Earth’ Episodes 1 and 2 Deliver Thrills and Chills

This post contains spoilers for the first two episodes of Alien: Earth, now streaming on Hulu.

The Alien movies are filled with so many ideas about what their future society is like that it feels close to (chest) bursting. But because most of the films are first and foremost suspense stories about surviving the Xenomorphs, these ideas are often teased only briefly, leaving fans of the franchise to fill in the gaps on their own. 

With Alien: Earth, Noah Hawley intends to turn those teases into the primary story, while also taking advantage of the length of a TV season to throw in a lot of Xenomorph action. These two opening episodes, “Neverland” (written and directed by Hawley) and “Mr. October” (written by Hawley and directed by Dana Gonzales), do very well with the second half of the series’ title, but are more mixed on the first. 

We begin in relatively familiar territory. It’s two years before the events of Alien(*), and we’re on a Weyland-Yutani-owned science vessel, the Maginot, which has several areas (the communications room, the cryosleep chambers) that look very much like the ones from the Nostromo in the first Ridley Scott film. The crew are roused for one of their periodic breaks from slumber, and we see that they’ve been gathering specimens of dangerous aliens, a Xenomorph included. And we get a bit of a sense of the crew dynamics, including the fact that everyone knows that their crewmate Tang is a synthetic, and also that Tang is a creep who keeps watching one of the younger female crew members while she sleeps. 

(*) Hawley is sticking with the timeline from the early films. Which means that in order for this all to be happening shortly before Alien, the ship’s 65-year mission would have had to begin only 30 years in our own future. Imagine if we had cyborgs and synths and ships capable of deep space travel by then. 

Originally, this sequence existed in a later episode that goes into more detail about what happened to the Maginot, while “Neverland” was designed to open with Wendy and Kirsh. So when the Maginot crashed, the audience would know barely anything about it. But at a certain point, Hawley realized that Alien fans would have certain expectations for the series. In this case, his commercial instincts pay creative dividends. In addition to beginning with something that more explicitly resembles the films, this restructuring provides just enough context so that what follows once the ship has crashed in New Siam makes more sense, and is scarier, than if we were disoriented the whole time. When, for instance, Maginot security officer/cyborg Morrow handcuffs two Weyland-Yutani soldiers inside the ship’s lab, and we see the escaped blood-eating bug climb into one of its helmets, it’s terrifying because we’ve already been given a, well, taste of what the thing does during the prologue.  

Primarily, though, “Neverland” is concerned with Hawley’s major concepts for the series: the ongoing battle for supremacy among the five corporations that control the planet, and their race to perfect a form of immortality before the competition can. We’re seeing this through the work of Boy Kavalier, the young, barefoot, superhumanly arrogant founder of Prodigy, which rules much of Asia. Synthetics, cyborgs, and bioweapons like the Xenomorphs exist, and Kavalier employs a few synths himself, like Kirsh. But he has his eyes on something more ambitious: transplanting human minds into theoretically unkillable synth bodies, starting with the group of dying children he dubs the Lost Boys, led by a young woman who of course renames herself Wendy. Kavalier claims that he did it in the hopes that he could finally have an interesting conversation with someone, though the money he could make from selling these kinds of bodies to the ultra-rich would be nice, too. 

There are philosophical questions we could ask about transferring consciousness versus copying it, and whether Wendy is exactly the same as the girl she was before the procedure. But the show treats her as the same, and Sydney Chandler plays her very much like a taller, older-looking version of the girl we first meet looking at a scorpion with Kirsh. In kid form, she already acted more mature than the others, and that continues after they’ve been through the procedure. (They keep asking when they can go home, and giggle over hearing words like “sperm.”) But she’s still childlike in her tendency to fixate, particularly when it comes to her older brother Hermit. When he’s part of the team sent to investigate the Maginot crash, she of course insists on going to help. We later find out it’s in part because she feels guilty for hacking into a Prodigy computer system to prevent him from leaving New Siam to explore a new opportunity back home. Mostly, though, she just wants to keep her brother(*) safe — and now is strong and fast enough to potentially do that.  

(*) That’s Hawley himself in the flashbacks to the siblings and their dad. Hawley told me that he didn’t intend to act in the show, but when his son Lev wanted to play a small role, he realized it would be easier to get a performance out of him if they were interacting as father and son, rather than him trying to direct Lev to work with a strange adult. 

Eventually, the action shifts from Kavalier’s Neverland base to the crash site, where Hermit’s search-and-rescue team and eventually Kirsh and the Lost Boys have to sift through both the wrecked ship and the massive building surrounding it. This is a bigger scale than anything Hawley’s done on TV before, and bigger than much of what’s in his one feature film, Lucy in the Sky. Though the CGI is dodgy on occasion, for the most part the spectacle is impressive, particularly when Hermit’s team first arrives outside the building. And the horror beats are suitably chilling, like the blood bug, or especially the eyeball monster — an eyeball that moves on tentacles, and that contains multiple irises that can combine to resemble a human or animal iris — clawing its way out of the cat’s skull to attack people.  

But whether for artistic or budgetary reasons, most of the kills by the Xenomorph itself happen off camera. And Hermit seems surprisingly able to escape this relentless killing machine, and also to compartmentalize the encounter while he continues doing his job. Hermit is introduced as not the coolest of customers, yet he doesn’t spend the bulk of the second episode ranting at everyone he encounters about the giant indestructible monster with multiple jaws and a nasty prehensile tail. 

And Morrow’s ability to knock the Xenmorph out, even briefly, with a taser rifle feels like an awkward shortcut for a TV show that can’t just have the thing kill off all the ongoing characters at once. If nothing else, if Weyland-Yutani — which very much wants to get one of these creatures in its lab to dissect and exploit — knew in 2120 that these kinds of weapons could temporarily immobilize them without killing them, why wouldn’t the Space Marines from Aliens have been outfitted with the things? 

And sometimes, it feels satisfying to have our old friend do so much damage just out of view, like when it tears through everybody at the decadent French-themed party where Hermit finds the third home-run ball Reggie Jackson hit in Game 6 of the 1977 World Series. The party’s theme, and the idea of the Xenomorph literally eating the rich, isn’t subtle, but subtlety can be overrated in a franchise about a phallic monster with acid for blood, you know? 

Hermit reunites with Wendy — or, as he knows her, Marcy — by the end of “Mr. October,” but the reunion’s not peaceful for very long, as the Xenomorph crashes in and grabs Hermit, and Wendy chooses to leap down into the wreckage of the building to save her brother. Will she succeed? Again, this is an ongoing TV show where she’s the main character, so the shock of Dallas dying midway through the first film, when at one point he seemed like its protagonist, won’t be repeated. But this is a pretty thrilling start to Hawley’s new chapter in this old story.