is a reporter focusing on film, TV, and pop culture. Before The Verge, he wrote about comic books, labor, race, and more at io9 and Gizmodo for almost five years.
While the monsters in each of the nine Alien movies have been a little bit different, the nefarious corporate forces have remained the same. Ridley Scott’s original Alien didn’t need to mention Weyland-Yutani by name for it to be clear that a singular mega-company had cornered the market on space exploration. But subsequent Alien films turned the franchise into a terrifying rumination on the violence baked into capitalism’s DNA.
Though Weyland-Yutani has loomed larger and larger in various Alien projects over the years, FX’s new Alien: Earth series is the first to explore what it looks like on the ground. Set two years before the original film, the show introduces new ideas about what gave rise to the series’ xenomorphs. But what’s most fascinating about this story is the way it depicts corporations as apex predators that have conquered the planet.
Before it gets terrestrial though, Alien: Earth opens in familiar fashion, aboard a spaceship owned by Weyland-Yutani. The crew of the USCSS Maginot understands that it is an expendable means to an end in the eyes of its employer. And after 65 years of cryo-sleep-assisted deep space travel, everyone wants to go home and get paid for completing their research mission — a task that has required all of them to give up any hope of ever seeing their long-dead friends and families ever again.
With just a few months left until the Maginot is scheduled to reenter Earth’s orbit, there’s a shared sense of relieved excitement between most of the ship’s newly awakened crew. But when some of the ship’s sensors and communications systems start to malfunction, security officer Morrow (Babou Ceesay) reminds everyone that they are still on the clock, and their top priority is to ensure the safe delivery of Weyland-Yutani’s coveted alien specimens.
Though Alien: Earth doesn’t immediately spell out what happens to the Maginot’s crew, the show gives you a series of brief and disturbing glimpses of their futures that make it clear how, on one level, this is a very classic kind of Alien story. Things go haywire, aliens get out, and people start dying in grisly ways. But the true horrors do not begin until the Maginot crash lands on Earth.
Through its impeccable production design, Alien: Earth immediately grounds itself in the larger world that Ridley Scott introduced to audiences back in 1979. The Maginot is a different kind of ship than the Nostromo, but its sterile, white hallways and consoles outfitted with analog screens and buttons make it feel like exactly the kind of vessel that Weyland-Yutani would have mass produced in its quest to become an interstellar operation. The show as a whole is utterly gorgeous in a way that few other projects on television are right now, and its visuals become even stronger as it sets its monster characters out in the wild thanks to its balance of digital and practical effects.
Noah Hawley, who wrote and directed the show’s premiere, is clearly taking steps to honor the first Alien both visually and narratively, as the episode teases how the Maginot’s alien cargo comes into the possession of Prodigy’s Peter Pan-obsessed CEO Boy Kavalier (Samuel Blenkin). While Boy and his synthetic research assistant Kirsh (Timothy Olyphant) are already busy preparing for the launch of a new technology that could give the ultra-wealthy a way to become functionally immortal, the young trillionaire wants whatever is on the Maginot because he knows it’s valuable to Yutani (Sandra Yi Sencindiver).
Alien: Earth’s trillionaire characters have a preoccupation with using technology to subvert death, which connects to one of the more important throughlines of the series. But the series becomes a very different beast than its predecessors from the moment the Maginot slams into one of Prodigy City’s massive skyscrapers.
Though this isn’t the first time that the Alien franchise has touched on Earth’s future, the series sets itself apart by fleshing out much more of what human society is like in 2120. Climate change hasn’t completely ruined the planet (yet), but because much of the series was filmed in Thailand, Prodigy City — a densely packed metropolis webbed with boat-filled canals — feels like a place that has had to adapt in order to survive in a world that’s become more hostile to human life. The planet’s most powerful corporations might be able to send people deep into space, but extreme wealth inequality still exists and children die of diseases that modern medicine cannot cure. Alien: Earth takes care to emphasize how capital like Boy’s could be spent on making people like combat medic Hermit’s (Alex Lawther) lives immediately better in more tangible, accessible ways. But the self-described boy genius is far more focused on his latest invention — fully synthetic androids that can house digitized human consciousness.
In fact, Alien: Earth is as much about androids as it is xenomorphs. The show introduces Wendy (Sydney Chandler) and all of Boy’s other hybrids, all children who have been given powerful adult bodies. Wendy and the other Lost Boys are, in a very literal sense, just kids. But they are also a new kind of synthetic being with novel abilities that make them very different from machines like Kirsch or cyborgs like Morrow. Through the Lost Boys, Alien: Earth establishes some of its most compelling ideas about what happens to people when their lives are defined by their relationships to technology. The kids are people, but they’re also products being experimented on by a man who embodies the worst of this futuristic society. (Plus, he never wears shoes.)
Between its strong performances and sharp scripts, Alien: Earth works phenomenally as a heady drama about young people learning to navigate the world. Chandler makes you feel Wendy’s wonder and terror as the adults in her life try to make her into something she isn’t sure she wants to be. But the show also delivers some of the Alien franchise’s most disturbing and gorgeously shot scares.
Though xenomorphs end up playing a larger role as the season progresses, Alien: Earth does an impressive job of making each of its extraterrestrials a different kind of alarming. And as the creatures metamorphize, they become increasingly difficult to control and dangerous — even for the super strong synthetics. The new monsters keep the show feeling fresh even as it riffs on familiar beats from other Alien projects.
What’s most impressive is how, for all of its moving parts and crisscrossing character arcs, Alien: Earth builds to a cohesive climax that’s as nightmarish as it is satisfying. It’s rare for a prequel series to feel like such a smart, engaging expansion of a world that’s already been explored from so many different angles. But Alien: Earth has the heat, and it’s one of this year’s strongest new shows.
Alien: Earth also stars Essie Davis, Adarsh Gourav, Kit Young, David Rysdahl, Jonathan Ajayi, Erana James, Lily Newmark, Diêm Camille, and Cameron Rodger Brown. The show premieres on August 12.
