3-2-1: Alien: Earth

2025, 8 episodes - Disney+/FX
created by Noah Hawley

The What 100: A deep-space research vessel owned by Weyland-Yutani crash lands in the Prodigy Corporation-controlled territory of New Siam. Prodigy founder Boy Kavalier sends his precious hybrids (completely synthetic bodies housing the minds of sick children who volunteered to have their consciousnesses transferred) to recover whatever is most precious that it may house. And those, of course, are a variety of alien specimens. But one surviving crew member, a Weyland-Yutani loyalist, is not going to just let Prodigy keep what they find. What's the most dangerous thing on Earth: invasive species, a new breed of being, desperate men, or greedy corporations?

3 Great: (1) World building. For the longest time I've never wanted to see "Aliens, but on Earth" because it seemed like the easiest and most obvious answer would be a plague that runs rampant, out of control too fast and too deadly for anyone to stop it. I had no interest in that story, whether in the end it was stopped or not stopped, either way it just seemed ... banal. Creator Noah Hawley's idea, which is to expand the reality of what is actually happening on Earth (it's run by essentially 5 corporations, rather than any sort of governmental structure now), and then carving out its own little pocket of this reality to operate in is the masterstroke of inspiration. In setting up the previously unheard of Prodigy Corporation, as well as establishing not just the Hybrids (as described above) but also Cyborgs (cybernetically enhanced humans) on top of the Weyland-Yutani-created Synths (who we've seen plenty of in the Alien franchise...Ash, Bishop, Michael), it's just opens up the world. For me the most stimulating parts of this reality are the glimpses into the corporate structures and rivalries (but they're not front and center to the show).

(2) The Hybrids, Boy K, and the Peter Pan connection. Centering a show or movie around kids can be a dicey affair, primarily because kid actors tend to always be a mixed bag. Even if they're really good, they're also going to age and that can make for complex storytelling. But Hybrids put the mind of children in adult bodies, and the show has a host of exceptionally capable actors playing the Hybrids who very effectively convey their youthfulness and naivety, both when interacting with adults and with each other. Where the show could have wallowed in boring "exploring their new bodies" stories like many a superhero show of the 2000s, instead it decides to wrestle with the ideas of whether these beings are even human anymore, and also delving into the trauma of severing your identity with your body.  Boy K (Samuel Blenkin, Black Mirror), an early 20-something genius in technology and business, sees himself as the "Peter Pan" of his new crew of post-human beings, and so he names all of them after the Lost Boys, except for Wendy (Sydney Chandler, Sugar), the first of his creations, who is his favourite. Having just watched a whole bunch of Pan movies recently, I loved how it toyed with its metaphorical connections, and, in the season 1 endgame, how it all was revealed to be bullshit, not connecting to the material at all. Boy K doesn't see himself as a parent to the Hybrids, but their cool rebel leader who they should inherently love. Instead the role of parents go to Arthur (David Rysdahl, Fargo Season 5) and Dame Sylvia (Essie Davis, Miss Fisher's Murder Mysteries) who are the technological and psychiatric experts on the whole Hybrid endeavour (as much as anyone can be an expert on a purely experimental process). Their different approaches to parenting create a pivotal inflection point in the series, and it's so interesting to see how people in this reality deal with their multi-trillionaire overlords who think themselves beyond human. 

(3) The new Aliens. Introduced on the vessel Maginot at the start of episode 1, the research ship has been fruitful in finding new species out in its 60 years travelling the galaxy, and it's ready to bring them home. But they're unprepared for the intelligence of the creatures they have brought with them, and things start to really go sideways. Once on Earth and in the hands of the Prodigy Corporation, things really aren't much better. The hubris of humanity is to think that all creatures are unintelligent, incapable of observing or learning, and that whatever systems we put in place to contain them are beyond their capacity to figure a way out of. Of course we're wrong, and the show is at its most upsetting when it's proving how wrong we are...including thinking that the Hybrids have found a way to escape death Among the creatures is a very large kind of fly-trap like animal (as opposed to vegetable), and there are creatures called "flies" that themselves eat non-organic material. Of course, there's also the Xenomorphs in all their various stages (and because this is a TV show, it has time to explore those various stages in much more depth than ever before...including what a facehugger is implanting within its hosts. But the greatest addition, the greatest creation of the series, even more than Prodigy or the Hybrids or the Cyborgs or any individual character among a host of great characters, is a Trypanohyncha Ocellus, a multi-tenticled eyeball creature whose iris can segment into many irises around its ocular body. It is looking for an ideal host, and when it finds one it brutally and aggressively burrows into its eye socket and replaces the being's eye with itself, and presumably its tentacles are penetrating the brain of the creature in a manner that allows it to control the being. Nicknamed Iris by some in the fan community, it is a very clever, intelligent creature, that much is shown, but we don't know how smart it actually is, or if it's able to communicate with language. It's unknown when it takes a hose whether it's in full control or if there's some form of symbiosis. There so much to explore with Iris, I love it tremendously and it creeps me the fuck out.

2 Bad: (1) The Xenomorphs. Everything around the xenomorphs, from the egg pods to the facehuggers to the infancy stages that are puppets or whatnot are all great and I loved every aspect of them in the show and on screen. The full grown Xenomorphs is where I felt the show didn't work. I appreciate the fact that the Xenomorphs were pretty much always practical, man-in-suit, but I really, really, really disliked the physicality of the creatures on screen. I know the stunt performers spent a lot of time studying the history of Xenomorphs on screen and they tried to adhere as faithfully as they could to history, but something in the way these particular ones were constructed, they didn't ever look right, and the movements were too exposed. The Xenomorphs are seen broad daylight, rarely in the shadows, and it exposes them too much. You need the shadows against the darkness of the body and the details to all be somewhat hidden, to really be more difficult to see, otherwise it...well, looks like a guy in a suit.  It's weird for me to feel that this show that is built on the Alien franchise, a franchise that centers around that classic Geiger design, only truly fails at the one thing that has been done so right so often, and yet succeed at pretty much every single other thing....

(2) ...except the finale. The show was PERFECTLY set up for a Grand Guignal of a finale, to really have the aliens (all of them) run ham on the entire Prodigy compound and just be a bevvy of carnage and chaos for our protagonists (some of them) to survive. Part of what I loved about the world building I described above was how the series so obviously constructed a corner for itself to play in such that when it all came crashing down it wouldn't affect anything else in the franchise. The expectation was there would be an implosion at the hands of the creatures, and there was not. I do not fully dislike the finale, but it fundamentally fails to deliver what any Alien film or story needs to close out with, just an orgy of alien violence.  Instead it pitches focus back to its central characters, and largely has the Hybrids level up. They're the ones that run ham on the Prodigy compound. Wendy/Marcy has learned to communicate and effectively command an adult Xenomorph (one which was borne out of her brother's lung, almost as if it's weirdly family) which neuters a bit of the chaotic element, but adds its own interesting wrinkles.  Where the show ends up, with the Hybrids in control, but Weyland-Yutani descending on the compound and all the adult players who have irked the Hybrids under their thumb could still have been the end result with a big scratch-fest (though sacrifices should have been made).  It's absolutely clear (and confirmed by Hawley on the excellent companion podcast) that the decision was made to not close these out in any real fashion because they're making a  TV series, and didn't want there to be any type of closure that might give Disney/FX the opportunity to say "nah, that's alright, we don't really need more".  It's tactical rather than satisfying.

1 Good: So much good (Timothy Olyphant as a Synth!? Come on! Incredible) but episode 5, which flashes back to the full story of what happened in those final hours on the Maginot is an incredible mini-movie in the midst of the series that also acts as a massive recontextualzation of cyborg Morrow (the magnificent Babou Ceesay, Free Fire) who in the previous episodes was nothing but reprehensible and vile, and he comes out of this flashback being, almost an anti-hero.  But the episode replicates in a way the Nostramo from Ridley Scott's classic original (the idea being that many of these big barges would have been made at the same time, on a sort of assembly line basis, so they're very similar if not exactly the same), allows us to spend more time on one of these ships with a different crew, and for things to go tits up in a very different way for very different reasons. It's an absolute blast.

META: As I mentioned above, I went into Alien: Earth with expectations that it would play to the easiest possible story, and not only was I pleasantly surprised by what it actually about, I really began to love every character and their role to play in the story by episode two (the only character I don't love is Nibs, because she's too much of a wild card...venturing into psychopath territory... I think there will be interesting things around her lack of stability in the next season, but boy is her style of cuckoo-bananas hard to empathize with).

The series had me eating out of its hand pretty much from moment one. It looks incredible (man-in-suit Xenomorph excepting) and it's stories and characters are so laden with complexities, there's a tremendous amount to explore.  This isn't a mystery box show in the slightest. It's not asking questions and depriving the audience of answers, it's just got so much depth to its characters, sci-fi scenarios and psychological ideas that it's got multiple seasons worth of mining to do. But at the same time, it's part of the Alien franchise so it *must* retain the surprise and horror of its most alien aspects. Hawley and company rightly understand that the Xenomorph has been used to death and really isn't surprising anymore (it's still pretty scary), so the introduction of new species with so much to learn about them still, leaves the show with many more scares and gross-outs in its pocket.

It's going to be years before we get a season 2. Again, I wish the finale had performed better as a denouement, just to be more satisfying while we wait, but I'm definitely going to rewatch, probably multiple times, in the meantime.