2120. Five powerful corporations control the Solar system, including Prodigy. After a decades-long mission to collect alien specimens from various planets, the Weyland-Yutani Corporation ship Maginot crash-lands in Prodigy's city of New Siam, releasing a number of hostile creatures. Prodigy operatives are dispatched to contain the site and recapture the aliens. Leading the way are five human-synthetic hybrids, the minds of dying children moved into new synthetic bodies. The group is at first happy to take orders from Prodigy's obnoxious CEO, Boy Kavalier, but soon develop their own agendas.
The Alien franchise has been thoroughly explored previously through movies, video games, comics, novels and roleplaying games. It's actually mildly surprising that the franchise has taken this long to get onto television, despite a realistic depiction of the titular creature requiring a significant effects budget. It also required a strong showrunner, to both find a story worthwhile of the prolonged runtime of a TV show - which may not be compatible with the franchise's horror roots, which relies more on short, sharp shocks - and to stand up to the scrutiny of the infamously irascible Ridley Scott. Noah Hawley, a tremendously well-regarded writer and director for his work on Fargo and Legion, is precisely the sort of writer you need in that role.
So is the show any good? Well, for the last few weeks I've been suffering from a shoulder complaint, which is quite irritating, and I cannot rule out it resulting from whiplash from trying to follow Alien: Earth's sometimes bewildering lurches in quality, tone and atmosphere from episode to episode and sometimes scene to scene.
The first half of the season is, by far, the stronger, although that lurching in quality is still present. The Maginot's budget-straining crash into a city and the resulting cleanup operation results in a ton of impressive vfx, xenomorph-unleashing carnage, burning tension and corporate intrigue. The cast immediately impresses, especially Babou Ceesay as a Weyland-Yutani cyborg agent and reliable old hands like Adrian Edmondson and a magnificent-as-always Timothy Olyphant. Sydney Chandler is suitably weird and offbeat as lead hybrid Wendy, whilst Samuel Blenkin is supremely punchable as the ridiculously smug Boy Kavalier. The cast is good, the action is solid, the vfx impressive, and the thematic element of the synths being "lost boys" a la Peter Pan is intriguing. The show makes good use of the xenomorph, showing it early and letting it rip, but also manages the impossible by having it be just one of a bestiary of horrifying creatures which are all different types of body horror.
The first half of the season sees the crash, the aftermath, the initial exploration of the aliens and concludes with a flashback episode set on the Maginot earlier in its mission which works as a great, 50-minute version of a full-blown Alien movie, complete with its own cast and storyline.
After this, the show loses focus. The thematic exploration of the hybrids becomes over-laboured and the Peter Pan analogy becomes less interesting the more it's overtly spelled out to the viewer. Like recent Russell T. Davies, Noah Hawley (or, given their mutual element in common, Disney) evidently decided that text is better than subtext, and why use a scalpel when you can use a chainsaw? Attached to a 5-gigaton nuclear bomb? There's also a degree of plotting which requires characters to hold ever-increasing sizes of idiot balls, and some decision-making by professionals that will have even the scientists in Prometheus saying, "hold up, that's a bit dumb, don't do that!" There's an element of this early on, but in the latter half of the series it gets pretty ridiculous, probably reaching its apex when a character only just marginally avoids death from a hostile alien creature that is still at large in the same room but takes a time-out from fighting it to offer some comfort to his upset sister. It's very nice that the alien showed empathy in that situation.
The show also struggles with the exact same problem that the franchise has struggled with since at least Alien 3: we know the drill of facehugger-chestburster-xenomorph and that ceased being scary decades ago, and has risked becoming rote. Ridley Scott's experiments with making Alien universe movies which are less reliant on the predictable xeno had a mixed reception, to say the least, and Alien: Earth makes the choice to lead with the creature, have it benched for most of the mid-part of the season, and bring it back at the end in a, if not friendly, than at least neutral role. The paradox of the franchise is that everyone knows what the xenomorph is about so it's become a bit predictable, but if you don't have the xenomorph in its traditional adversarial role in the story, is it even an Alien movie to start with? Sans the xeno, I'm not sure the Alien universe is actually that original or intriguing. We could also comment on the increasingly implausible way the story fits into the Alien canon, but that would probably give everyone involved an aneurysm so best not. Suffice to say that it's increasingly implausible the xenos could be such a mystery in Aliens given that hundreds of people saw them running around causing chaos on Earth sixty years earlier.
The baggy and bizarre second half of the season is probably single-handedly (tentaclely?) saved by Alien: Earth's breakout star: Ocellus, the maths-loving eyeball monster. Ocellus' trick is that it pops out the eyeball of a target creature, sticks itself in and then steers the creature around, after a comical period trying to work out how the creature walks. It's also clearly far smarter than any other alien (possibly any other character) on the show, although where exactly the brain is it would need to do this is a question probably best left for the "oh no I've gone crosseyed," category. Whenever the show flags, Ocellus usually steals a scene with its exploits, which veer between comedy and horror. Also, given the absolute brain-dead stupidity of most of the characters (especially by the end), you kind of find yourself rooting for Ocellus to pop a few more eyeballs than it manages before the end of the season.
There's much to enjoy about Alien: Earth (***½), with some great performances, ideas, creature design, vfx and some awesome sets. However, it is overlong and flabby: eight episodes is too much to sustain the horror and tension, and you have easily compressed these events into six episodes without losing too much of value. It does over-belabour its thematic ideas, and its use of the titular xenomorph is certainly...interesting. Probably the biggest problem is the cliffhanger ending, the prospect of a second season (which can only be reacted to with mixed feelings) and the increasing likelihood of a major arse-pull to explain how none of the events of this show are known in later parts of the franchise. Still, if they rename Season 2 Alien: Ocellus, I'd be more firmly on-board (and Ocellus single-handedly raises the review score by half a star).
The first season of Alien: Earth is available to view on Disney+ in much of the world and Hulu in the USA.
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