Whatever your preconceived notions ofAlien: Earthmay be, this FX prequel series, set two years before the events ofRidley Scott’sAlien,is simultaneously more horrific and restrained than you might think. Creator and showrunner Noah Hawley (Fargo,Legion) spins a familiar (and bloody!) yarn about individuals who realize they’re out of their depth when they encounter an extraterrestrial killing machine known as the Xenomorph. It all seems like something we’ve seen before — except that the narrative takes place on Earth instead of within the confines of a spaceship.
Yet, whileAlien: Earthdelivers the chest-ripping carnage one might expect, it also maintains a remarkably intimate scale, giving us reasons to care about its entire roster of characters so that when the heads begin to roll, we feel a sense of the stakes. With the luxury of a full-length series (each of the eight episodes runs an hour or more), Hawley and his crew can shift this franchise into a different gear, allowing for a greater exploration of themes around the intersection of identity, corporate power and the forces of nature while also offering face-melting spectacle.
Alien: Earth
Hybrid Humans Up the Stakes
Eerily mirroring contemporary discomfort around tech interweaving with politics, the opening crawl tells us that Earth in the near future is governed by five corporations: Prodigy, Lynch, Dynamic, Threshold and a name that should be recognizable to Alien fans — Weyland-Yutani. While synthetics (humanoid robots with artificial intelligence) and cyborgs (humans with both biological and artificial parts) are common, Prodigy stands above the rest by being able to produce hybrids — synthetic bodies that store human consciousness.
We meet Marcy, a young girl dying of cancer who undergoes Prodigy’s first hybrid transition process. Her consciousness is implanted into the body of an adult (Sydney Chandler), and upon successful transfer, she’s christened with the name Wendy (as in Peter Pan and Wendy). Prodigy repeats this process several more times, amassing a posse of hybrids. Wendy and her “siblings” are quickly put to the test when a Weyland-Yutani ship, Maginot, crash-lands in Prodigy City. Unbeknownst to all, it carries several extraterrestrial life forms.
Prodigy’s CEO, Boy Kavalier (Samuel Blenkin, balancing entitled sniveling with just enough charm to make his character watchable), seeing an opportunity to one-up Weyland-Yutani, orders Wendy and her siblings to retrieve whatever cargo is inside. As the hybrids enter into the annals of the ship, they not only encounter the Xenomorph, but a host of other creatures from across the galaxy. Along the way, they learn more disturbing realities about their origins, and begin to question the circumstances around their techno-rebirth.
It’s through Wendy and her siblings' exploration, subsequent capture of the alien species and return of those species to Prodigy’s research facility island that Hawley can explore some of his richest ideas. Wendy and her siblings are still kids, entrusted with the task of dealing with some of the most dangerous forces in the galaxy. And suffice to say, their near-death experiences leave them shaken. There’s something unique in the way the synthetic body holds human consciousness, and it’s unclear whether a hybrid, when killed, can simply be resurrected the way an android might. This unknown variable raises the stakes for these youths, who realize their indestructible bodies can still bleed white ichor.
Ultimately,Alien: Earthis a show about children who gave up their decaying bodies to get a new chance at life, only to wake up in a world where their corporate benefactors try to take advantage of their disorientation and naïveté to further the company’s bottom line. Wendy and her siblings have to grow up in a world that sees them only for their potential for exploitation, and it’s painful to watch them come to terms with the fact that they’re seen not as people, but as more efficient robots. Their bodies make them both targets and tools; they can’t articulate or fully make sense of their agency, and the show is about their coming of age in this cruel world.
Character Development Trumps Sci-Fi Formula
It’s heavy narrative territory, but Hawley navigates these thorny themes with a steady directorial hand, coaxing precocious performances out of adult actors who realistically capture the disorienting and destabilizing process of having to grow up too quickly. He’s able to do this by committing to a more familiar plot structure, then coloring in its contours with richly realized characters. The moment the alien life forms move from the crashed ship onto the main Prodigy island, we know it’s only a matter of time before containment will be breached and monsters will run free.
Hawley is aware of the audience’s cognizance, and instead relishes in demonstrating how this cocktail of greed, carelessness and cruelty combusts in spectacular fashion. There’s always a loose screw on a containment unit or a person who thinks they don’t need help during a routine inspection, and Hawley finds a way to aggregate these moments into a crescendo of unstoppable dread. It’s not a matter of if the monsters will escape, but when. It’s in this in-between that Hawley makes ferocious music out of the foibles and carelessness of his human characters, using that scaffolding to focus on character development and allow his sprawling cast of hybrids, synthetics, cyborgs and everyone in between to have fully fleshed out arcs.
The show starts as an adventure story, then morphs into a haunted house tale. And by the time it shifts to its latter half, we have characters to care about. It’s exciting, and a little bit terrifying, to see Wendy transition from innocence to tactical leader, while Nibs (Lily Newark) gradually moves from denial to righteous defiance once she learns the Prodigy company can delete memories to make the hybrids more subservient. Meanwhile, Babou Ceesay plays the cyborg Morrow, the sole survivor of the crash, who is dedicated to retrieving the alien samples for Weyland-Yutani. He’s a standout, all muscle and sheer will. He stands in contrast to the flustered nature of the kids, or even Timothy Olyphant’s portrayal of Wendy’s synthetic trainer Kirsh. Morrow’s relationship with another one of Wendy’s siblings, Slightly (Adarsh Gourav), is a standout, providing some of the show’s most tense moments once Morrow realizes he can exploit Slightly’s kindness to find an in on the island.
Where most projects taking place in established universes suffer from too many callbacks to their histories and mythologies (look no further than the deepfake nightmare of Ash inAlien: Romulus), Hawley keeps those overt references to a minimum. From hearing the sirens of a crashing deep space research vessel to the sounds of gunfire from an M41A Pulse Rifle,Alien: Earthgets the little details right, using them as ways to remind the viewer of the world they’re in. It’s refreshing to experience a show based on IP that doesn’t remind its viewers of everything that happened in prior installments; it allows the focus to be kept on what’s unfolding while giving it a grounded sense of place.
The most honorable way this manifests is howAlien: Earthbuilds on the retro-futuristic look of the original series of films. Forgoing the sleek and contemporary look ofPrometheusorAlien: Covenant—which were rife with everything from holograms to flying orb scanners —Alien: Earthhas a kinship with the old-fashioned, evoking the analog gadgetry of theAlienseries' early era. When characters interface with a computer, the machine spits back responses in the green typeface that’s become a staple of the series, for example.
Another way the series overcomes its narrative contrivances is through its clever use of audio and visuals. To this writer’s count, each new monster that’s introduced is given at least one POV sequence when they’re in the throes of a hunt, establishing the show’s egalitarian approach to its creatures as well as its synthetics and humans. Hawley and cinematographers Dana Gonzales (Episode 1), Colin Watkinson (Episode 5) and David Franco (all other episodes) also make frequent use of split diopters and superimposition, clever ways to draw parallels between concurrent characters or events.
The main issue is, ironically, the Xenomorph itself. This may be the result of unfinished VFX in the episodes that were provided to critics for review, butAlien: Earth’s action sequences frequently get neutered through choppy editing. You can see the outlines of the exciting set pieces Hawley was trying to create, but what often ends up happening is that we see the aftermath of something exciting rather than witnessing it ourselves.
Alien: Earthrepresents the chilling endgame of a reality where corporations not just shamelessly, but gleefully exploit the least among us to achieve their quotas and meet their bottom line. As entertaining as it is, it’s profoundly distressing as well, because it feels prophetic. As much as human beings have the capacity to imagine, create and love,Alien: Earthsuggests that the only thing we’re worthy of inheriting is our destruction. All we can do is scream into ears that have long since tuned us out.
All episodes were screened for review. The first two episodes ofAlien: Earthpremiere on Hulu and on FX linear channels on August 12th, with new episodes weekly thereafter.
