The story begins when the alien larynx lands on the ‘primitive earth’ what is it like? What’s the geological, biological and ontological status.
Terra-nullis
It is a Terra-nullis, i.e. nobody’s land? Terra-nullis is ofcourse a colonial fantasy. It is the sickness that does not allow the colonisers to experience what’s already there. Don’t you see the people. The houses, the farms, the forests, the mountains, the rivers and the people. Ofcourse they do. Their blindness of a different kind. They are not semiotically blind, they are ontologically impaired. Terra-nullis is ontological violence. Not recognising something you have never seen before. How does one reconise something that you encounter for the first time? What happens when something that you don’t have any ontological memory of stands in front of your face? You see right through them. You build on top of them. Their existence takes the status of a planetary phenomena. The mound of rubble on the coast of Haifa becomes a landscaped garden, a geological feature of land. If you are lucky, your past becomes an part of a stratified history, it becomes an archelogical object that might be discovered in the future. Nonetheless its temporality acquires a planetary scale. In this way it can be relegated to a time beyond the existence of humanity. Earth has known to exist without humans and this is what enables terra-nullis. If we think of the planet as having been continuously occupied by bodies that are not exclusively human, then it would be difficult to categorise a land as terra-nullis. If it is possible to imagine evolution as a simultaneous multi-directional flow instead of the abstract Darwanian carsinisation of time then again it would be impossible to occupy any land and tagging it as terra-nullis. The planet has never been empty. Empting the planet is a form of ontological blindness.
If that is how the ‘primitive earth’ is defined in the show, then it is a lie. Becuase even before the landing of the alien larynx, it was not empty.
FUBAR (fucked up beyond all recognition)
Tohu Wa-buh
Now the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the spirit of God was hovering over the waters.
— Genesis 1:2, New International Version
Creation ex-nihilo