Noah Hawley’s Alien: Earth is at its best when it’s contrasting space monsters with our own species’ worst instincts. Spoilers ahead… NB: The following contains spoilers for Alien: Earth episodes one and two. “You know Burke,” an exhausted and sickened Ripley said in Aliens, “I don’t know which species is worse. You don’t see them ... Alien: Earth | The franchise expands to TV, but greed remains the true villain (spoilers)
Noah Hawley’s Alien: Earth is at its best when it’s contrasting space monsters with our own species’ worst instincts. Spoilers ahead…
NB: The following contains spoilers for Alien: Earth episodes one and two.
“You know Burke,” an exhausted and sickened Ripley said in Aliens, “I don’t know which species is worse. You don’t see them fucking each other over for a goddamn percentage.”
Directed at the conniving Weyland-Yutani corporate stiff Burke (Paul Reiser) the line got to the heart of the twin horrors that have kept the Alien franchise going for over 45 years. These aren’t just stories about humans encountering a parasitic species from another world; they’re about the cold-blooded corporate interests which led to those encounters in the first place.
Ridley Scott’s Alien set the template in 1979. At the film’s midpoint, the crew of the Nostromo realise there are two monsters in their midst – the acid-blooded ghoul that burst into view hours earlier, and the ship’s science officer, Ash (Ian Holm). An android placed on the ship to serve the interests of his corporate master, Ash is only too happy to sacrifice everyone aboard in order to ensure that the alien specimen is secured. When Ripley (an iconic Sigourney Weaver) blasts the creature out into space, she scores a twin victory – she’s saved herself and her cat, Jones, but also jabbed a defiant finger in the eye of her employers.
This same theme runs right through Alien: Earth, the new spin-off series created by Noah Hawley. In interviews, Hawley – who previously brought us TV’s Fargo and Legion – has reliably provided variations on the sentiment that Alien is about that classic interplay between humans, monsters and corporate power. Or, as he puts it, “humanity [being] trapped between its primordial parasitic past and its AI future, and they’re both trying to kill us.”
In Alien: Earth, however, Hawley also pulls in a message made clear in James Cameron’s 1986 sequel, Aliens. It isn’t the AI itself that is evil, but rather the humans that programmed it. In Aliens, the synthetic human Bishop (Lance Henriksen) is the innocent, while Burke is revealed to be the heartless traitor.
This is continued in Alien: Earth, which introduces Wendy – the consciousness of a 12 year-old girl plugged into a cybernetic body that resembles that of a grown woman. Wendy, played with wide-eyed tenderness by Sydney Chandler, is a Hybrid – the first successful human-machine interface created by a company called Prodigy. Once deathly ill, Wendy now finds herself in a body unfamiliar both in its maturity and sheer strength.
Read more: Alien: Earth episodes 1 and 2 | Spoiler-free review
Alien: Earth takes place in the year 2120, two years before the events of Alien and several years after its prequels, Prometheus (2012) and Alien: Covenant (2017). Earth and other planets have been carved up among a number of rival corporations, and Prodigy, headed up by its mop-haired CEO Boy Kavalier (Samuel Blenkin) is the newest firm on the block. But while Kavalier may seem charming enough, he didn’t get to be a trillionaire by accident, and his casual demeanour hides a streak of ruthlessness and opportunism.
From the debut episode, Alien: Earth emphasises the naivety of Wendy and her fellow test subjects, all named after characters in Peter Pan, and the collection of scientists and executives who resemble their surrogate family. Researcher Dame Sylvia (Essie Davis) and synthetic Kirsh (Timothy Olyphant) may seem like mentor figures, but they’re also cold and detached – we’re also constantly reminded that Wendy and her contemporaries – dubbed ‘Lost Boys’ – are all mere company property. When a crisis unfolds, for example, Kavalier thinks nothing of sending his test subjects – who have the minds of kids and zero weapons training – right into the danger zone.
Hawley whips up a broad canvas and cast for Alien: Earth, but he wisely keeps the core of its story simple. The catalyst is the USCS Maginot, an exploratory vessel containing alien specimens which crashes into Prodigy City, a slice of South East Asia under Kavalier’s control. Who, if anyone, gets to control those specimens becomes the plot’s driving force.
Needless to say, the Maginot contains a drooling xenomorph – not to mention at least five leathery eggs. But there are other horrors, too: the T Ocellus, an octopus-like beast that burrows into ocular cavities and takes over minds. A parasitic critter that acts like a cross between a leech and a mosquito. There’s also a briefly-glimpsed insectoid thing that will probably come into play in later episodes. Oh, and a gourd-like affair that hangs from ceilings and probes at things with an exploratory tentacle. Animal or vegetable? Even the coolly analytical Kirsh isn’t sure. (Perhaps, like the monster in A Thing From Another World, it’s both.)
With the crashed Maginot embedded in the foot of a highrise building, Hawley and his collaborators have fun merging worlds – the industrial production design of Alien (the Maginot is a ringer for the Nostromo) with the earthly and everyday. The ruins of a clothing outlet, with catwalk models strutting across an LED screen; the xenomorph bounding down concrete staircases and corridors.
Alien fans can delight in the details Hawley picks out or mashes together. The xenomorph has the silver teeth of the beast from Alien, but its fast, quadrupedal movement feels more Alien 3. The background details back on the Maginot, from the Mu-Th-Ur mainframe to the outfits of its crew, are exquisitely realised. (We get the feeling there’ll be a flashback episode later in the series that explores the Maginot and its grim fate in more detail.)
The presumably enormous production budget is often in evidence, at least in these first two episodes, but the show never loses sight of its core themes. Wendy’s humanity is underscored by the love for her older brother, Prodigy medic, Hermit (Alex Lawther). He’s a member of the search and rescue team sent into the Maginot and its surrounding building on the hunt for survivors – a mission that soon sees Hermit running for his life.
Their warmth is contrasted by the ruthlessness of the older cast. There’s the cyborg Morrow (Babou Ceesay), who’s determined to round up the specimens he’d collected while he was part of the ill-fated Maginot mission. Then there’s Kavalier, who’s delighted to note that the rival Yutani corporation’s ship has crashed in his territory. The second he learns that Yutani’s loss could be his gain, he becomes fixated on the idea of bringing in the Maginot’s specimens for his own experiments. “I want what’s on that ship,” he hisses to his subordinate, Atom Eins (Ade Edmondson, crossing another big sci-fi franchise off his list after appearing in The Last Jedi).
Kavalier may dress up his ambitions with faux intellectualism – he created Wendy because he wants someone smarter to debate with, he tells Dame Sylvia – but his drive is something far more mundane: power and gratification. It says a great deal about our current world, really, that a villain who’s both wealthy, powerful and a slave to his childish ego would make such narrative sense; a decade ago, Kavalier might seem far-fetched. In the age of Elon Musk, he seems perfectly logical.
Hawley’s interests are also laid bare in one of Alien: Earth’s more overt moments of comedy and horror. While looking for survivors, Hermit and a doomed Prodigy footsoldier stumble on a decadent party that looks like something out of Barry Lyndon – all powdered wigs, ball gowns and ruffled shirts. Attempts to break the party up and warn of the danger fall on deaf ears; one xenomorph attack later, and the shindig’s turned into a bloodbath. Before the guests are torn limb from limb, though, the posh chap who answers the door says something telling. “We’re having a dinner party,” he coos. “I’m sure if there’s a problem, the Boy Kavalier will call me personally. We’re in the same club!”
It’s a not-so-subtle reference to the class fault lines that have also run through the Alien franchise. Kavalier may look young and scruffy, but he’s as much a member of the elite as the toffs at that party. They’re the same type of people who thought nothing of sending the working class crew aboard the Nostromo to their deaths in Alien, or throwing an entire detachment of Colonial Marines under the bus in Aliens. The names and faces may change, but the same motivation drives them all – ultimately, the Alien franchise warns, it isn’t our parasitic past that will be our species’ undoing, but our greed.
Back in our own reality, we repeatedly see and hear corporations tell us about how invaluable their AI products and services are, while also warning us and potentially world-ending the same technology could be. There’s an element of the carnival barker and the snake oil salesmen to all of that, certainly, but also a starker truth that, like Weyland Yutani or Prodigy, the pursuit of power will always overcome common sense.
There are still six episodes left to go in Alien: Earth, and all kinds of questions left to answer. Hawley has several kinds of monsters to play around with. We’ll have to see how Yutani responds to Prodigy’s seizure of the specimens it travelled space to find. Or what Morrow does to get them back. But then there’s the repeated hints that Wendy has some kind of kinship with the xenomorph – certainly, she appears to have the ability to hear their movements from several yards away, like a shark sensing blood in the water. Goodness knows how that will play out.
Just as tantalising is the show’s proximity to the events of Alien. We now know that Weyland-Yutani has already made contact with the xenomorph, either on LV-426 or elsewhere. This almost certainly means that, when the crew of the Nostromo were woken up to analyse a mysterious signal in that 1979 classic, their paymasters already knew what monstrosity they’d eventually encounter.
Time and again, Alien tells stories of unsuspecting people being fucked over for a goddamn percentage.
Alien: Earth episodes one and two are streaming now on Disney+.
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