Ridley Scott’s iconic 1979 science fiction classic, Alien, is hands-down my favorite film of all time. In the five decades since, we’ve gotten plenty of sequels and prequels, most of which I’d either rank as fantastic or practically unwatchable (there’s weirdly no in-between with the Alien franchise). So I was surprised to realize that when it comes to Noah Hawley’s spinoff show, Alien: Earth, my feelings are decidedly ambiguous. Somehow, the series is both a hit and a miss for me.
Alien: Earth definitely gets a lot right, but after watching the season 1 finale, I’m torn, because it gets a lot of things wrong, too. There’s clear commitment to certain aspects of the Alien franchise, but many of the show’s most interesting plot points never really pay off. Now that I’ve had a little time to digest the events of the first season, I’m ready to talk. Here are the top five things I loved about Alien: Earth season 1 — and five more things I hated.
5 things I loved about Alien: Earth
The casting and acting
I can’t say this enough: The cast of Alien: Earth does a great deal of heavy lifting. Babou Ceesay’s performance as cyborg Morrow is arguably the best part of the show. Timothy Olyphant’s synthetic, sarcastic Kirsh is also a treat to watch. Samuel Blenkin does a phenomenal job playing Prodigy CEO Boy Kavalier, pulling off a performance that’s simultaneously magnetic and repulsive.
Even supporting characters like Smee (Jonathan Ajayi) and Slightly (Adarsh Gourav) are both charming and extremely believable as children trapped in synthetic adult bodies, and Lily Newmark is delightfully unsettling as Nibs, a Hybrid who is clearly starting to unravel mentally. Series star Sydney Chandler also manages to portray a believable young Wendy, and the only thing that detracts from her emotive performance are confusing statements made early on in the season that seem to suggest the Hybrids don’t experience emotion the way people do. Wendy and the rest of the “Lost Boys” frequently express feelings that would seem to suggest their emotions are fairly intact.
The music
Look, I don’t care if it’s a gimmick, I’m 100% here for it. Each of Alien: Earth‘s episodes ends with the credits rolling to the tunes of my teen years. Tool’s “Stinkfist,” Metallica’s “Wherever I May Roam,” and The Smashing Pumpkins’ “Cherub Rock” all make appearances during season 1’s credits. Even if I don’t like the way an episode ended, it’s hard not to smile when I hear the songs that ruled my youth combined with my all-time favorite sci-fi/horror franchise.
The musical treats aren’t reserved solely for the post-episode credits, either. We get to hear a golden oldie (The Ink Spots’ “We’ll Meet Again”) while Morrow reminisces about his past in episode 5, and Alt-J’s “Tesselate” plays in the lead-up to a tense meeting between Prodigy and Weyland-Yutani. The cherry on top is the eerie remix of Cream’s “Strange Brew” that plays during each episode’s opening sequence with Hawley himself providing the vocals and tweaking the lyrics from, “Killing what’s inside of you,” to, “Kill what’s inside of you.”
The intro
I really appreciate the show’s introductory sequence for its simplicity and utility. Hawley easily could have done some long, rambling opening credits sequence and wasted multiple minutes making us watch close-ups of Xenormorphs (or whatever) while the cast’s names sluggishly appeared on-screen. Instead, he went with something far more simple (and far more haunting). A three-beep tone plays as the show’s title appears on screen before viewers get a brief visual recap of the previous episode.
It’s quick, it’s creepy, and it does a great job of reminding viewers what happened in the last episode while setting the tone for the one they’re about to watch.
The practical effects
One of the things I love most about 1979’s Alien is the practical effects. The movie still looks incredibly good by modern standards, and much of Alien: Earth follows in its footsteps, especially when it comes to Xenomorphs. The show makes use of multiple Xenomorph suits and a large animatronic Xenomorph puppet named Steve.
Yes, there are definitely some scenes where I looked at the Xenomorph and thought, “That’s a guy in a suit,” but there were certainly moments like that in the original Alien film as well. Frankly, I’d much rather be exposed to practical effects that are obvious but still look good, than be forced to watch special effects that are both noticeably CGI and noticeably bad.
New creatures
I’m usually a bit of a purist when it comes to creatures in the Alien universe. I care about Xenomorphs and Xenomorphs only. So the first few episodes of Alien: Earth had me worried as Hawley introduced several new creatures to the universe, including a strange, ceiling-dwelling plant-thing, a hive of deadly flies, a small swarm of absolutely disgusting tick-like creatures, and of course, the “eyeball alien” also known as t. ocellus or Species 64.
Kudos to Hawley: T. ocellus is the first non-Xenomorph creature I’ve ever really cared about in the Alien franchise. Not only is this eyeball monster pretty darn cute, but it’s also intelligent, outclassing the Xenomorphs (and maybe even the humans) when it comes to its ability to pull off an evil scheme. Hopefully, we see much more of Species 64 in season 2.
5 things I hated about Alien: Earth:
Ice Age
Look, I get it. Fox owns the Ice Age animated movie franchise, and Disney owns Fox. But of all the animated children’s films to shoehorn into your Alien TV show, why Ice Age? The film’s 3D animation feels incredibly out-of-place in Alien’s retrofuturistic, analog-everything universe, and every time Sid the sloth’s face appears on-screen, I am instantly taken out of the sci-fi universe in which the show takes place.
I’m all for giving Wendy and her brother Joe (Alex Lawther) a relatable flick to bond over, but Ice Age goes with Alien the way buttercream icing goes with wasabi. I’d have preferred if Disney had just stuck with the Neverland theme and had Wendy and Joe grow up watching Peter Pan together. If you’re going to force a ham-fisted message about growing up into your show, at least be consistent — and leave Sid the sloth out of it.
The pacing
Historically, Alien has been a film franchise, and audiences go into each entry knowing that most of the cast will be dead by the time the film hits the 90-minute mark. Naturally, it’s going to be difficult to get the pacing right in a TV show that spans nearly eight hours. But Alien: Earth‘s pacing is all over the place. I lost count of the times I was hit with a credits sequence only to find myself thinking, “Really? We’re ending the episode here?” Throughout the entire show, scenes drift awkwardly into each other in a way that just feels off.
There is zero build-up to the Xenomorph’s first appearance — a stark contrast to the Alien films, which usually give you at least an hour of tension before the creature reveals itself. That’s not realistic for a TV show, obviously, but it felt rather anticlimactic to see a Xenomorph tear apart the Maginot crew mere minutes into episode 1. Conversely, the finale had the opposite problem. We get lots of shots of Wendy’s (relatively) tamed Xenomorph lurking around Neverland while hiding in the island’s lush foliage, and occasionally, a brief glimpse of it tearing through Prodigy and Weyland-Yutani security forces. But we never got a truly tense scene with the Xenomorph, nor did we get to see it kill any characters of importance. Episode 1 started off with a bang, but episode 8 failed to provide the blood-soaked payoff that Alien fans have been trained to expect.
The unbelievable stupidity
Alien is a horror franchise, and horror franchises sort of necessitate that at least one person do something dumb. But stupidity is downright contagious in Alien: Earth. Some of that stupidity is explained when we learn Boy Kavalier has “severe” ADHD and hasn’t been taking his meds. That might explain his very dumb, very impulsive decision to send The Lost Boys — a $6 billion investment that effectively serves as mankind’s first steps toward immortality — into the wreckage of the USCSS Maginot to investigate the ship and retrieve the deadly specimens on board.
There are plenty of other moments of baffling stupidity in Alien: Earth, like the fact that the Maginot’s lead medical officer, Chibuzo (Karen Aldridge), thinks it’s a good idea to eat her lunch with one hand while feeding alien species with the other, or the fact that Weyland-Yutani apparently has her storing these deadly creatures in containers made of easily breakable glass in the first place. The most mind-boggling moment of stupidity comes in the finale, when Wendy has to face off with Kavalier’s synthetic manservant, Atom (Adrian Edmonson). All it takes is Wendy yelling, “No!” and suddenly Atom is frozen in place, unable to fight. Wendy explains that Atom is “on the network,” thus she can control him just like the security cameras. Have tech genius Boy Kavalier and his army of brilliant synths and scientists never heard of a private network?
The Hybrids just don’t make sense
Wendy was the first Hybrid created by Prodigy. If anything, you’d think that might make her less advanced than her fellow Lost Boys. She has the ability to hear Xenomorphs speak, because her synthetic body can make out frequencies that are too high or low for human ears to detect. That makes sense. What doesn’t make sense is why the other Hybrids can’t hear the Xenomorphs. Did Boy Kavalier just give Wendy super-special hearing abilities, but decide not to give those same abilities to future Hybrids? The show seems to imply that this ability only surfaced after Wendy fought and killed the Maginot Xenomorph, but that doesn’t really make sense, either, since we already knew she had superior hearing, and whatever might have happened during her fight with the Xenomorph that would result in the sudden ability to understand their language is never explained.
In episode 7, Nibs finally snaps and starts murdering members of Prodigy’s security force with her bare hands. She takes two shots to the left side of her chest, but doesn’t go down until Joe hits her with the same type of super-taser Morrow used to knock out an adult Xenomorph earlier in the season. Nibs seems very dead, and Wendy is horrified. But when we see Nibs in episode 8, her injuries have been repaired and she’s seemingly fine. Meanwhile, we’re made to believe that one of the other Hybrids, Isaac (Kit Young), is completely dead after some alien flies melt half of his face. We’re given a half-hearted explanation about the flies being drawn to non-organic matter, and when Kavalier asks where the science team is on rebooting Isaac, Kirsh says it’s theoretically possible, but seems to imply that Prodigy’s scientists aren’t sure where to even begin. I guess Hybrids can survive gunshots, intense electrical charges, and hand-to-hand combat with Xenomorphs, but cosmetic damage from fly puke is a recipe for instant death.
The ending
Alien: Earth’s biggest sin is how little payoff viewers get in the season finale. No one of importance dies at the hands of Wendy’s pet Xenormorph — it appears to have better manners and far more restraint than your average housecat. We also don’t get to see t. ocellus scoop out one of boy Kavalier’s eyeballs and take over his body, an event Hawley has been teasing us with all season. Instead it climbs into the days-old, pre-chestbursted corpse of Arthur (David Rysdahl), presumably so his wife, Dame Sylvia (Essie Davis) can bump into him next season and scream in horror. Episode 8 is also when the writers suddenly remember that ceiling-dwelling plant-thing from the Maginot exists, and it proceeds to eat one of Prodigy’s redshirt soldiers before disappearing again. Even the brewing tension between Wendy and Curly (Erana James) over who is Boy Kavalier’s favorite Hybrid fizzles out, with Curly revealing she wishes to be called by her real name, Jane, and then proceeding to happily follow Wendy’s orders.
It feels like the show’s writers wanted to tie things up with a bow while also leaving room for a potential season 2. That impulse makes sense, but the execution leaves much to be desired. At best, viewers got an unsatisfying ending and will have to wait god-knows-how-long to see how things play out next season. At worst, the show isn’t renewed, and we now have several gigantic, alien-on-the-loose-shaped plot threads left waving in the wind, never to be resolved.
Alien: Earth is a fun ride, and I do hope we get a season 2. I just hope the writers take that opportunity to put a little more thought into how (and why) things work the way they do in this universe.
