Oh, thank goodness! Alien: Earth, Disney’s megabucks TV series set just before the events of the original Alien movie, is just brilliant. Showrunner, writer, and director Noah Hawley has created something truly special: a show that feels utterly built from the DNA of Ridley Scott’s earliest vision, but with the non-stop thrills of James Cameron’s Aliens sequel. And crucially, unlike every other film in the franchise since the first two, it remembers that this is a story about the hearts of the characters, rather than just the events happening to them. Here are my thoughts on the first two episodes.
Alien: Earth makes a very interesting opening decision. You might think, given how the Alien sequels have all flailed under comparisons to the first two films, that Hawley would want to immediately put his own stamp on the show. The creator of the extraordinary TV series Fargo and Legion has a distinct approach, so surely the smart move is to hit that hard as we begin? But no, a far braver choice is made. The opening few minutes of Alien: Earth are an astonishing recreation of Scott’s style, complete with a cynical and tired crew bantering around a table, sniping, mocking, talking over one another. Tensions and relationships are instantly established for the beleaguered crew you already know are about to die as their research vessel containing multiple alien specimens crash-lands onto Earth. It all looks and breathes like a perfect piece of 1970s science fiction. And in achieving this, the show immediately feels right. This is the Alien we love, not the weirdly incongruous blandness of Covenant or the dreadful misfires of Alien 3 and Alien Resurrection.
This is then put into stark contrast by the events on Earth. While the crashing ship, the Maginot, is owned and operated by the Weyland-Yutani corporation, it crashes into a towering city owned by another company called Prodigy. Because, as we learn in the show’s opening banter on board the ship, the Earth in 2120 is controlled by four corporations, and it’s soon to be five. We learn that Weyland-Yutani owns North and South America, but we’re yet to be told about the rest–although we’re quickly introduced to the new force to be reckoned with, Prodigy. Created by the youngest-ever trillionaire, Boy Kavalier (Samuel Blenkin), Prodigy owns at least a large city in New Siam and vast research island, and is about to make a major breakthrough regarding synthetics–the androids with the gooey white blood from those first films. Kavalier has developed a way to transfer the consciousness from pre-teen children into the bodies of synths, and as we join the facility on Neverland Island, Kavalier is preparing to try it for the first time, moving the mind of terminal cancer patient Marcy Hermit (Florence Bensberg) into an adult synth body, where she renames herself Wendy (Sydney Chandler).
And yes, let’s pause to address all this Peter Pan business. Eeehhh, this TV show is about as close to perfect as you could hope for, but if I had to pick at something, it’d be this. It’s wildly heavy-handed (indeed, all the names are pretty painfully on-the-nose–“Kavalier” for our move-fast-break-things trillionaire, “Hermit” for our girl about to be moved into a new shell…), to the point where clips of the Disney cartoon are repeatedly shown and we even get Kavalier reading out loud from the book. She’s Wendy, it’s Neverland… good grief, we get it. They’re children who get to live forever, I guess? Except, of course, the point of the book is they stay children, but here they’re intended to mature into adults. It feels deeply cumbersome. But honestly, that’s my only complaint.
Prodigy rapidly moves ahead with transferring a bunch of dying kids into adult bodies, all now living under the mentorship of more traditional synthetic Kirsh (Timothy Olyphant), moments before the Maginot crashes into the base of two skyscrapers in Prodigy City. A search and rescue team of Prodigy employees is instantly dispatched, including a medic who happens to be Joe Hermit (Alex Lawther), brother to Wendy. And, of course, the alien specimens got out.
What follows is a lot of extremely good, proper Alien business, or terrified humans with guns moving through dimly lit corridors that very probably contain monsters. It’s especially enjoyable here because so much is completely unknown. We know the Maginot was carrying Xenomorphs at many phases, from egg to Facehugger to full-grown Xenomorph XX121s, but we’re also aware there’s some fucking eyeball-with-tentacles thing in there, along with various other alien species we’ve never seen before. And while we’re left in no doubt that the Xeno is still the worst of the bunch, none of them seems vaguely friendly.
But this is elevated by the show’s central, most abhorrent and chilling aspect: some super-rich 20-something just put a bunch of 10 to 12-year-olds’ minds into super-powered adult bodies, and then sent them into danger.
The body-swap between child and adult is a beloved formula, and almost always played for laughs. From Big to Freaky Friday, the notion is wrung for humor (even if you do get something as deeply troubling as Big‘s 13-year-old boy losing his virginity to an adult woman). So when you first see Marcy become Wendy, there’s that jovial sense to it. Firstly, she’s not going to die as a just-turned-12-year-old any more, and that’s wonderful, but also you’ve got an adult actor acting like a kid. At one point she grabs her boobs and declares how weird they are, how they move around while she’s running. The program is very clearly playing with those body-swap tropes, telling us how jolly this all is. After a bunch of the kids have been put into the adult synth bodies, there’s a wonderful scene in which they’re all sitting around chatting in a common area, a room of adult actors moving and talking like children. Jonathan Ajayi especially shines at this, his leg movements incredibly familiar for anyone with a kid with ADHD, but it’s all delivered without pantomime. It feels wrong, because body-swaps always feel wrong, but we’re being told how right it is throughout.
But it’s so wrong! This isn’t being done with families around them, or friends from their previous lives, and they certainly don’t have appropriate adult supervision or counselling. They’re experiments, their former terminal diagnoses and separation from their families clearly designed to make them disposable should something go wrong. Wendy’s compulsion to find her older brother once more seems to test the adults, unsure whether to prevent it for the project’s secrecy, but ultimately driven to let it play out purely for the test results. It’s grotesquely mercenary, and the second episode switches to endlessly reminding us of this, as we see these adult shells acting like utterly terrified kids in the face of alien danger.
Almost everything is shot perfectly. In fact, Alien: Earth feels like the final obliteration of any difference between film and television, its massive-budget movie quality and ultra-widescreen format giving it the sense of being cinematic at all times. The only sop to traditional television at any point is a peculiar flashback to Marcy’s childhood, which sticks out like a sore thumb among the rest of the format. It would be incredible to be able to go watch these weekly episodes on the big screen, and god knows, movie theaters could use the custom.
What’s also so exciting is to think where this program could be going next. The claustrophobic events in the ruined ship and destroyed apartments make up most of the second episode, but clearly this is soon to head outside. There’s surely no chance of containing this incident, and it’s going to be extraordinary to see how the corporations address the outbreak. The other aspect to think about is the words from the first episode’s opening text.
In the future, the race for immortality will come in 3 guises:
Cybernetically enhanced humans: Cyborgs
Artificially intelligent beings: Synths
and
Synthetic beings downloaded with human consciousness: Hybrids
While the program has already featured all three, and we see the terrifying capabilities of Weyland-Yutani cyborg Morrow (Babou Ceesay), there’s yet to be any sense of how the various corporations are looking to ensure their creations become the dominant force. It’s surely to come.
In Alien: Earth, Hawley et al have done something that seemed so impossible for the last 40 years–combine the terror of Alien and the thrill of Aliens, while keeping humans as the focus of the story. Not even Ridley Scott could come close in his two glum prequels. But in FX’s TV show, it’s all there, with an amazing eight more hours of it to come.
