Josh Reviews Alien: Earth

Alien and Aliens are two of my all-time favorite movies.  I’ve seen them both dozens of times.  I love them deeply!  I’m always game for a new Alien project, though over the years I have been disappointed far more than not.

Alien: Earth felt to me like an intriguing project on many levels.  This was the first attempt at a TV version of an Alien story, and it was overseen by Noah Hawley, who I think it’s fair to say is a TV mastermind.  Mr. Hawley created and ran the much-loved Fargo TV show, and he also created the X-Men-adjacent series Legion (a show which I think is great and wrongly ignored by most of the world).  So Mr. Hawley has experience working with franchises and established I.P., and bringing his own unique spin to that type of project.  I was excited to see what he’d do with an Alien show.

Sadly, while I think Alien: Earth has a lot going for it, and it has many elements that are interesting and worthy of praise, overall I thought the show missed the mark.

What works?

The production design and visual effects on the show are fantastic.  This is movie-quality work.  This show has all the beauty and grandeur of a great Alien movie.  The Alien itself looks great.  All the stages of the Alien life-cycle look exactly correct (eggs, face-huggers, baby Alien, grown-up big monster Alien).  We get some great scenes of Alien carnage when the creature cuts loose.

I loved the way the show recreated many iconic aspects of the look of Ridley Scott’s 1979 Alien film.  I loved that the text that opens every episode is designed to mimic the look of the MUTHR computer.  I loved that the letters in the “Alien: Earth” opening titles mimic the way the original Alien title appeared in that first film.  (I also loved how the images behind the Alien: Earth titles each week served as a “previously on” montage!  That was clever.)  Episode five, “In Space, No One…” is a beautiful, episode-long homage to the original Alien, as we step back to before the events of the show to the doomed crew of the Maginot, a space freighter not unlike the Nostromo, who capture the Aliens but wind up crashing to Earth (and launching the events of the series).  That episode was a hoot, a fun new version of the now familiar “Alien terrorizes a space-ship” type of story, filled with nods back to the original.  Visually, I loved how the look of the Maginot was so reminiscent of the Nostromo.  It all felt correct and made me happy to be back in this world.

The show also introduces, for the first time in an Alien story, other alien monsters!  We get a whole bunch of new horrible killer monsters, and I loved all of them.  The champion, of course, is the incredible eyeball creature.  That was an instantly iconic new monster, with a terrific look and a terrifying modus operandi.

Synthetics have always been a part of the Alien mythos ever since Ash (played by Ian Holmes) in the original film.  The Androids have been some of the best characters in the Alien movies.  That tradition continues here — I absolutely adored Timothy Olyphant’s synthetic, Kirsh, who had an awesome look (love that white hair!) and an intriguingly mysterious, calm persona — and is dramatically expanded upon, as we are introduced to a number of new forms of artificial life, including Morrow (a cyborg — a human with synthetic parts, including a very cool robotic arm) and, most importantly, the “Lost Boys” at the center of the show.  These are “hybrids” — humans who have had their minds transferred into synthetic bodies.  These “Lost Boys” are, intriguingly, six human children who were dying of terminal diseases, who now find themselves in adult, and powerful, artificial bodies.  Are these kids still who they were?  Are they human?  Are the Synthetics?  These existential questions are clearly at the heart of Noah Hawley’s vision for what this show is all about.  When the show actually explores those questions, there are a lot of interesting ideas to be found.  (However, I didn’t think the show dug nearly deeply enough into any of these potentially interesting avenues.  More on that later.)

The Alien franchise has, for the most part, kept Earth off-screen and un-seen, so it’s interesting to explore what Earth is like in the time-frame of those movies.  I an interested by the world that Mr. Hawley and his team have imagined, a scarily plausible world in which the planet is controlled by the uber-rich at the heads of five corporations.  The show mostly focuses on the super-genius Boy Kavalier, the CEO of the Prodigy Corporation.  But I enjoyed getting some moments with the Weyland-Yutani Corporation (the much-mentioned “Company” from the movies).  The scene in which we see Kavalier and Yutani meet for “mediation” was a hoot.  I loved seeing those two characters bounce off of one another, and I loved getting that peek into how this society functioned.  I wanted more of that!

The cast is strong.  I’ve already mentioned Timothy Olyphant, who I found endlessly watchable as Kirsh.  But the real standout was Sydney Chandler as Wendy, the first of the “Lost Boys”.  Ms. Chandler is magnetic, thoroughly compelling.  She is a great main character for the show, guiding us through the story.  The show makes great use of tight close-ups on Ms. Chandler’s expressive face and eyes, which she so skillfully utilized to allow the audience to experience her feelings and her turmoil.  Wendy’s journey of self-discovery was one of the most intriguing character-arcs on the show.  I enjoyed seeing Alex Lawther (the manifesto-writing Nemik on Andor) back on my screen, here playing Joe Hermit, who is the brother of the dying human girl, Marcy, who Wendy used to be.  (And maybe still is?)  Babou Ceesay makes quite an impression as the menacing cyborg Morrow.  Samuel Blenkin is perfectly arrogant and hatable as Boy Kavalier, the young, super-rich and super-spoiled super-genius who runs the Prodigy Corporation and created the Lost Boys.  By the end of the season, I’d grown to quite like all five of the other Lost Boys: Jonathan Ajayi as Smee (the most innocent and silliest of the Lost Boys); Adarsh Gourav as Slightly (who gets co-opted by Morrow, turning into a scary threat); Lily Newmark as Nibs (who also becomes a scary threat when the trauma she suffers in the early episodes throws her mind out of wack); Erana James as Curly (who is jealous of Wendy’s status as Boy Kavalier’s favorite); and Kit Young as Tootles (who fancies himself a scientist and gets into trouble when assisting Kirsh in overseeing the captured creatures).

What didn’t work?

The show took absolutely forever to get going, and I found the set-up to be extremely confusing.  It isn’t until the middle of the third episodes that the action moves to Kavalier’s island and I realized that everything we’d been watching to that point was one long prologue.  That might have been forgivable had the events we’d been watching been exciting and thrilling.  While there were some cool moments, for the most part I was bored.  It took an eternity for the characters to explore the crashed ship, and time after time I found myself confused by who was who and what was going on.  What was the paramilitary unit that Hermit was with?  They’re medics and also soldiers?  They seemed quite well-armed for a search and rescue team.  Why were they needed in the utopian Prodigy City?  Why was only one small 10-ish person search & rescue team investigating this 9-11 type of catastrophe?  Why don’t they encounter tons of civilians on the floors of the building above and below where the ship crashed, trying to get out?  If Wendy can access cameras in the ship to somehow find her brother Hermit, why don’t any of those cameras also pick up the huge Alien monster?  Why is Kavalier willing to risk his multi-billlion-dollar Hybrids on this crazy mission with so much potential for mishap?  (I know he wanted what was on the crashed Yutani ship, but why not just send in a hundred expendable human grunts?)  I wish I’d better understood any of that when watching those early episodes.

Even as the season unfolded, I felt too many characters were left with their backstories and motivations unclear.  We get lots of hints that Kirsh was undermining Kavalier, but in the finale he just seems to be a loyal robot, fighting Morrow to the almost-death?  What did Kirsh want, and why was he so reckless with the Alien monsters?  Does Kirsh want Kavalier to succeed or to fail?  We get a bit of Morrow’s backstory with a dead daughter, and he says that he owes Yutani everything, but I never understood how that dad who loved his daughter wound up on the Maginot mission in the first place, and how/why he then became such a fanatic for the cause of the Yutani corporation.  Boy Kavalier, meanwhile, gives a speech about how he just wants someone intelligent to talk to, but I don’t understand how that led him to this project of putting kids’ brains into superhuman bodies.  We can see they’re all still acting like kids, despite their heightened abilities!  None of these Hybrids seem anywhere close to a super-intelligence.  Speaking of the Hybrids, how and why did Wendy develop a connection to the Aliens and the ability to connect with them as she does?

Speaking of the Aliens, they seemed to get somewhat lost in their own show, with the Hybrids at the focus of the stories, and the new monsters (especially the eyeball creature), more interesting — and more important to the plot — then the Aliens themselves.  Seeing the Aliens on a leash by the end, controlled by Wendy, felt like a letdown to me.

I wondered repeatedly what the point of this show was.  Was this show really just about the hybrids and the “are they human?” questions?  Would that have been stronger as a separate show, not set in the Alien universe?  Was this whole show just designed to explain why the Company wanted the Nostromo to stop and look for the Aliens in the original Alien movie?  (I never thought that needed explaining.  I never thought the Company knew exactly what was on LV-427, just that it took advantage once it was clear what the crew had discovered.)

As I’d noted above, it took way too long for the show to actually settle in and make clear what type of show it was going to be… and then the eight episodes were over in a snap, and the show ended without resolving most of its storylines, nor digging nearly as deeply into any of its central questions as I’d hoped it would.

The show ends on a cliffhanger, which might have been exciting if I thought there was any prospect we’d get a second season of this show any time soon.  But we might not get a second season ever!  The show has not been renewed yet.  Even if it was renewed tomorrow, it could be years before we get to see it.  In today’s world, with the way streaming shows are made — particularly shows as expensive and elaborate as this one!! — ending on a cliffhanger like this feels to me like an enormous mistake and a disservice to the audience.  I’ve written about this many times previously.  I think storytellers have an obligation to bring their season’s stories to at least some sort of conclusion by the end of the season.

Want to dive in deeper?  I have lots more thoughts!!  Beware SPOILERS ahead, though!

Episode 1 — “Neverland”:

• I loved the shots of the Maginot that opened the episode; it was a pleasure to see this gorgeous recreation of the look of the Nostromo.  I loved that they even mimicked specific shots from the original Alien.
• I think it was smart to start with some familiar Alien stuff before introducing all the new stuff with the kids and the Synths/Hybrids.  On the other hand, I thought the flash-backs & flash-forward jump cuts were confusing and not needed.
• The crash sequence was awesome.
• This show, though, breaks the central conceit of all the early Alien movies that even one Alien on Earth would be catastrophic and potentially world-ending.
• I was curious why the show didn’t really establish where Wendy/Marcy’s parents were when all this was happening when she was having her brain transferred into a robotic body?

Episode 2 — “Mr. October”:

• Watching this episode, I started to get very frustrated that little of the setup made any sense to me.  (See the long list of questions I’d written above.)
• Boy Kavalier can see through all the Lost Boys’ eyes.  So he can see the danger and the monsters.  And yet he’s willing to risk his multi-bajillion dollar hybrids??  This just doesn’t make any sense to me.
• I started to fall in love with the eyeball creature here in this episode.
• I also loved seeing the weird cocoon.  (The show makes us wait until the last episode to discover what’s in there!)
• I liked seeing Yutani.
• The show has a Lost-like problem in that people withhold information in an unbelievable manner.  Why doesn’t Hermit just blurt out that theres a huge vicious alien on the loose?!  Why doesn’t he respond when Wendy says “we’ve found him” to ask why they’re looking for him?  Why doesn’t he even ask her name?

Episode 3 — “Metamorphosis”

• I started to get frustrated with the show here in this episode.  We’re three episodes and we’re still in this first stage of the story.  I was bored.  I did not expect to feel bored when watching this show.
• The Maginot somehow found FIVE new alien species??  Where??  How??  They found five new alien creatures, all at once, when no other aliens had ever before been found in this universe?  (At least, none had been seen on-screen in previous Alien movies, aside from the Space Jockey in the original Alien and, if you count them, the Predators in the Alien vs. Predator films.)  OK, I know there’s a famous line in Aliens referring to a “bug hunt”, which could imply the Colonial Marines had previously fought alien creatures.  So maybe other aliens did already exist in this universe?  Still, how did the Maginot find so many aliens, and apparently all at once??  How were they able to capture them all??  How did they get all those Alien eggs onto the ship without accidentally releasing any facehuggers?
• I was happy when the show FINALLY moved away from spaceship crash.
• Boy Kavalier talks about kid prodigies and the benefit of their imagination; which helps his project to make a little more sense to me.  We see that one of the hybrids learned French in a week.  But none of them seem like super geniuses so far.
• The beginning of Morrow’s seduction of Slightly was very creepy.  But also implausible.  Hasn’t the show established that these kids are being watched at all times?  We’ve seen a whole team watching Wendy when she’s watching videos of her brother.  So how could any of this go on under Kavalier & Kirsh’s noses?
• I was confused by the ending.  Did they remove Hermit’s lung and implant an alien spore only to put it back into Hermit’s body?  (Later episodes revealed that’s not what happened.)  (Also, I was confused what that tadpole was and only realized at the start of the next episode that it was an embryo; what the facehugger implants into a host that then grows into the Alien.  I wish they’d explained that at the end of this episode.)  How and why is Wendy connected to the Aliens?  How does no one notice her come into the lab and pass out on the floor?

Episode 4 — “Observation”:

• I liked the great, creepy scene in which Wendy mimics the Aliens’ sound.  This was interesting, exploring how the Aliens communicate, which we have seen hints at in previous movies.  I still have no idea how/why Wendy can hear them.
• Boy Kavalier seemed so annoyed that Wendy’s brother was there, but he was allowing it, right?  So why was he so annoyed by it?
• Kirsh saw on the monitors that Morrow put an object in Slightly’s neck, but when Kirsh confronts him in his room, he doesn’t ask him about it.  I didn’t understand that.  (I think, based on what happens later, that Kirsh wanted to lure Morrow to the island so he could capture him?)
• The eyeball alien and the goat was wonderfully gross and creepy!
• It’s wild that I didn’t realize until now that Dame Sylvia and Arthur were married.  Again, I feel like the show didn’t do a good job in setting up these characters.
• Seeing Nibs saying she’s pregnant was creepy and disturbing.  Then she talks about Jesus, which I found even more disturbing.  A psychotic synth/android is scary.  (Like Ash from the first film!  And Morrow now…?)
• Boy Kavalier’s speech about not liking brothers or fathers or mothers makes clear that he sees himself as Peter Pan.  (Interesting; I’d have liked to have gotten this earlier.)
• So at the end, the Alien bursts out & smashes the glass.  But no one was monitoring the Alien’s growth?  There are no alarms?  There’s not a team of scientists there 24-7?  This is all so crazy!  Why is Kavalier just leaving this all to these weird kid/hybrids??

Episode 5 — “In Space, No One Can…”:

• This is a great episode — a thrilling flashback to the Maginot.  I wonder if the series would have been stronger had they started with this episode.  Its a more traditional Alien horror adventure (which is a positive and a negative, I suppose).
• I was happy when Rahim said “oy va-a-voy”.
• These scientists are beyond incompetent.  The Alien facehuggers get out (or are let out).  The blood-sucking bugs get out of that preposterously loose, simple screw-on-top cage.  And then the woman doesn’t properly secure the eyeball alien so it gets out too??  Crazy.
• Where/how did they capture all these alien creatures in the first place?  How did they get five Alien eggs on board?
• Morrow gives speech about traveling in pairs and then walks out of mess hall alone.  I rolled my eyes at that.
• Watching the young engineer drink that waterbottle that we know is filled with tiny Alien spores was horrifying!  (But in a good way.)
• The surgery scene with the “ticks” on the guys’ internal organs was GROSS!!  I sort of loved that, too, though.
• It’s a huge ship, but of course they coincidentally have a shootout right outside the sealed lab with monsters inside??  So they have to go in and wind up releasing the monsters??  I found that dumb.
• We learn that Morrow was a boy with a palsied arm, who was taken in by Yutani.  That helped me understand he was a cyborg and not a full android.  But I don’t understand why he went on the Maginot mission.  I’d at first thought that he was a poor man, trying to help his wife & daughter.  But he was connected to one of the five richest people on planet Earth!!  So this makes no sense to me.

Episode 6 — “The Fly”:

• It was cool to see the little Alien in a stage growing between the small chestburster and the full grown beast.  We’d never really seen that before.  (Interestingly, Alien: Romulus also introduced this intermediate stage of the Alien lifecycle, only that movie suggested the Alien made a cocoon and grew inside it.)
• Finally someone — Kirsh — talks straight to Hermit; he’s never going to be allowed to take his sister & leave this island!
• I loved the Yutani-Kavalier meeting scene.
• I also loved the scene between Kirsh and Morrow in the elevator.  Two robots sniping at one another!  Where has this good writing been until now?
• Then the show gets dumb again.  They do this dangerous procedure to erase Nibs’ memory, then let Wendy just tell her all about it as soon as Nibs wakes up post-surgery??  Why wasn’t Nibs being monitored to prevent that?  Why didn’t anyone guess that of course one of the other Hybrids would talk to Nibs and mention what had happened?
• I hate watching people act galactically stupid in stories like this.  Tootles walking into the cage with the bug monsters is insane.  As is the idea that they’d let these priceless experimental synthetics be alone with these monsters just days before the important presentation they were talking about earlier in the episode.  And then — of course — Arthur rushes in and opens the cage door, and gets implanted by the facehugger.  They’re all acting so dumb!
• I was intrigued to see Kirsh is watching everything and doesn’t seem to care.  (I wish the show had better explored his motivations and desires before the end of the season.)
• In episode five, I thought the eyeball creature was trying to help on the Maginot, trying to warn the female scientist about the bugs.  But here it helped get Tootles killed, and we get a very sinister shot of it at the end!  That was great.

Episode seven — “Emergence”:

• Slightly brings Arthur & the facehugger back to his room somehow.  How did he manage that?  Again, there are no cameras around to catch this?  No one sees or notices any of this?
• Wendy/Marcy letting the Alien out is reckless and horrible.  So many people die!
• I rolled my eyes at the Weekend at Bernies comedy of Slightly & Smee moving Arthur’s unconscious body around.
• The chestburster explodes out of Arthur just a few hours after he’s implanted.  They have radically (and annoyingly) condensed the timeline of the Aliens’ lifecycle.  (To be fair, many Alien sequel films did the same thing.)
• How on earth did they find the tiny Alien on this huge island, in all the trees/jungle growth??

Episode eight — “The Real Monsters”:

• The Kirsh vs Morrow fight was great.  I was sad seeing Kirsh get his back broken.  I know he’s a villain, but I like this character!
• Finally we see the creature that was growing inside that cocoon.  We get a pretty gnarly death of Hermit’s friend, one of the surviving members of his original search & rescue squad.
• Finally in this episode, the show started digging into the issues of what new type of life the hybrids are.  I liked hearing Curly tell Wendy her name is Jane (embracing her human past).  I also liked Wendy’s speech to her brother that she’s not Marcy nor is she Wendy; she’s not sure what she is.
• I loved the reveal that Kavalier’s right hand man was the cyborg that Kavalier built as a boy.  I loved then seeing Wendy freeze him with her mind.
• Kavalier walking with just one security guard into the cage with all the angry, super-powered hybrids was incredibly dumb.
• I laughed at the revelation of who the eyeball ended up in!  Arthur’s corpse!  I’d really thought Hermit was going to get eyeballed.  I like Hermit, so I’m glad he survived.  But I think that too many characters survived until the end of this Alien story.  We needed some characters who were actually important to have bought it before the end.  Heck, one of the few name characters who died was Arthur, and even he gets “resurrected” by the end!  I think the low body count (of people we care about) was a mistake.
• The ending was surprising.  It was an interesting left turn.  I respect and like that.  But leaving so much hanging left me annoyed, as I’ve written about above.
• I thought we’d more clearly see Yutani triumphant at the end, to align with the continuity of Alien, in which Yutani is “the company” and seems to control everything.
• I also wanted to see Dame Sylvia’s reaction to learning her husband was dead.  I was surprised that didn’t happen.

Will there be another season of Alien: Earth?  Will it be better than this one…?  I guess we’ll see…

Thanks for reading this post!  I hope you enjoyed it.