Alien: Earth has the feel of a franchise retread at times, but it does offer some interesting concepts and characters and has the potential to turn into a decent sci-fi series.
What Is It?
This prequel series takes place in 2120, two years prior to the events in the 1979 film Alien. A research vessel carrying three alien species crash-lands in a city controlled by the powerful Prodigy, one of the five major corporations on the planet. A group of machine/human hybrids is sent in to investigate, while the CEO of the Weyland-Yutani Corporation (which owns the ship) tries to reclaim its cargo.
Airing: FX, Airs Tuesdays at 8 PM EST (New Episode Available on Hulu Next Day)
Starring: Sydney Chandler, Alex Lawther, Essie Davis, Samuel Blenkin, Babou Ceesay, Timothy Olyphant
Developed By: Noah Hawley
Johnny Jay’s Thoughts:
Before proceeding with this review, I have a confession to make: I have not seen any of the Alien movies beyond 1997’s Alien Resurrection. I consider the first film in the franchise to be an all-time Top 10 sci-fi entry, and the second a notable genre accomplishment as well. The third film had its moments, but I hated that they killed off (Spoiler Alert?) Hicks, Newt, and Bishop. By the time they got to the fourth film, it seemed like they had run the franchise into the ground, and I just lost interest. From what I’ve heard about the films that followed, it appears that trend continued, though perhaps I’ll catch Prometheus, Alien: Covenant, and Alien: Romulus at some point.
The TV series seemed promising enough at the start, introducing the hybrids, which differ from the synths of the films in that they have a human consciousness implanted in a synthetic body. It also fills us in on how people on Earth knew about the aliens prior to the events of the 1979 movie. But as the show quickly cycled through these concepts and a few others, by the second or third episode I started to feel like I did when watching Alien: Resurrection: we’ve done all this before, and there doesn’t seem to be enough new material to justify the latest entry. Still, I’ve stuck with the show through its fifth episode, and I’m starting to warm up to it a little more.
On the good side, the hybrids are interesting, and there are plenty of directions the creative team can go with them. The show also successfully replicates the look and feel of the early Alien movies, while finally giving us a glimpse of Earth, something we haven’t seen up to this point. I also find it intriguing that five companies control the planet, something I don’t recall being mentioned before (though perhaps that came up in the more recent films). Plus, that eyeball alien is super creepy, and hopefully we learn plenty more about it.
On the bad side, there are not many characters here you can sympathize or identify with. The medic Hermit (aka Joe) is one of the few I liked early on, and I eventually warmed up to Wendy (aka Marcy). Timothy Olyphant gives his usual excellent performance as Kirsh, and that character does seem interesting. But he’s not necessarily someone I’m rooting for. Boy Kavalier is pretty close to a comic-book character, though Samuel Blenkin is clearly having fun chewing the scenery. Security Officer Morrow could have been a much more compelling character, and while Babou Ceesay delivers a strong, moody performance, I’m starting to worry that the writers may waste his potential.
Despite these issues—and the retread feel—overall I am enjoying the show so far. I wonder how far they can go with this as a prequel, and I certainly hope they don’t start re-writing canon the way several Star Trek prequel shows have. They could eventually jump forward past the first two Alien movies and carry on the series from there, or spin off and focus on the hybrids. There’s enough of interest to keep the show going for a while, and I just hope they keep moving forward with minimal recycling of concepts already covered by the franchise. The potential for a really great sci-fi series is here; it just hasn’t been realized yet.
What’s Next?
Alien: Earth has not yet received a second-season renewal, but viewership has been good and I like its chances. Creator and showrunner Noah Hawley (Legion, Fargo) has indicated that he has more seasons planned and that he sees the first year as a “proof of concept.” There’s no word on how long he wants the series to run, but he has said that “endings are what give a story meaning” and that he knows where the show is headed.
Where Can You Watch It?
New episodes air Tuesdays at 8 PM EST on FX, and the first season will wrap up on September 23rd. The new episodes are also available to stream on Hulu the day after broadcast.
Are you watching Alien: Earth, and do you believe it is a good continuation of the franchise? Chime in with your thoughts in the comments section below.
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Nothing wrong with ‘Prometheus’, I felt like it might have been in the top three entries for the film series: not perfect, but then the first two weren’t perfect either (though that first one came pretty darned close!)
I felt disappointed by ‘Romulus’ – it felt a lot less ambitious than ‘Prometheus’, as if they “dumbed it down” a bit in response to the poor reception for ‘Prometheus’ (which really didn’t deserve most of the bashing it has gotten.)
This TV series might come in fourth, just behind ‘Prometheus’, from which it picks up a lot of that film’s better ideas, and runs with them a little more freely than the narrower scope and shorter run-time of the film format could allow.
Some of the things I’ve been enjoying so far in ‘Alien: Earth’ (some minor spoilers):
– The deeper dive into the implicit themes from the first two moves plus ‘Prometheus’ in regards to Giger’s “biomechanical” alien as an artificial life technology, just like the synthetic androids, and – as explored in ‘Prometheus’ – human beings themselves, and more than likely even the “Engineers”: basically a nesting-doll series of machines, each “playing god” to the next in line, in the spirit of Mary Shelly’s ‘Frankenstein (or, The Modern Prometheus)’.
– With that in mind, I’m not familiar with the actor for the synthetic” character, Kirsh, but he’s lending this character a wonderful mix of gravity, mystery, and eccentricity that is just the perfect fit for a character who is, ultimately, playing the “big brother” to all of the cyborg and “hybrid” characters, in a dysfunctional family led by human parents who have been setting some terrible, terrible examples for their creations. It’s hard to tell if the character is jealous, angry, amused, disgusted, resigned, sympathetic… all of the above seem to appear at different times, and the actor handles it all with enough restraint to just barely keep this character unreadable, while still betraying just a bit more humanity than some of the human characters around him. It’s a shame we never had a chance to see this character interacting with “Bishop” – Lance Henricksen wasn’t bad at that sort of thing, either, and I suspect he really would have enjoyed pushing his character a little further than ‘Aliens’ allowed him to.
– I’m very pleased to see that this series has taken the opportunity to expand its universe beyond just the familiar “xenomorphs”, the “Engineers” (also drawn from the first movie), and the “Predators” (which, to me, never really felt at home in this setting! I don’t consider any of the Alien-vs-Predator stuff “canon”.) It’s theoretically a universe teaming with the life that the “Engineers” have seeded, and should be filled with dangerous aliens, but the inferior film sequels just never seemed ambitious enough to explore what else might be out there that might be just as weird and deadly as the “xenomorph” creatures. The series has done a very nice job with most of the aliens (there were at least FIVE alien species on that research ship when it crashed, all of them presumably very dangerous – we’ve only been properly introduced the three of them so far (the familiar xenos, the googly-eyed monster, and some giant-bloodsucking-venom-spitting-termite-thngs), with just a glimpse of a fourth (the not-a-vegetable thing hanging from the ceiling. The characters referred to FIVE in total, but I don’t think I’ve seen any sign of the fifth one. There are hints that at least the googly-eyed monster is a problem-solver, and might even be intelligent, with a hint that it might even be able to communicate! At least one other alien species has also shown signs of intelligence and communication as well. Most of the species – other than the blood-suckers – seem to be quite appropriately alien and mysterious so far – something I hope doesn’t get lost in the tendency to over-explain everything in sequels, because I enjoy not knowing everything there is to know about these critters!
– I’ve actually rather been enjoying the “Boy Kavalier” character – he seems to have a good chance of being one of those characters that the audience loves to hate, with a great deal of the success of such characters resting on the charisma of the actor. I think he’s doing a marvelous job of it so far, channeling an odd mix of Sam Bankman Fried and Elon Musk, if I can be forgiven the comparisons: a sort of childlike enthusiasm, combined with more wealth and power and influence than is healthy, colliding with more than a hint of instability or dangerous irresponsibility emerging whenever the character gets bored or impatient. It’s a perfect fit for the ‘Peter Pan’ allegory the series starts out with: the original story was a lot darker than audiences today remember (as the occasional voice-overs of Kavalier reading from the story should be hinting!)
– I’ll repeat that I don’t care for the tendency for spinoffs, sequels, prequels, and the like to over-explain things that are better left mysterious, but I didn’t expect to enjoy as much as I am the world-building around “The Five” mega-corporations and how they govern Earth. I think I’m getting more than a hint of “Federal Reserve Bank” in the model for “The Five”, and the hints at the way treaties between the megacorps work, how negotiations are handled through legal negotiations, and so on are kind of a nice touch: I’ve been finding these little details far more interesting than I expected, and they’re dropped in with so little exposition that they never wear out their welcome.
– The writers seem to me to be handling the situations where everything seems to go wrong all at once quite nicely: situations like that seem to come up every episode or two, and really keep the tension high somehow, even though the problems seem to get resolved sooner than I expect them to (so far). The result is that it really feels like they’ve been VERY lucky so far that some very reckless decisions haven’t caused more damage, but that luck has to run out soon. I have to work a little harder to suspend disbelief so far, but it’s still fun, and I’m sure there will be a pay-off by the finale!
– I’ve mostly been enjoying the secondary “hybrid” characters… a couple of these characters have been taking the “kids stuck in synthetic adult bodies” thing and running with it, and I think the results have been mostly working on multiple levels, including comic-relief, but there’s a tragic quality to it too, that the actors and actresses mostly hit the right, sympathetic notes on.
Some of the more dubious elements, so far:
– The “Wendy” character is dangerously close to “Mary Sue” territory – I doubt I’m the first to worry about that. I think the actress is doing well enough with the role that I don’t dislike the character, but I really regret that the character wasn’t given the same subtlety and nuance that characters like Ash, Bishop, or Kirsh (for a few examples) have gotten in the series! There’s still room for some plot twists, but the writing for her character has been a weak link so far, at least for me.
– I was a bit dubious about what seemed to be “trans” metaphor early in the series, but the writers seem to be taking aim at more of a trans-human thing, and seem to have some mixed feelings about it. I’m warming to the way it’s going so far, as mentioned above about the “biomechanical” theme, and hope that they take this in as interesting a direction as the subject could go in: the various sorts of synthetic life are in a perfect position to bring up some of the moral and ethical questions involved, and offer very different points of view on it, if the writers are willing and able to go there.
– The “Peter Pan” motif is murky… so far, that’s not a bad thing: characters involved directly in that motif are complicated enough to shift places in that allegory as the plot develops, and at least one or two of the characters are self-aware enough to refer to the motif in-character, and question its accuracy. This motif might look a bit hokey or goofy to some viewers, I guess: the “snow white and seven dwarves” motif from the third alien movie didn’t go over well, and I don’t think most viewers understood or appreciated the “Prometheus” myth them from that movie, and I suspect “Peter Pan” won’t work any better (it’s a shame, because I’ve been enjoying that, these “fairy tale” themes are some of the highlights of the franchise, even in otherwise mediocre sequels!) “Captain Hook” is maybe a bit too on-the-nose for my taste, though. On the other hand, “Tinkerbell” looks like a particularly off-the wall choice, if I’m reading the allegory right, and if so, I think I kinda approve….
– The “Evil MegaCorp” thing is a staple of cyberpunk storytelling, and the ‘Alien’ franchise is no exception, but it seems a bit tired and lazy at this point in the genre’s history. Why are the megacorps evil? Because they want to bring alien weapons to earth! Why do they want to bring aliens to earth? Because they’re evil! Well, that’s Weylan-Ytani Corp, what about the others? Oh, that’s the same story with Prodigy too, I guess, and probably the others? It’s still early yet, and maybe we’ll be lucky enough for someone to introduce a new motive for these corporations: biomedical research for healing people, or discovering the secret to eternal life or youth, for example? I don’t think that the motives for the megacorps seem likely to get even that ambitious, though….(/minor spoilers)
Anyway, I’m enjoying the show so far, the people I’m watching with seem to be, too, and I think that this might stand up well enough alongside ‘Alien’, ‘Aliens’, and ‘Prometheus’, as long as the rest of the season holds up, and they can maintain or exceed that quality through any renewal the series likely gets.
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This is a really good review. I think so far it has been doing a good job of setting characters and the story up, and I’ll be curious to where it goes from here. Yeah, I’m not sure that Kirsch is a “good” guy …
Prometheus is a great movie, but you have to watch it as not an Alien movie. 👍
Mostly agreed on Alien Earth characters- personally the one I dislike the most is the brother character. The actor gives a weird unlikebale performance – strange expressions and overall body language just take me out of it. Ceesay does a good job. The Wendy girl is okay too. Olyphants android character is the highlight of the show – I just find myself constantly wondering what he’s up to and going to do next. The rest of the characters are meh.
Skip Prometheus and Covenant. They are a nonesensical waste of time. Romulus is okay but the story is largely a remix of prior films – the visuals were well done though.