When Siberian asked what could have done it, Hermit admitted that he did not know. Rashidi then noticed that something had crawled out of one of the bodies and left a trail behind it. Hermit told the others they needed to find whatever had made it, and the squad pushed deeper into the wreck of the Maginot.
Inside The Wreck
In the ship's medbay Hermit studied the dead crew more closely and concluded that they had not died in the crash. Their blue lips pointed to a toxin rather than the depressurization that Siberian suggested, and foreign bodies lined their digestive tracts, the work of a Chestburster. He found the incident logged under code 1562 and warned Rashidi that it was bad. When Siberian asked what he meant by foreign, Hermit answered that it was alien.
The squad chose to head down, and moving through the wreck toward the stairwell they reached a gap in the stairs that had to be jumped. Siberian barely made the leap and had to be hauled up by his comrades, and when Hermit was left to cross last, the Xenomorph dropped on him across the gap. He escaped alone in the south elevator heading up and reported over the radio as Prodigy Medic Hermit, requesting backup and describing a creature roughly eight feet tall and armored. Nobody answered, because the communications in the tower were down, and he was left cut off from the rest of his squad.
Floor Sixty-Five
The crash had torn open the upper floors of the tower, and on the 65th floor Hermit, still calling for Rashidi and Siberian with no reply, met up with Bergerfeld. Bergerfeld told him the comms were down and the whole building felt as if it was about to collapse, and he had already cleared the other apartments on the floor. One resident was hosting a dinner party with the Caspians among his guests and refused to leave, claiming that Boy Kavalier would call him personally because the two belonged to the same club. The soldiers warned him that the north stairwell was out and the fire suppression system was down, but he shut the door on them.
The Xenomorph reached the apartment before the guests could be moved, and it tore through the dinner party. The Maginot's cyborg security chief Kumi Morrow tracked it through the ruined apartments and sealed it in a cocoon, and when Hermit thanked him for the rescue, Morrow shot him with a stun round and left him lying beside the bodies. In the aftermath Hermit found a ball from Game 6 of the 1977 World Series, and alone in the ruined apartment he spoke out loud to his father about the highlight reels they had watched together.
Finding Marcy
Two strangers arrived in the wreck soon after, Wendy and Slightly, children in adult bodies sent in by Prodigy, and found him speaking to his father beside the ball. When Hermit looked for Slightly's wound he found no cut and no red blood, and realized that the pair were synthetic, though Wendy insisted they were something different, something special. When Kirsh ordered them over the radio to secure the cargo in the front section of the ship, Hermit said he had to get back to the wounded, but at Wendy's plea he went with them. Along the way Slightly let slip that he was really Aarush, that Wendy was Marcy, and that they were only eleven and twelve years old.
Wendy told Joe she had been watching him for a long time on the screens, going to work and riding in boats, and said it was her fault he had never gone to Mars. He answered that she had died and that he had been to her funeral, and she explained that when she was sick the boy genius had come to visit and told their father he could help her if she went away to live with Kirsh and Dame Sylvia, that it had to be a secret, and that the boy genius's name was on Joe's uniform. Joe refused to believe her until she answered his questions, recalling how she had shouted that she was mad to them on her first day of daycare and what she had said about his big toe on Christmas morning when she was seven. The answers were memories only Marcy could have had.
Taken By The Xenomorph
In the front section of the ship the group found the Xenomorph eggs, and the creature seized Joe before his sister could reach him. Wendy left Slightly behind to guard the eggs and went after her brother alone, and Kirsh had to admit to Boy Kavalier that she had gone to find him. Joe woke cocooned in a freezer truck in the lower levels of the tower, held fast by resin. When Wendy came looking for him he shouted that it was a trap and begged her to get away before the creature came back.
Wendy reached him in the truck and pulled him free of the resin, and the two of them fought their way back toward the surface. Joe told her to stay behind him, insisting that he was the soldier and she was the kid, and she answered that she was not a kid anymore. As the Xenomorph pounded on the roof above them, its acid eating through the metal, the pair made for a door and ran. Even injured and outmatched, Joe was still trying to put himself between his sister and the creature.
The Elevator
The Xenomorph caught up with them at the elevator, and while Joe fought with the door controls, shouting that he was coming, Wendy struggled with the creature. In the struggle Hermit was gravely injured, and by the time the lift carried them away he was coughing up blood. Wendy stayed at his side as he begged her to stay with him. His last words before losing consciousness were a promise to Marcy that she was going to be okay and that he was there.
Prodigy brought him out of the city, and when he woke he was on Neverland, the private island of Boy Kavalier, with a new lung in his chest that the company had paid for. Wendy had been brought back to the island as well, along with the eggs and creatures recovered from the Maginot, which were now in Kirsh's lab. She later told Kavalier that she had fought the creature because it was hurting Joe. Nobody would tell Joe what had become of the rest of his squad.
Neverland
When Joe met Boy Kavalier in the lab, the founder dismissed him as a man who worked for a subsidiary of a subsidiary of a holding company of an LLC, and asked how the new lung was. Wendy could not hear her brother, because the scientists had taken her hearing offline after she heard the eggs screaming in Kirsh's lab. Once it was restored she explained that the screaming came from the baby Kirsh was experimenting on, and Kavalier was thrilled to learn that she could hear an alien language. When the founder pushed her to reproduce the sound, Joe insisted she was not a machine but a frightened child who needed rest after a rough night.
Arthur Sylvia, one of the scientists in charge of the hybrids, ran the hearing tests with Joe at his sister's side. Kavalier mocked the brother for having a feeling but let Joe take Wendy back to her room. Afterward he ruled that the brother could stay, on one condition: he would be working for Prodigy. As Kavalier reminded his staff, it was his world, and Joe only lived in it.
Terms Of Employment
A Prodigy executive explained the terms. Joe asked first after Rashidi and Siberian and was told that information was confidential, and when the executive asked him to confirm that the transition had worked and that Wendy was the same person as his sister, Joe insisted her name was Marcy. He threatened to quit, and was told he would be put on the first shuttle home, that all contact with her would end and that the new lung had not been free. He could work off the debt by signing a lifetime contract, or he could go home and be billed for it. Joe answered that he was their man.
When he asked when he could take his sister home, the executive described her as the property of Prodigy, a prototype for a transhuman product and the path to human immortality, and told him she was no longer a human being. He soon learned that the rest of his squad, or what was left of it, had been brought to the island as well, with Rashidi and Siberian now working there. Kavalier, meanwhile, mocked Wendy that her brother had never visited her while she was sick and threatened to put him on the next plane home. He let Joe stay only after she gave her pinky promise that her brother would never become a distraction.
The Lost Boys
Over ice cream with the hybrids, Joe heard from Isaac how Arthur's chips let them upload whole books into their heads, and that he was learning zoology and advanced biology to help Kirsh in the lab. When one of the children asked about the Five the boss kept mentioning, Joe explained that the old planet had once had governments that people voted for. Those governments had failed, and five corporations, Prodigy, Yutani, Threshold, Dynamic and Lynch, had risen to take their place and now ran things together. The children reasoned that Yutani, angry that Prodigy had taken its crashed ship, would ask the Five to help get its creatures back.
When Slightly objected to an outsider being among them, saying they all had brothers and mothers who were not there, Joe agreed that the families of all the children should have been there, and that instead of funerals there should have been parties. Some of the children began to talk of demanding to see their families, while others worried they would be sent away and said they liked it on the island. Wendy, meanwhile, grew fascinated by the captured Xenomorph, comparing its kind to bees and ants with their hives and colonies. Joe called the creatures killers, but she told him she thought this one could be good, a belief he could not share after Floor 65.
Patrol
When Joe asked Slightly whether he had seen Marcy, the boy tried to lure him away on behalf of Morrow, but Rashidi came to the door and took Joe out on patrol, an order he said came from above. Out among the trees Joe was asked whether Wendy was really his sister, and he answered that he thought so, and that she was to him anyway. He used the patrol to learn the island, asking whether there was a way off, and learned of the airships, a couple of boats and a path leading to a sign for the boat docks. Rashidi warned him that Yutani might send cyborgs to get her monsters back, that Neverland had its own security and that their squad was expendable.
When Joe mentioned that his father had once taken him out on a boat, Siberian told him to stop whatever he was planning, because they were alive, they were paid and they had a good thing going. Back in the compound Joe found Arthur, fired and on his way off the island, and told him he had noticed how much Arthur cared for Marcy. He asked for an honest answer as to whether his sister was safe there, and Arthur pulled up the vital signs the company kept on the children. Whatever he saw convinced him, and Joe told him that was all he needed to hear.
The Escape
After the hybrid Isaac died in what the company called an accident, Joe told Marcy they were not safe and had to go, revealing that Arthur had turned off the trackers for all of the children. Wendy refused to leave the others behind and asked whether he would have left without her, so Joe agreed to take them all, as long as they moved fast. Kirsh soon found footage showing that Arthur and the brother had switched off the trackers, and alarms rang through the compound as the secure lab was breached. Joe led the children toward the boat dock a quarter of a mile away, with a code from Arthur to get them through.
Prodigy soldiers intercepted them on the way, and Wendy called the Xenomorph, which answered her call and tore into the soldiers. When Joe asked what she had said to it, she told him she thought she had told it to hide and follow. At the dock their old squad was waiting, because Siberian had told the others he would come there, and Rashidi reminded him of his warning and said his orders were to take him back, while Nagg told him he had messed up. In the struggle that followed, the hybrid Nibs turned violent, and Joe shot her to stop her from hurting his friends.
The Holding Cell
Joe was locked in a holding cell with Morrow, who had been captured on the island, and the two men passed the hours talking. Morrow told him the stun round on Floor 65 had saved his life, asked how the lung was and warned him that whenever the corporation gave something there was a price, and that everything did not begin to cover it. Elsewhere Siberian told the others that he had shot Nibs, and Rashidi defended him, saying the girl had killed someone and that he was one of them. In the cell Joe returned to the letter Marcy had written him when she was ill, asking whether he could come home, and heard his father's voice telling him to take care of her.
When Morrow attacked the guard and looked set to kill him, Joe stopped him, saying he was going to save the ones he could, and Morrow told him he had better save the children because he meant to burn the place to the ground. A synthetic aide later brought word that Mr. Kavalier had a proposal for him, and Joe answered that he would not leave without his sister. He was told Wendy now had rights of her own, guessed that the company would forgive the lung only to take everything else, and was shut in a room shouting for help.
The Uprising
The hybrids rose against Prodigy that night. Wendy told the others that nobody touched her brother, sending them after Kirsh, the cyborg and the soldiers. When she came for Joe she seized the synthetic aide through the network, declaring that she decided what happened now and that their captors would never hurt them again, and explained that it was mechanical like the doors and cameras, so she could make it do what she wanted. Joe apologized for shooting Nibs, explaining that he had no choice because she was hurting his friends. Wendy reminded him that he was supposed to help people, and asked whether he was saying that Nibs was not people.
She told him that perhaps he should call her it, since she was neither a child nor a grown-up, neither Marcy nor Wendy, and that she liked the aliens because they were honest predators. When he tried to say that things were complicated, she told him that was what powerless people said to make doing nothing okay, and that she was not powerless. Joe admitted that he had messed up and had not known what else to do, but she only told him that the children were rounding up the grown-ups. By the end of that night the hybrids held Neverland and its adults captive, Joe among them, while Yutani's forces closed in, and the brother who had given up medical school and a lifetime of wages to stay with Marcy had become one of her prisoners.
Personality And Traits
Joe was a soldier only by contract. At heart he was a caregiver, a medic who ran toward the wounded, studied the dead to learn what had killed them and wanted nothing more than to become a doctor. He was quiet and sincere among the hardened members of his squad, who teased him for his ambitions but defended him when it counted, with Rashidi calling him one of them even after he had chosen the hybrids over his own unit. Guilt shaped much of what he did. He had never visited Marcy while she was dying and had mourned her at her funeral, and finding her alive gave him a second chance to keep the promise he had made to his father.
He accepted a lifetime contract, the loss of his scholarship and threats from Prodigy without hesitation, and he tried to save all of the hybrids rather than only his sister. That same protectiveness became the gap between them. Joe kept treating Wendy as his little sister Marcy, a child to be shielded, while she came to see herself as something new and stronger than the grown-ups around her. His decision to shoot Nibs to protect his squad was the moment she stopped seeing him as the one who helped people.
Skills And Equipment
Joe was a capable field medic, able to read the time and cause of death from a body, recognize the signs of a toxin and identify foreign organisms in a corpse with no knowledge of what a Facehugger was. He saw at once that the crew of the Maginot had not died in the crash, reading their blue lips as a toxin rather than depressurization. He had won a scholarship to a medical school on Mars, and Wendy proudly described him as a medic, like a doctor, and really good at it. Even in the ruined tower he kept to that role, treating wounded residents and checking Slightly for a cut before discovering that the boy was synthetic.
As a Prodigy tactical officer he wore the unit's vest with his surname across it, carried a flashlight and an earpiece, and used a rifle with a laser sight in the wreck and on Neverland. Cut off and alone, he still identified himself over the radio as Prodigy Medic Hermit and gave a clear description of the creature. He survived being taken and cocooned by a Xenomorph, as well as wounds severe enough that Prodigy had to replace one of his lungs. At the boat dock he proved willing to shoot one of the hybrids to protect his old squad.
Behind The Scenes
Joe Hermit was played by English actor Alex Lawther. The official FX biography described him as Wendy's brother, once separated from his family, a tactical officer and medic who would risk everything to protect his sister after an unexpected event reunited them. Wendy first introduced him by comparing his name to the baseball player Joe DiMaggio.
The ball Joe found on the 65th floor recalled a real moment of baseball history, when Reggie Jackson hit three home runs for the New York Yankees in Game 6 of the 1977 World Series, the performance that cemented his nickname Mr. October. The second episode of the series took its title from that nickname, and the cartoon line that Wendy put in the mouth of the HR bot was taken from the animated film Ice Age.
Famous Quotes
- "Marcy, you're gonna be okay."
- "I'm your man."
- "I'm gonna save the ones I can."
- "I'm not leaving without my sister."
- "I'm the soldier. You're a kid."
- "Your families should be here, all of them."
- "Is my sister safe here?"
Conclusion
Joe Hermit was the Prodigy medic who walked into the wreck of the Maginot hoping to finish his contract and go to medical school, and walked out with the sister he had buried. He began the story asking an HR robot for a way out of his contract and ended it bound to Prodigy for life, having given up his scholarship to stay at her side. He traded his freedom for a place beside her on Neverland and tried to take every hybrid child home. The girl he had sworn to protect no longer wanted protecting, and he ended the story as her prisoner.
Appearances
- Alien: Earth - "Neverland" (2025)
- Alien: Earth - "Mr. October" (2025)
- Alien: Earth - "Metamorphosis" (2025)
- Alien: Earth - "Observation" (2025)
- Alien: Earth - "The Fly" (2025)
- Alien: Earth - "Emergence" (2025)
- Alien: Earth - "The Real Monsters" (2025)
Tag Categories: Alien Universe Characters | Alien Earth Characters | Alien Earth Lore | Alien Lore
