Alien: Earth Season One Review

 

Alien: Earth - Season One (No Spoilers) 

 

Last time I reviewed the latest installment in the Alien franchise, I had a lot to say—in fact, looking back, I think I had too much to say, especially when I didn’t even love the movie all that much. This time, it might seem likely that I will have even more to say since the newest addition to one of my favourite franchises is an eight-episode direct-to-streaming TV show, so in terms of content, there’s more to talk about than ever. But, to everyone’s surprise including my own, I actually have less to say about Alien: Earth, because unfortunately, I think it’s now my least favourite entry in the franchise.

Before I get too far into why I quickly grew frustrated, disappointed, and baffled with the show, I will say there are actually multiple aspects I like, especially as a long time Alien fan, but before I can get to the highlights, I have to address the first major problem, which is the very nature of the show’s premise. Not only did I have little initial interest in xenomorphs running around on planet earth as far back as when the show was first announced years ago, I found series creator Noah Hawley’s comments about disregarding prequel lore and cherry-picking stuff he liked to use as cannon and changing what he wanted a bit unfair to fans who enjoyed Ridley Scott’s Prometheus, such as myself, and made me wonder how it would fit into the well-established canon of the original film. After a couple episodes, I started to wonder why he even bothered to call it Alien: Earth, and even by the end of the season, I think Alien: Island might have been a better title, given the three primary locations in ascending order of most screentime are one big building, a spaceship, and a remote research facility on a tropical island.

It's not the earth-ish setting as part of the premise that I had such a problem with out of the gate, though. The series begins by introducing three types of artificial people. First, there are the synthetics, which we know well from previous Alien films: seemingly living individuals that spew milky blood when injured and often prioritize the creature’s best interests over those of humans. Timothy Olyphant plays Kirsch, an older model who seems to have a secret agenda (as these synths often do) and while he’s only a supporting character, he is one of the most interesting in the cast, and Olyphant plays him expertly, making him different from Michael Fassbender’s David and Ian Holm’s Ash, but similarly unpredictable. The second type are cyborgs: humans with technological upgrades. I’ll come back to this type, but the third type are hybrids, which are artificial bodies with previously living human minds uploaded to them. It’s something new for the franchise, continuing the fascination with tech that’s been overtaking these narratives since Prometheus.

The hybrids are the main characters of Alien: Earth, created by the mega corporation called Prodigy, a rival to the familiar Weyland Yutani Corporation, named after the billionaire founder who goes by the name Boy Cavalier (Samuel Blenkin) and has a strange obsession with Peter Pan. The Peter Pan stuff is just to provide some unsubtle extended metaphors throughout the show, and hey, now that Disney owns Alien, it’s easy to provide some scenes from the animated film early in episode one. See, the idea here is a bunch of terminally ill children are going to live forever in adult bodies by having their undeveloped adolescent minds uploaded to superpowered robotic bodies, which has never been done before, but what could go wrong? Boy Cavalier is a purposefully annoying, egotistical, exaggerated, narcissistic genius who is clouded by the temptation to do something crazy because he figured out how and can make a ton more money from it, rather than considering what could go wrong or whether he should do it at all.

What this means for the show is the narrative follows a bunch of kids in adult bodies, so we have adults acting like kids, and they are all named after the Lost Boys from Peter Pan. Wendy, played by Sydney Chandler, is the one who is supposedly most special, and these super expensive, super unique hybrids are sent to investigate a crashed spaceship, the Maginot, which happens to be carrying several species of deadly extraterrestrials, including the xenomorph we all know and love to fear. Yes, Boy Cavalier knows all about these creatures before Wendy and the Lost Boys even get to the ship, but it makes sense to send these expensive, experimental kid-tech-combos in without any training or strict supervision instead of a proper rescue troop or investigation team, right? Well, actually, there are some Prodigy security soldiers sent in, as well, and one of them, medic Joe Hermit (Alex Lawther), just so happens to be Wendy’s brother from her previous life, and even though she no longer looks like her childhood self or even bears the same name, Joe runs into her and quickly figures out she really is his sister, and the two of them are reunited, but he soon realizes Prodigy does not have her best interests in mind. 

So, this is where the show starts off, and if it’s not already clear, I did not like the concept. I hated all of the Lost Boys, I hated their nicknames, and I could not take any of it seriously when the jumping off point for the show was so stupid. I did keep watching the season hoping it would get better, but things certainly got dumber once the creatures were brought back to Prodigy’s island research station, and the seeds of plenty of ideas with potential were planted early on, but they didn’t grow into anything surprising, intelligent, or satisfying. The actors playing kids in adult bodies did the best job they could. Some pull it off better than others, but it often felt like the concept was an excuse to have characters act stupidly on purpose just to allow for more carnage and mayhem to occur and for questionable story beats to be brushed off more easily. As for the “boy genius” character? Yeah, I don’t know what the excuse is for his stupidity. There are multiple supposedly intelligent characters who make increasingly idiotic decisions, but without the stupidity, there actually wouldn’t be much of a show, since stupidity is what leads to plot progression from one episode to the next.

Alien: Earth has more going on than any Alien entry before in terms of different synthetics, different alien species, and different characters who will inevitably fall victim to one or the other or both. In a different way from how Prometheus stretched its ambitions far beyond the original Alien’s simple premise of seven truckers in space trying to survive one unpredictable hostile organism, Alien: Earth muddies the waters of the established lore and, in some ways, really swings for the fences, but hits so many foul balls in the process that it becomes baffling how many braindead ideas made it into the production and up onto the screen for how many well executed ideas also made it. For me, there were no home runs, but I do have some respect for Noah Hawley trying out so many things with the established lore, making some new additions, and trying to put his own spin on the franchise. Some of his techniques work well, like his repeated use of crossfades (except that maligned, meme-worthy Ice Age shot), but some, like the constant use of different heavy metal songs at the end of the final scenes of the episodes before the credits, just don’t sound right or feel appropriate.

Coming back to the other type of artificial person, the main cyborg character is Morrow, played by Babou Ceesay, who is a crewmember of the crashed Maginot ship. His likeness to Yaphett Kotto who played Parker in the original Alien is no accident, and his character is easily the most compelling from the entire cast. Ceesay plays Morrow with a controlled intensity, delivers his lines with conviction, and has the best written backstory, as well as the most interesting role in the season’s overarching narrative. His mechanical blade arm is clearly lifted from the T-1000 in T2, but it’s still pretty cool. Beyond Kirsch and Morrow and the rivalry between the two, Joe is a somewhat interesting character, though he frequently acts chill during insanely horrific scenes and has evident plot armour, and one of the newly introduced species of aliens, nicknamed “The Eye” (AKA the T. Ocellus) nearly steals the show as a horrific, disgusting, but fascinating intelligent monster. Other than that, for all the characters in the show, not many are that interesting, and another big problem is the lack of clarity around the nature of the hybrids.

Even the Alien movies knew better than to make synthetics main characters. Humans have to be kept in the loop, and as much as we love Bishop in Aliens, we love him because he’s a supporting role to Ripley’s role as the protagonist and he was an inversion on the nefarious Ash from the first movie. Aliens would not be good if Bishop was the main character. I don’t know if Wendy can be reuploaded to a new body if she becomes damaged beyond repair, but I also don’t really care. None of the Lost Boys are very interesting, and I don’t like the protagonists being artificial, even if they do have some real memories and previous experiences in living bodies. If Joe had been the protagonist and the story had been from his perspective more, perhaps I could have bought into the premise more easily. Many have cited the fifth episode, which is a flashback to how everything went wrong on the Maginot and why it crashed into Prodigy City, as one of the best of the season, and I would agree, partly because it had nothing to do with the main plot of Prodigy’s hybrids.

I won’t spoil too much about the show’s later episodes since it’s so new and even after my review some may still want to check it out, but the connections between the hybrids and the creatures develop into pitiful twists or don’t end up going anywhere at all, and some of the new creatures end up relegated to the background for most of the season, while the xenomorph itself gets many moments to shine, but also ends up a bit like the Velociraptors from Jurassic World later in the season. At times, the old school alien looks pretty good and racks up an impressive kill count, but a lot of the time it’s filmed inadequately and looks like a guy in a suit—also a result of some poor tweaks to the design and the overall size of the actor being smaller than most previous iterations. The familiar stages (egg, facehugger, chestburster, adult) all get showcased, but there’s nothing creative or fresh about any of them; it feels more obligatory than anything to have them featured, and at times, the xenomorph takes a back seat to all the other stuff going on.

The reviews for Alien: Earth have been mixed—some love it, some hate it— but initially, I was taken aback by how positive they seemed. Sure, the recreation of the retro-futuristic aesthetic from the original is impressive right from episode one and never falters—the whole show looks visually incredible, honestly—and there are obviously the other positives I’ve already highlighted, but the amount of questionable decisions from a storytelling perspective just really brought the whole thing down for me (and on the note of the visuals, Romulus already recreated the look of the original Alien, so it didn’t impress me as something that hadn’t been done to that level before). I watched episodes one and two with absolute intention and hoped something great would develop, and then I watched the remaining episodes half-checked out. Actually, I was more than halfway checked out by the finale. The bad writing didn’t make me feel like they completely wasted the premise of Alien on a multi-episode format, but they really didn’t make the most of it, either.  

Alien is scary because it’s a slasher movie in space. Aliens is awesome because it’s an action horror movie and a great story with great characters that builds on what came before. Most of the other sequels, prequels, and spinoffs suffered from having generic characters, increasingly far-flung plots full of holes, and a decreasing fright factor. Alien: Earth does not have generic characters, but they aren’t the kind of intelligent, believable, endearing characters we need. The plot is what’s flimsiest of all, but it’s also really not scary. Adding in new monsters does provide some new repulsive body horror elements, but it’s still nowhere near frightening when none of the characters are endearing and most of them are artificial, in more than one sense. Not only was I not rooting for the protagonists of this show by the end, I wasn’t even rooting for the xenomorph because it ends up being one of the most neutered versions seen yet. I held out hope for some kind of payoff in the season’s endgame, and I was not rewarded. I’m not surprised, though, because when the very genesis of the idea for the show did not work for me, I didn’t expect it to ever really grow beyond that. It’s unfortunate so much money, so many great visual effects, an overall good cast, and a sprinkling of new ideas and new lore were wasted on such a bad premise.

Will I feel differently down the road, perhaps if I ever finally rewatch Alien: Covenant, or any episodes of Alien: Earth Season One, or if they make a second season and continue the story? Perhaps. For now, though, I think the reason it feels like the worst chapter of the Alien saga is because of just how much of it there is and how much potential was squandered. Alien: Covenant was disappointing, sure, but it did pick up some threads from Prometheus which was a movie I enjoyed, in spite of some definite screenwriting stupidity. Even the sequels like 3 and Resurrection and the crossovers with Predator had more consistent creature effects, better action, and some even had more interesting characters. More to the point: I wasn’t stuck with any of those lesser stories (compared to Alien and Aliens) for longer than two hours. Alien: Earth, for all it gets right, gets so much wrong that it adds up as just too great a quantity of crap to even recommend to Alien fans or casual TV watchers. There is no need to watch this show, and I take no pleasure in saying so, because it was on the verge of greatness, but lost its footing right from the start, never to regain it. Last note: it ends on a terrible cliffhanger, and given how long it took season one to finally come out, if it does get a second season, I’m sure that cliffhanger won’t be resolved for many years to come. I won’t be waiting around!