Danger Comes to Our Homeworld

Fans of the Alien series have gotten something of a raw deal for the better part of 40 years. While the first film, Alien, proved to be an awesome locked-ship horror film, and sequel Aliens showed that the concept and franchise had legs all but turning the whole project into a militaristic action film, none of the follow-ups have managed to recapture anywhere near that magic. Each successive sequel, from Alien 3 to Alien: Resurrection, the two Ridley Scott prequels Prometheus and Alien: Covenant, and even recent sequel Alien: Romulus have struggled with a problem of diminishing returns, borrowing bits and pieces of the formula without making a project that felt nearly as fresh and interesting as the first two films.

It’s even worse when you compare the films with what’s been going on over in the other half of the shared Aliens v PredatorOriginally two separate franchises, the Alien and Predator series came together first in a series of comics and video games before, finally, Fox Studios merged them together is the Alien v Predator film franchise. mega-franchise. While a couple of the Predator sequels have been less than impressive, the batting average overall has been better, and recent sequels Prey and Predator: Killer of Killers both gave fans everything they wanted and more. Clearly Disney, who have been in charge of the franchises since the buyout of Fox, can get the right people in the right projects if they do things properly (Alien: Romulus notwithstanding), so when was the Alien series going to get its turn?

Well, finally we might just have an answer for that. While Alien: Romulus was big on mood, it failed to deliver on story or characters. But with the new FX on Hulu television series, Alien: Earth, the proper mix of horror, thrills, character, and story have finally come together to, at least with their premiere, give Alien fans everything they’ve wanted for all these decades. That’s thanks to Noah Hawley, the creator behind Fargo and Legion, and he brings his same control and storytelling capabilities to the xenomorph universe to give a fresh and interesting take that the series has desperately needed.

The television series first introduces us to the crew of the Maginot, Weyland-Yutani corp. spaceship on its way home after a journey out across deep space. Its crew visited various planets, collecting samples of five different species (including xenomorphs) to bring back for study on Earth. Unfortunately, somewhere along the way something happened and many of the specimens escaped, killing most of the crew. Seeing no other safe way to get the creatures back to Earth, the cyborg security officer, Morrow, sends the ship on a crash course to Earth, figuring it’ll land somewhere in relative shape so it can then be collected and secured by Weyland-Yutani forces.

However, the ship ends up crashing into the territory of a different corporation, that of Prodigy. That corp. is the newest, fastest growing of the five corporations that control Earth, and its leader, Boy Kavalier (Samuel Blenkin), has his hands in all kinds of projects. One such project is the extension of human life by creating hybrids, synthetic human bodies with actual human consciousnesses loaded into them. The first creation using this process, Wendy (Sydney Chandler) was birthed from the death of terminally ill, young girl, Marcy (Florence Bensberg), and Wendy has proved to be the project's most successful hybrid yet. She’s so successful that when she suggests that she and the other hybrids go to the crashed ship to explore it (and also so she can see her brother who is working as a medic at the crash site), Boy agrees. Plus, then he can loot all the cool secrets Weyland-Yutani has hiding on that ship. But the hybrids are in for a nasty surprise when these aliens come to life under their watch…

No doubt, there is a lot going on in the premiere of Alien: Earth. We get a huge amount of ideas and concepts thrown at us in short order. From the Maginot and its illicit cargo, to the creation of hybrids, the birth of Wendy, the crash of the ship, all the side characters, side plots, and everything else going on, Hawley drops a lot on us in two episodes and expects us to run and keep up. That’s to the show’s benefit, though, as at least it’s not treating us like idiots, spoon-feeding us all the details so it knows we’re all on the same page.

The beauty of these first two episodes is that they’re crafted so that they give you all the information you need – who the characters are, how the world works, what the aliens are that we’ll see soon – without it ever having to slow down and explain it all. The show naturally gives us this information (even going so far as to reintroduce bits and pieces of the Alien mythos so even newer watchers can understand the series) without having to stop and lecture us. It never relies on info dumps or long monologues to explain its story (unlike Alien: Romulus). It’s a lived in world that goes on existing when we arrive to see our story.

The series also plays a solid trick by giving us a specific character to latch onto. Despite there being so many things going on, and so many story threads at play, we’re pushed to focus on Wendy. She’s our connective thread that brings it all together, from her creation at Prodigy, her brother working at the crash site, and her desire to go and explore the crashed ship. She acts as our main character, our focus, and our throughline of the piece, and (despite her being a hybrid) she also provides the story with its heart.

It’s a trick trying to get smart characters to do a dumb thing, namely go onto a crashed ship filled with alien lifeforms that want to kill you, and not make those characters seem dumb. Wendy, despite having the mind of a 12-year-old, is also supposed to be a super genius. This is because her brain is a supercomputer (and a very expensive one at that). She shouldn’t want to go to this crash, to explore it and put herself in danger, but the series gives her a motivating factor that trumps all that: she wants to see her brother and keep him safe from danger. She has a body that’s nigh invulnerable, super strong and super tough, but she’s also a child that wants to be with her family. Despite her powers and skills, her motivation makes her relatable, as does a solid performance from (Chandler).

Of course, credit where it’s due, the series primarily gets by its gore and horror. This is a work of the Alien franchise and, primary to that, we have to have a lot of body horror and so much blood and viscera that it makes gore hounds stand up and take notice. Alien: Earth doesn’t skimp on that and while, sure, some of its CGI might not be the best (it’s a television series likely made on a high, but not exorbitant, budget) it still provides all the shocks and thrills fans of the franchise want.

While it’s a curious choice that the series includes aliens that aren’t our traditional xenomorphs, the series is able to work these new critters in and make them creepy, gross, and very effective. We don’t get to see the full breadth of what all five of these species can do, but the two we do see – a horrible eyeball monster and some super-leeches – certainly show that the creative team on board has brought fresh, new horrors to the table that will delight the horror fans in the audiences. They don’t diminish the power of the xenomorphs, who still get plenty of time to creep and scare all on their own, instead accenting and adding to the mounting dread the series builds as it goes through these first two episodes.

I think the best thing about this series, though, is that it doesn’t pander. Unlike Alien: Romulus, this show doesn’t feel the need to make constant callbacks to previous works. It doesn’t reuse lines and scenes from other, better productions in the series. Sure, it uses much of the same tech, and even shows us a crew on a Weland-Yutani ship that feels similar to the crew from the first film that rode the doomed Nostromo, but that’s more in line with the world building of the franchise than specific callbacks to make sure fans know, “this is official, guys.” The series trusts that the audience is there to see cool aliens and the people they kill, and it can deliver all that with a solid story and an interesting world, callbacks be damned.

It’s only the premiere so it’s hard to know for sure where this series will go across its first eight episodes (and hopefully beyond), but so far this is a promising start for this series. Hawley has a lot of interesting ideas that he’s brought to the table, all in service of a story we haven’t seen before. There will be plenty of aliens causing lots of chaos, with fodder characters left and right getting killed, all while the real core that makes this franchise tick is going strong. A girl, on a mission, trying to keep her people alive despite overwhelming odds. That’s what made the first two films work, and it was almost strong enough to carry many of the later films as well. It’s working here in a solid reinvention of the franchise, and these first two episodes give me hope that it’ll keep working through this first season and beyond.