The Xenomorph steals the show, but there’s more than one monster lurking in Alien. Midway through the original film, we learn that the Nostromo’s science officer, Ash (Ian Holm), is secretly an android under company orders to bring the Xenomorph to Earth. The rest of the crew: expendable. Seeing Ash abruptly turn on everyone—violently, with a milk-like substance spewing out of his body in lieu of blood—was nearly as shocking as an alien bursting out of someone’s chest. And while the Xenomorph and Ash couldn’t be more different in manner and appearance, they both tapped into a similar fear for humanity—that we’re no longer the top of the food chain. As Ash memorably said of the creature: “I admire its purity.” In other words, game recognizes game.
Over the decades, the Alien franchise has made Xenomorphs its biggest selling point, but androids like Ash aren’t far behind. Sequels have given us kindly androids (Aliens’ Bishop), rogue robots playing god (David from Prometheus and Alien: Covenant), and even another science officer bearing Ash’s likeness (Alien: Romulus, featuring a CGI re-creation of Holm that drew controversy). Androids are a staple in science fiction—including Ridley Scott’s other masterpiece of the genre, Blade Runner—but their existence throughout the Alien franchise also hammers home one of the central themes of the series: Whether we’re studying dangerous life-forms or creating them, humanity is the architect of its own demise.
Mankind revealing itself to be greedy and self-destructive is a fairly predictable starting point for the first Alien TV show, Alien: Earth. In fact, as you watch the opening moments of Noah Hawley’s series, it all might feel a little too familiar: another deep-space vessel (the Maginot) from the Weyland-Yutani Corporation, another ragtag blue-collar crew, another company order asserting that employees are expendable, another disaster with a ruthless alien waiting to happen. But Earth doesn’t take long to zig where you expect it to zag: The pilot skips ahead to the bodies of the Maginot’s crew strewn across the ship, save for its cyborg security officer, Morrow (Babou Ceesay), giving serious Ash vibes. From there, the Maginot crash-lands in a futuristic city, and it’s a race against time to prevent a Xenomorph from wreaking havoc.
This makes for a tantalizing setup, but it’s only part of the equation. With FX’s Legion and the small-screen reimagining of Fargo, Hawley’s demonstrated an ability to take IP and add his own spin to it, whether it’s incorporating UFO sightings in the Upper Midwest or turning a confrontation between mutants into a psychedelic dance-off. Now, in Earth, Hawley has taken a page out of Scott’s less heralded entries, Prometheus and Covenant, by focusing on the other great existential threat in the franchise: synthetic beings. As the Maginot descends upon the planet, the pilot breaks down what’s happening to humanity in the year 2120: World governments have been replaced by five megacorporations, including Weyland-Yutani and Prodigy, a newer company founded by a whiz kid named, I shit you not, Boy Kavalier (Samuel Blenkin). While Weyland-Yutani has specialized in androids and cyborgs (bionically enhanced humans such as Morrow), Prodigy is concerned with developing a new synthetic hybrid: a robot body with a human consciousness transferred into it.
You can understand Prodigy’s endgame: If the synths are a success, the company can effectively put a price tag on immortality. The snag: As of now, the only minds capable of transitioning into these new bodies are children. And so Prodigy’s initial test subjects are a group of terminally ill kids, including Wendy (Sydney Chandler), formerly Marcy, whose new name is a reference to the eldest Darling child in Peter Pan. (The other synths are named after various Lost Boys; the island facility housing them is called Neverland.) How does all of this relate to the Maginot? The ship crashes in a Prodigy-controlled city, and Kavalier wants to see how his new creations problem-solve on the fly. (The potential for studying alien critters in a lab is appealing, too.) Wendy and the Lost Boys are chaperoned by Kirsh (Timothy Olyphant), a more traditional android, but are otherwise left to their own devices. Naturally, it doesn’t take long until shit hits the fan.
It hardly constitutes a spoiler to say that a Xenomorph is running amok amid the wreckage and that it tears apart any unlucky soul that gets in its way. But I’m pleased to report to my fellow sci-fi sickos that the Xenomorph isn’t the only alien aboard the Maginot: Other extraterrestrial monstrosities have broken containment, some parasitic in nature, others akin to ravenous mosquitoes. Moments like these are what an Alien series is contractually obligated to create, and Earth doesn’t skimp on the gore. Eat before or during episodes at your own peril.
What makes Earth so rewarding over the course of the eight-episode season, however, goes back to Wendy and the Lost Boys. They’re unlike any synthetic beings in the franchise: childlike, innocent, unaware of their full capabilities. But as Wendy and the Lost Boys undergo a rapid evolution—learning what their new bodies can do, gaining increased intelligence, and so forth—they come to the realization that, while they’re created in their makers’ image, they might have more in common with the creatures from outer space. The synths can wander throughout Neverland, rather than being confined to a lab, but it’s a prison all the same. Why remain locked up at the behest of a lesser species?
On the subject of Neverland: Not a single soul would’ve expected an Alien series to feature so many allusions to, of all things, Peter Pan. When Kavalier reads actual passages from J.M. Barrie’s novel to the synths before bedtime, you’d be forgiven for thinking, What the hell am I watching? But like Fargo before it, Earth is the best kind of IP extension because what Hawley really cares about is tapping into a shared frequency. The series isn’t shamelessly deferential to its predecessors, but it’s not betraying the essence of the Alien franchise, either. Like the synths, Earth is something new made from familiar parts, somehow making Xenomorphs, artificial intelligence, and the literary foundations of Peter Pan feel like strange bedfellows.
To that end, Earth also expands on ideas that lurked in the background of the films. The show’s reveal that humanity is now run by a handful of megacorporations is extremely on-brand in a franchise where profits come before people and Weyland-Yutani is the closest thing to an overarching villain that doesn’t have acid for blood. (“I don’t know what species is worse,” Ripley says in Aliens. “You don’t see them fucking each other over for a goddamn percentage.”) At a time when the rich keep getting richer and everyone else suffers for it, Earth’s increasingly corporatized future hits uncomfortably close to home. (Can you imagine if a Xenomorph were unleashed at the Bezos wedding?)
That Earth manages to juggle thought-provoking themes alongside some seriously gnarly body horror is, ultimately, what makes the series such a worthy companion to Alien. You may quibble with the Xenomorphs being relegated to the background for parts of the season—and how much story there’s left to tell by the end of it—but with a trio of lauded IP shows under his belt, Hawley has more than earned the benefit of the doubt. An Alien series would quickly lose its novelty if it had little on its mind outside of Xenomorphs slicing humans up like sashimi. (Though that never gets old.) But like the best entries in the franchise, Earth is at its most compelling when it delves into the artificial beings that inhabit it. One season in, I admire its purity.
