Television Watch: Alien - Earth (Season 1, 2025)

I'm the first person to say Alien and Aliens are two great films, each for different reasons.  And while I understand people love Alien3, I just wasn't onboard.  And it's safe to say, I've wrestled with the subsequent sequels, including Prometheus and Alien: Covenant.  The desire to combine the Alien storyline with the Predator franchise, with the wink-wink connections to Blade Runner strikes me as a curious obsession in sci-fi fandom - even if I shared the excitement of everyone else when Predator 2 came out.  

And then I saw Aliens vs. Predator, and I thought "never mind".

I'd skipped the last Alien movie.  If Ridley Scott couldn't make me care, I'm not sure who could.  

But part of that was, even as Romulus was in post-production, I heard Noah Hawley got his hands on the franchise and had a TV show coming.  

For those unfamiliar, Hawley is the person responsible for Legion, maybe the most interesting superhero adaptation (loosely based on the Marvel X-character Legion) to hit a screen, big or small, and which ran on FX for three seasons.  But, more important, Hawley has helmed Fargo for five seasons and across ten years.  And, in this blog's opinion, it's one of the best shows to have graced screens, full stop.

Fargo is an oddball spin-off of the Coen Bros. film of the same name.  And I won't get into it here, but if Legion showed Hawley knew how to take a nut of an idea from source material and grow something fascinating with it, Fargo took the well-defined themes and characters of a Coen Bros. movie as inspiration and exploded their stories into multi-faceted noir epics, borrowing elements and ideas from across the Coen Bros. filmography.

So... yeah, I was jazzed when I heard Hawley was getting his hands on Alien.  And eight episodes later, I feel like my trust was warranted.

As with the two other shows, Alien: Earth has taken what's been the scant mythology of the first Alien movies and expanded the concepts.  

The biggest problem with the original Alien is that, to really (reeeaally) dumb it down, it's a jump scare movie with terrific visuals and the hook of the two-phase lifeform.  That's not a problem for the movie itself - I give the movie six stars and three thumbs up (and add more stars and thumbs when it comes to giving the world Sigourney Weaver).  But it is a problem in that the most impressive thing one could do, logically, based on the original film and make it a crowd-pleaser was probably Aliens.  Alas, for everyone else wanting to make a sequel, we already have Aliens.   And everything Scott did following Aliens felt like putting legs on a snake.

I mean, Alien: Resurrection is a movie I watched twice sometime last century, and I just haven't felt the need to return to it.  Whatever we're trying to say about corporations and man mucking where he shouldn't just didn't particularly work (or make much sense).

Where Ridley Scott seemed to want to try to say something profound with Prometheus and Covenant, it wound up feeling like too much and not enough, clumsy as action horror films, and underwhelming and muddy in concept.  If Scott had themes he wanted to dive into around the nature of creation, of alpha-species, etc...  instead they became about themselves rather than about anything remotely interesting.  

So... what to do?  Do we keep just making jump scare movies?  Yes, we know the face huggers scuttle and hop out at you and go "whip sound whip sound".  We know the aliens go "crrrkkkk" and "hssssss" and "eeeek" and that they drool.  

What Hawley seems to have done is really break down the themes and concepts touched on in prior films, that seemed part of world-building, but were just something ominous and sci-fi-ish in the background.  It all had implications that drove our characters, but mostly they just were humans in monster-movie situations, trying not to get eviscerated or implanted with alien zygotes.

I don't think it's wrong or a mistake that by the last four episodes of Alien: Earth Season 1 that the xenomorph (and friends) are sidelined as supporting entities.  If you're going to explore the *ideas*, running through dark halls with alert strobes flashing is not the time or place to do it.  Yes, the aliens (and the show presents us with, I think, five different species of aliens) are threats practical and existential, but also the MacGuffin, as they so often are.  But it's only squid-eye who has human-level intelligence (and is it a mistake that the xenomorphs have *no* eyes?).  

Instead, the show follows the notions laid out in prior installments of mega-corporations owning the world in vast empires.  No more countries, instead you work for one of the five big companies, directly or indirectly.  And that is, in it's way, as much of a horror unto itself in it's recognizable, monopolistic, hyper-capitalist hellscape that seems all too possible at the moment.   And when that's the case, what power do these companies hold?  What is justice in a system where profit in the only goal?

What does it really mean to live in a world with no nations, but mega-monopolies running the planet?  How does it benefit anyone?  What does that look like on the street?  And how does that impact the choices we make?

And, of course, the possible paths of next-gen humanity.  One path is cybernetic enhancement, the other -  the very experimental part here - is fulfilling the dreams of real-life 2000's-era futurists and uploading consciousness to a positronic brain in an inorganic body.  

What does it mean to create artificial life? And wouldn't we ultimately become jealous of that life and what it could do?  And if it is artificial, what is the relation between alien life that loves a fellow biological creature for hosting itself and for food?

Thus, our central focus shifts to the Boy Kavalier and his Neverland Island where he brings dying children and gives them a second chance at life in the bodies of androids, complete with superhuman strength, superior computing capacity, and an endless lifespan.  But now with the minds and wonder of children.

This may be just me, but goodness knows I like a good story digging into artificial intelligence, and the notion of whether or not the minds of the children are actually them or not is...  sweet and heartbreaking, especially as the actors playing the kids in adult bodies are, honestly, so damn good.

The Peter Pan metaphor is twisted and broken from the get-go, and it never feels like quite the right fit, which is some long-game intentionality by Hawley.  The Boy Genius wishes to think of himself as a boy among more young people, but who he is, deep down, is finally, flatly stated.  Were he a child at heart, wouldn't he have been in spirit with the actual kids all along? 

By and large, I just really dug the show.  The concepts of corporations as states in a for-profit cold war is fascinating.  The extrapolation of previously seen elements and getting, at last, to Earth, welcome (while still containing the action via an island).  The slow reveal of the characters allows them to define themselves through their actions in steps.  And, yes, the concepts of the aliens brought back and the horror elements, including the flashback episode, were great.  I'm not made of stone. And, of course, the show knows to create indelible imagery, and so we get the sheep.

I do wonder if we'll be given more explanation for Wendy's extraordinary abilities, or if the others will realize they have them.  

The cast is very, very good - or well directed.  I don't know which.  While Hawley directs an episode, I think half are directed by Dana Gonzales, and some by an Ugla Hauksdottir - but the consistency is there across episodes.  Timothy Olyphant is terrific as the android Kirsh, and Babou Ceesay as his cyborg opposite.  The talk has been largely around Sydney Chandler, and it's well deserved.  In a cast at this level, she's still a standout as Wendy, the smartest of the uploaded kids.

I could be here all day talking about what each cast member did well - so insert warm thoughts for all of them, I suppose.  

The FX and set design are, honestly, extraordinary.  And, this blogger is thrilled they kept the xenomorphs largely practical.  Them's my boys.  But I also loved how squicky and weird the CGI aliens were.  Top tier work, y'all.

My nit to pick is that the while the show is clearly expensive, sets expansive and detailed...  while some set pieces are gigantic - at times, it can feel like they didn't really push the camera work.  Look, I don't need all dutch angles and German Expressionism and strobes in the lighting, but whatever else my complaints are about Alien movies, they always look @#$%ing incredible.  And sometimes I felt like they chose pedestrian set-ups and pumped lighting into scenes where it was unnecessary, which is super weird especially after establishing that xenomorphs tend to hang out in the dark.  Which is odd, because *most* of the time, the show is not a *show*, it's a longform film but it occasionally slips into looking like television (but so did Captain America: Brave New World, and that was a $200 million movie).

I'll be honest - I really have no idea when in the Alien timeline Alien: Earth occurs.  I'm not even clear on whether planetfall on LV-426 is the first time a human saw a xenomorph or if The Nostromo was sent there by Mother.  Or if this is following Aliens.  It matters and it doesn't.

Like most Gen-X'ers, Alien and Aliens were a major touchpoint for me, and it's been a disappointment how the concept has been trotted out counting on my nostalgia and trust, and managed to not really deliver, while also pretentiously swinging for the fences.  To have someone actually sort it out, much the way the Predator franchise felt revitalized and improved with Prey, has been a delight.