Stream It or Skip It?

Noah Hawley, creator of Fargo and Legion, is now creating exciting sci-fi horror *inside* the established lore of a storied franchise. What can’t this guy do? For FX’s eight-episode Alien: Earth, Hawley takes the facehuggers and bulbous-headed xenomorphs and people smoking cigarettes on spacecrafts we know from Ridley Scott’s Alien and crash-lands that stuff on a 22nd-century Earth dominated by corporations that own cities, private armies – even licenses to to control entire galaxies. But let’s not get too far ahead. Because the immediate issue is what happens when those acid-blooded xenos from deep space encounter the latest and greatest in synthetic human technology right here on terra firma. The Alien: Earth cast features Sydney Chandler, Timothy Olyphant, and Andor veteran Alex Lawther.

ALIEN: EARTH: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT? 

Opening Shot: “In the future, the race for immortality will come in three guises.” It’s 2120 in Alien: Earth, and corporate tech is in a battle for power, profit, and the nature of human existence itself.

The Gist: Aboard the USS Maginot research vessel, as it lumbers through outer space, it’s technically not yet this future. Years back, Weyland-Yutani, that legacy corporation of the Alien films, sent this ship to collect some lifeform specimens. Which it did. (Look at those splotchy, tentacled lifeforms in their jars! They couldn’t possibly be a threat…) And now the Maginot crew are emerging from cryo-pods on their return leg to Earth. With film stock, production design, and Tom Skerritt haircuts referencing the Alien past, they discuss their cryo sleep blues and the corporate synergy of Earth’s and A:E’s present. W-T controls the Moon and some continents, while a corp called Prodigy is the upstart, created by trillionaire genius Boy Kavalier (Samuel Blenkin). And while the crew talks we flash to Kavalier and his “Neverland” HQ science team, a group led by Kirsh (Olyphant), a synthetic, and the human Dame Silvia (Essie Davis). 

Prodigy’s shiny new thing is hybrid people. There were already synthetic androids cyborgs with bolt-ons in this world, but now we’re talking bot bodies imbued with actual human consciousness. Wendy (Chandler) will be the first live prototype. But when we first meet her, pre-future-Frankenstein-experiment consciousness transference, she’s still a terminally ill 12-year-old. It’s also interesting that Kavalier and his team, on the cusp of this breakthrough in limitless human life extension, are still mired in philosophical arguments about what it all means. Tech-bro oligarchs, one hundred years from now, applying “move fast and break things” to immortality.     

Wendy can jump high and run fast and pry steel doors from hinges. But she also retains vestiges of her pure-human existence, like an emotional link to her biological brother. Hermit (Lawther), as he’s known to his unit, is a medic with a detachment of Prodigy soldiers based in New Siam. They’re minding their own business when the trajectory of the Maginot quite literally moves past planets and crashes their earthly party, bringing with it terrifying glimpses into how things progressed with Weyland-Yutani’s precious collected “specimens.”   

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? Dune: Prophecy was also built via colon off an established brand – it dug 10,000 years into science fiction history, while Alien: Earth is set just two years before Ripley Scott’s original Alien. A:E also marks Alex Lawther’s second foray into major TV sci-fi: in Andor, as Karis Nemek, Lawther’s passionate manifesto-reading informed the spirit of the Rebel Alliance. 

Our Take: Besides the music cues, the title card fonts, the interior ship design, the technology standard, and even the labor disputes and roiling issues of class and corporate contracting malfeasance – all of which it renders superbly – there is one thing Alien: Earth gets so importantly right about the Alien films. Right out front, it’s our perennially stupid human trick of not respecting the thing that kills us. 

It’s very cool how Noah Hawley shows this off. On the USS Maginot, all it takes is a brief look at an eyeball with tentacles to know how casually the crew is treating their live cargo. That monstrosity’s just chilling on a lab table? And then Alien: Earth switches to the alien creature’s POV, just to really drive home the sentience and intent. This series offers a ton of richly-imagined science fiction. (Indeed, while the lead episode feels much longer than its one-hour runtime, it never feels bloated.) But right away, A:E is also trumpeting the key role that horror plays in everything Alien-derived. For all of their ancient space presenceness, the xeno crew are horror movie killers incarnate, happy to stalk human beings relentlessly until the only escape is to be ripped limb from limb. That kind of bloody onscreen death might even be preferable, considering the alternative, where a facehugger inserts an embryo into your chest cavity and harvests your DNA. 

We’re super psyched to see what grisly shit happens when the aliens we know knock on Earth’s door. But we’re also hyped for how this arrival will skew the corporate jockeying of the 2100s, where the nature of human life itself is becoming a saleable commodity. There are horrors in the philosophy Alien: Earth is probing, even as the planet itself is probed by the xenomorph, the franchise player of science-fiction horror.

Sex and Skin: Not really. One aspect of sexuality in Alien: Earth: a cyborgian male gaze moment, as a synthetic aboard the Maginot stares creepily at a woman crewmember in cryosleep.

Parting Shot: Wendy, in her new form for mere minutes, lobbies to become a Maginot crash first responder. She knows Hermit is there, and worries for her brother with the certainty of her still-adolescent thoughts. “I’m gonna save him.” 

Sleeper Star: Right away, we’re loving what pretty much all of the cast is doing in Alien: Earth. Here are some highlights. Samuel Blenkin, in Boy Kavalier’s futuristic casual pajama sets and determined, dangerous rich guy arrogance, is driving the central ideas of A:E forward. (Blenkin was great in the “Loch Henry” episode of Black Mirror.) And as Morrow, a Weyland-Yutani-coded cyborg in A:E, Babou Ceesay is becoming one of the show’s coldest and craftiest non-alien adversaries.

But maybe the Sleeper Star is Timothy Olyphant, because it’s always Timothy Olyphant? No matter what show he’s in, no matter what form of fabulous his hair – in Alien: Earth it’s a white-dyed frightwig – Olyphant, like his Justified co-star Walton Goggins, always brings an essential and unique energy to the proceedings. And this time, that particular Olyphance™ is applied to him playing a synthetic human!

Most Pilot-y Line: “Why are we pretending she’s human?” What is humanity, anyway? What essence gets sucked out when a facehugger attaches? And in the race to build a better human, will we make everything fucking worse?

Our Call: Drop everything and STREAM IT. Alien: Earth tackles big questions about immortality and classic human-powered folly – manifesting as horror – as it brings the ancient terror of those xenomorphs we know to its powerfully-imagined version of a not-so-distant future.  

Johnny Loftus (@johnnyloftus.bsky.social) is a Chicago-based writer. A veteran of the alternative weekly trenches, his work has also appeared in Entertainment Weekly, Pitchfork, The All Music Guide, and The Village Voice.