A megacorporation’s research ship returns from a 65-year mission into deep space loaded with gooey alien specimens. But—and stop me if you’ve heard this one before—something goes wrong. The ship crashes on Earth, and just to complicate things, it crashes into a city run by a rival corporation.
Now it’s a mad dash to search the shipwreck (and the cyberpunk skyscraper it crashed into) and capture all that profitable yet slimy alien cargo, which in the first few episodes of Alien: Earth goes about as well as you might expect.
Speaking of expectations: I was not expecting this series to be good. I’ve been trained by almost 30 years of crappy Alien movies and mostly mid Alien games to roll my eyes whenever that sleek and shiny xenomorph is once again trotted out to slowly pick off terrified crew members one-by-one.
But Alien: Earth is a ton of fun so far, and part of that fun stems from the fact that this particular xenomorph is not picking off anything one-by-one. It is killing its way through this show like it’s got a bodycount quota. Hell yeah.
Even better, it’s not alone. Noah Hawley (who also directed and wrote the FX series Fargo) clearly knew the Alien universe needed a real kick in the butt, so there’s a handful of different alien species on the crashed ship doing horrible things to the first responders in enjoyably grisly ways. We’re all well-versed on face-hugging, double jaws, and acid blood, but now there’s plenty of disgusting new alien biology to discover. I think that’s honestly what uppercase Alien needed at this point: way more lowercase aliens.
The aliens aren’t the only thing Hawley tripled-down on. In the Alien movies, there’s always one synthetic person in the rapidly dwindling group of human survivors, but in Alien: Earth there are three different kinds of artificial people, from classic synths to cyborgs to people who have had their thoughts downloaded into artificial bodies, called hybrids. And they’re all running around the crash site together like a bunch of weird semi-superheros trying to find and contain a bunch of gross, violent aliens. I am on board for all of this.
It’s a real relief. There have been so many Alien-related misfires and stinkers, many made without Ridley Scott’s involvement, but a few with him at the helm (hey, sorry, I’m a bit fond of Prometheus but it has an absolutely terrible script).
Alien: Isolation did a great job of bringing the tension and fear of xenomorph to the PC back in 2014, but we’re just so overly familiar with the creature and what it does that there just aren’t many ways to make it an interesting monster anymore. (I also didn’t think much of Alien: Romulus, in large part due to that Ian Holm CGI abomination).
I’m eager to see the rest of the series: I’d watch Timothy Oliphant do anything, Sydney Chandler is great and believable as a kid whose mind has been transplanted into an adult synth body, and Samuel Blenkin’s tech trillionaire (easy to believe we’ll have a bunch of those in 100 years) is both insufferably smug and clueless about what his hybrid creations are actually capable of. And there’s still plenty of cast members around to get sliced and diced (and worse) by a crashed ship full of alien critters.
Does Alien: Earth make sense for a prequel series to the entire Aliens shebang? I’ll be honest: probably not. We’ve got synths and cyborgs and hybrids and a ton of aliens all skittering around on Earth years before the Nostromo even finds its first, fateful clutch of eggs.
But I don’t care. What canonically comes before Alien and Aliens can’t be any worse than what canonically came after Alien and Aliens. The damage to the fiction has already been done, much of it by Ridley Scott himself, so even if Alien: Earth bends or breaks the history of Alien, it’s still good fun to watch.
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