The series “Alien: Earth” feels a bit like the “Alien” franchise crash-landed into an entirely separate science fiction saga, because that’s more or less how it begins. The show is creator Noah Hawley’s third partnership with FX to artfully walk the line between IP expansion and auteurist exercise. “Fargo” has iterated on the Coen Brothers classic for five seasons and counting, an unlikely success that’s lasted the long haul; before Fox’s entertainment assets were fully subsumed by Disney, “Legion” spun a minor “X-Men” antihero into a trippy psychodrama. With “Alien: Earth,” Hawley inherits his most iconic set of tools yet, though he seems less interested in Xenomorphs and body horror for their own sake than as a bridge to another set of ideas.
So-called synthetics have been a staple of the “Alien” universe since its inception nearly half a century ago. But they’ve never been as central as they are in “Alien: Earth,” which has two parallel inciting incidents. One is the collision of the research vessel Maginot into humanity’s home planet, exposing a menagerie of extraterrestrial specimens — not just Xenomorphs! — to billions of potential hosts. The other is the creation of the first human-synthetic hybrids by Prodigy, a mega-corporation and rival to the iconic Weyland-Yutani enterprise. (“Earth” is set in the year 2120, just a couple of years before Ellen Ripley’s fateful ride aboard the Nostromo.) These two strains cross paths when Prodigy founder Boy Kavalier (Samuel Blenkin) impulsively sends his hybrids to investigate the Maginot wreck and recover its cargo. The first concept is a flashier hook, conjuring images of facehuggers wreaking havoc on packed pedestrian thoroughfares. Yet it’s the second that proves to be the actual premise of “Alien: Earth.” One kind of inhuman, intelligent, unpredictable being is simply a foil and catalyst for the other.
“Alien: Earth” opens with a dense ream of exposition, though it boils down to just a couple important takeaways. (As Hawley pointed out to my colleague Daniel D’Addario in a cover story for this magazine, there’s not much mythology in “Alien” about the status quo of human society before it gets violently disrupted by the titular life forms, giving him a lot of empty space to fill.) One is that corporations like Prodigy and Weyland-Yutani act like enormous nation-states, controlling vast swaths of territory and commanding armies. The other is that while this universe already contains bionically enhanced humans (“cyborgs”) and completely artificial, yet lifelike, robots (“synths”), what prodigy is cooking up are synths implanted with a pre-existing human consciousness, a project with the end goal of putting a price tag on eternal life. For their initial lab rats, they’ve selected terminally ill children, due to their pliable minds and desperate, consent-giving parents.
Concerned with the line between android and human, questions that play out amid an East Asian cityscape thanks to a Bangkok-based production, “Earth” owes as much to “Alien” as to “Blade Runner,” an equally influential entry in director Ridley Scott’s filmography. Our protagonist is Wendy (Sydney Chandler, daughter of Kyle), née Marcy, a former cancer patient who becomes the first-ever hybrid and names her new self after the eldest Darling child in JM Barrie’s “Peter Pan.” Subsequent hybrids naturally assume the monikers of Peter’s Lost Boys, from Slightly (Adarsh Gourav) to Smee (Jonathan Ajayi). In this metaphor, Peter himself is, of course, Kavalier, a precocious trillionaire with a Roman Roy-like reluctance to sit normally in a chair or even wear shoes. His moniker is already on the nose — he’s a boy, who’s cavalier! — well before he starts quoting passages from his favorite book.
“Earth” assumes its audience is familiar with the basic “Alien” setup, a baseline that leads to some amusing shortcuts. When the premiere cuts straight from the crew of the Maginot enjoying a meal to security officer Morrow (Babou Ceesay), a cyborg, barricading himself in the control room, I wrote in my notes that “I see an ‘Alien’ situation has occurred.” It’s almost a relief that “Earth” initially skips past such well-trodden territory, and eliminates any suspense around the Xenomorph’s life cycle or final form that would be difficult to sustain over several episodes anyway. Midseason, “Earth” doubles back and delivers the Hawley take on a classic “Alien” scenario, and while it makes for a gripping, relatively standalone hour, it also has the slight air of the obligatory — Hawley doing his duty as caretaker rather than pursuing his own ends. The episode is even dubbed “In Space, No One…”, the ellipsis alluding to the likelihood that if you’re watching an “Alien” TV show, you almost certainly know how this goes.
What all the strategic omissions make room for is a study of what happens to humanity when it’s refracted through a machine. The idea itself is a science fiction trope in its own right, enlivened by idiosyncratic details and a host of strong performances. “Earth” takes seriously the idea of children’s minds in adult, if inorganic, bodies. The hybrids snicker at swear words and speak in charmingly simplistic language; when the group happens upon a cluster of Xenomorph eggs in the Maginot wreck, Wendy orders her friend to “guard the omelet!” They also retain the mannerisms of their younger selves, a house style for which Chandler sets the tone.
The hybrids’ minder, Kirsh (Timothy Olyphant), is an old-school synthetic who urges his charges to embrace their novelty. (“Fear is for animals,” he tells them before they board the Maginot. “You are not animals.”) Kirsh’s shock of white hair and dry, sardonic air give Olyphant refreshing distance from the upright lawmen he’s known for. They also form a contrast with Wendy, whose naiveté and wide-eyed curiosity make her a very different kind of heroine from Sigourney Weaver’s tenacious Ripley. When Wendy reunites with her human brother, a Prodigy-employed medic who goes by Hermit (Alex Lawther), it underscores that she’s neither detached like Kirsh nor fragile like her family member. She’s something new, undergoing a process of self-discovery that Chandler renders transparent.
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In focusing on synthetics, Hawley exploits a quirk in the “Alien” universe’s established bylaws: because they have no flesh to feast on, they’re not natural prey the way humans are. There’s a practical benefit to this, along with the synthetics’ super-strength; a story about aliens let loose on a vulnerable human populace would likely have to be a short one. But there’s a philosophical angle, too — an intriguing idea that starts to come into focus as the season unfolds. The interests of the hybrids and the aliens aren’t inherently at odds. In fact, they’re both treated as science experiments and contained in research facilities under humans’ control. There may be more that unites the two groups than divides them. And if that’s true, where does it leave the jailers?
“Earth” follows the lavish epic “Shōgun” as a massive investment on the part of FX, which now balances period pieces and genre fare with smaller projects like, say, “Dying for Sex.” That expenditure is evident on the screen; production designer Andy Nicholson crafts evocative images like the clunky Maginot wedged into a high-end shopping center, while the new aliens are convincingly rendered enough to induce entirely new fears, including a parasitic eyeball that hijacks the nervous system. (Though if I’m being honest, no recent addition is quite as indelible as a baby Xenomorph bursting out of a chest in the original “Alien.”) But aliens do not have the inner lives — that we know of, at least — to propel the plot of a show over hours or even seasons, a length that “Earth” is explicitly aiming for. For that, Hawley turns to Wendy and her fellow synthetics, thrilled and terrified and in some cases destabilized by their new lease on life. They’re not as flashy as the voracious monsters, but they prove a richer vein to mine.
The first two episodes of “Alien: Earth” will premiere on FX and Hulu on August 12 at 8pm ET, with remaining episodes airing weekly on Tuesdays.
From Variety US