By the time the credits rolled on the first episode of the new FX series Alien: Earth, I was shocked by how much I enjoyed it. Other than the first two films, Alien and Aliens, the legacy of the groundbreaking science fiction series has been divisive, to say the least. When I saw that Noah Hawley, who has also developed television adaptations of Fargo and created the X-Men series Legion, was credited for both directing and writing the series, I knew that we’re all in good hands.
I gave up on there being another good Alien movie a long time ago. As a general rule, I’m not a fan of extending something into a franchise when a story feels complete. Alien was its own complete story—one that gestured at a wider world, but a story with a beginning, middle and end. It’s extraordinarily lucky that Aliens is also an amazing movie, though an action movie rather than a compact science fiction thriller. But after these two successes, there’s been a series of duds and half starts, and some outright abominations (Alien vs. Predator).
As much as I personally enjoy a movie like Alien: Covenant, it is an objective truth that even the return of director Ridley Scott could not bring back the magic of that first Alien movie. As much as I like Alien: Romulus, it too relies on nostalgia for the past rather than creating new places for the story to go. This is not the case with Alien: Earth, which has two episodes streaming on Hulu right now. I think a large part of that is Noah Hawley.
The first show written by Hawley that I watched was Legion, which is an adaptation of X-Men, sort of. It follows David Haller, a mutant in a mental hospital who later learns that the things he thought were mental illness were actually his mutant powers manifesting. Though the show becomes more uneven the longer it goes on, it’s always ambitious and visually adventurous. Instead of putting a hand to his temple and squinting, Haller’s psychic powers are portrayed as dance offs, Bollywood musical sequences, and at one point, a duet between him and his nemesis of the song “Behind Blue Eyes.”
Legion manages to capture aspects of the X-Men and mutant culture that exist in comics that never makes it into the movies: mutants are discriminated against, and therefore a lot of them end up in the dregs of society. What would it feel like to have potentially world altering power, but also be in the throes of a drug addiction? Similarly, Hawley’s Fargo show is more than just a series of crime stories. It tries to grasp at the tone, and especially the humor, of the Coen Brothers’ film without retreading plot points too closely.
This is the great strength of Alien: Earth. It isn’t just another game of cat and mouse with the infamous xenomorph—though there is still plenty of suspense centered around where the xenomorph currently is, and where it’s going to go next. Like the original film, it’s also about how megacorporations like the fictional Weyland Yutani treat its workers as expendable in their quest to learn the secrets of immortality from the nigh indestructible xenomorph. In a way, the xenomorph itself becomes a literalization of the extractive nature of capitalism: it takes from people and hollows them out from the inside, all in the service of replicating itself. All of the entries in the Alien franchise that I enjoy makes that tension a part of their narratives.
Much of the first episode of Alien: Earth is about a new megacorp, Prodigy, which is experimenting in transferring consciousness from children with terminal illnesses into adult synthetic bodies.These synthetics have child minds, but they are in adult bodies, leading to some fun acting choices with these adult actors trying to portray that mentally these characters are all about eleven or twelve. Due to the secrecy surrounding this new technology, Prodigy does not allow these synthetics to return to their families ever again. The first child transferred into an adult synthetic body, Wendy, is allowed to see her brother, but only from a distance, watching him through viewscreens but never allowed to contact him.
In the first episode, a space craft crashes into a skyscraper, and Wendy watches her brother jump into action as a first responder. Wendy talks her handler into allowing her and her fellow synthetics to assist in rescuing people, and doing a bit of corporate espionage on the side. Of course–of course!—there is a xenomorph on that very ship. And boy howdy does it love tearing people apart.
More than just the fascinating mysteries that Hawley sets up in its first two episodes—the circumstances of how the xenomorph broke free from containment on a space ship, leading to it crashing into a populated city, are so far unrevealed—Alien: Earth is gorgeous to look at. The camera swings and careens down narrow hallways, picking up speed as if it’s on a rollercoaster. There is detail packed into every frame, things moving behind people’s heads as they examine the crash, something scuttling in the background as they turn each corner. Most impressive to me are the show’s use of soft fades to transition from shot to shot, overlaying images on top of each other into a collage. It all feels thoughtful and considered, a show you cannot watch while looking at your phone.
For a long time I never wanted an entry in the Alien series where the xenomorph comes to Earth. Hell, I thought most of the entries where the xenomorph is in space were cheap cash grabs relying on nostalgia—a xenomorph on Earth felt creatively bankrupt, as if the series were scraping at the bottom of the barrel to win back fans. After watching two episodes of Alien: Earth I stand corrected. There is something interesting in the idea of a corporation unleashing something this deadly on humanity, only to watch their plans all go up in flames.
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