If you were to delve into the deep, dark history of this blog you’d probably find a number of old reviews. Not so much in the last few years. While I am occasionally tempted to jot down my thoughts and feelings on the movies and TV shows I’ve watched or the books I’ve read I typically find, before the idea takes hold, that I’ve already moved onto the next thing. I have decided to preserve my train of thought long enough to make an exception for Alien: Earth however, simply because it’s a TV show based on Alien which means it’s of a certain personal significance and also because it, perhaps, tells an interesting story about pop culture media in the current day and age.
Go back to the time of Alien’s release and you’ll find that TV shows based on movies were … well, actually not that uncommon after all. The difference is in scale and perception. You would never have seen a TV spin-off for a major franchise (Bond, Star Wars, even Alien) because there was simply no way of bringing those widescreen visuals to a crappy CRT TV screen, especially with the budget limitations of the day. When a cinematic property did make the transition to television it was generally as a means of squeezing a few more dollars out of something that had already lost its cinematic lustre, so it didn’t matter if it was further cheapened by a lower quality TV adaptation.
That started to shift in the 1990s with shows like Star Trek: The Next Generation proving that you could deliver something approaching cinematic quality on the small screen (and, indeed, that show eventually made the converse transition—heading to cinemas to gasp its final breaths). With HBO and the rise of prestige TV (such as Game Of Thrones), not to mention the increasing availability and affordability of high quality widescreen TV sets and surround sound systems, the gap between cinema and television diminished even further. Production methods shifted. Budgets increased. TV became at least as good as cinema, perhaps even better. Major stars began to circle around TV productions without fear that it might forever doom their cinematic careers.
Then COVID happened and you might argue that cinemas have struggled to regain their foothold ever since. Now the only thing to distinguish your big screen experience from your sitting room is the likelihood that there’ll be more people chatting and munching noisily on their popcorn.
Critically, the streaming revolution had already happened by that point. Netflix changed the TV viewing model and before long everyone else wanted some of that action. Disney Plus had access to some of the biggest franchises on the planet and ruthlessly milked them to provide must-see—and exclusive—viewing on its new streaming service. (There’s a separate argument around whether Marvel and Stars Wars have been devalued by their small screen adventures which I’ll skip for now—all I’m trying to do here is paint the scenery).
The bottom line is that back in the 1980s a TV series based on Alien would have been unthinkable. Mainly because it was a cinematic franchise (all the comics and novels came later); it didn’t belong in our front rooms (brought down to earth, as it were). Even thematically speaking, the idea of the aliens reaching earth was unthinkable given the films made it pretty clear that it would mean game over for humanity.
In short, a TV show based on Alien and set on earth is already offering two impossible things (and before breakfast, too …).
A further challenge is that you have very few raw materials to craft from if you’re going to base something on Alien alone: we know precisely nothing about life on earth; we know next to nothing about the aliens; we can deduce only a little bit about corporate morality and motivations. There’s really not much there, but it certainly looks fantastic—it’s not for nothing that the production design from Alien persists through so much of sci-fi.
Years later, James Cameron proved that the franchise had commercial legs and broadened the premise just enough to spark the imagination—two factors that are probably critical for a multimedia franchise to be spawned. Cameron introduced the Colonial marines, the queen alien, the underpinning of family, and showed us that there were more than seven people in the universe after all. It was enough of a nudge that more stories could be told without necessarily destroying the mystique of the aliens themselves (hence those comics and novels).
Which is a long way of saying that, even though the show does its very best to ignore the trappings of Aliens, it’s almost a certainty that without that sequel we wouldn’t have had Alien: Earth.
Themes of an Alien story
I was heading into this review with the premise that, while Alien: Earth was a pretty good time, it was less successful specifically as an Alien show on the basis that you could easily remove all of the elements directly connected to Alien and the story would be none the worse for it (in fact, it might even be stronger). Then I started to ask myself: what are the main components of an Alien story? For this exercise I’m looking mainly at the first four movies (although some of these themes are carried over into the Prometheus movies) and solely at those which stem from the first movie (so no space marines, sorry).
The core themes of an Alien movie are:
- Will synths protect us or be used as tools to destroy us? Do they have their own agenda?
- The human body is mortal and penetrable.
- Space is dark and full of horrors.
- Your corporate employer will probably try to kill you. And if they don’t do that they will, at the very least, treat you as disposable property.
(Basically, an Alien movie is not a good place to be, so if you ever find yourself in one … run!).
I’ve never really seen the Alien movies as a medium for exploring artificial intelligence but any story that explores the multiple ways in which the human body can die is inevitably an exploration of life, mortality and the struggle to not only survive but to maintain a sense of identity. There is also (implicit in Alien, and then made explicit in Aliens) the question of who the real monsters are, the subtext of which is: what does it mean to be human (so we’ve already covered life, death and humanity). Given these threads, it’s inevitable that a series which features androids so prominently would explore the same questions through the lens of something that’s explicitly designed to simulate a living human. If nothing else it it provides so many more opportunities to explore than: which shadow is the monster hiding behind and when is it going to kill me?
SPOILER WARNING: I‘ve avoided discussion of specific plot points for Alien: Earth but if you want to go in completely fresh then you may want to stop reading now.
The xenomorph
Before I go any further I’m going to add that I think the xenomorph is by far the least successful element of Alien: Earth. I don’t mind, too much, some of the story decisions that were made—there’s only so far you can go with a monster that simply wants to kill you so throwing in the idea that maybe they can be communicated with (which … of course they can because how else could they function as a species) is not a bad way to extend their creative potential. I know some fans hated that particular direction and, like the Borg in Star Trek, once you unwrap something too much you risk a once iconic villain losing its potency.
It works, to an extent, in Alien: Earth because we already know that synths aren’t regarded as suitable prey for the xenomorphs: they want biological victims that can be used for procreation or, failing that, for food … one presumes. There’s no real threat that the xenomorph poses to the synths, so there’s no real dramatic relationship there. Which means, if our main characters are going to be synths, and we have a xenomorph in the mix, there needs to be some way of connecting those threads. Otherwise whatever story the show wants to tell is either dead in the water or it has some serious dead weight to lug around.
The problem, really, is with the humans. Part of the horror of the xenomorph is that it is an indiscriminate killing machine that can’t be reasoned with (… wait, did we slip into the Terminator franchise?). Where Alien: Earth forgets this is in the number of times that a listed cast member comes face to face with the xenomorph and survives while, at the same time, the show takes great glee in showing how the xenomorph will tear through a squad of unnamed soldiers in a matter of seconds (which, for that matter, doesn’t quite work for me either given this isn’t supposed to be a Friday The 13th movie).
It’s also painfully clear in many scenes that we’re watching a man in a rubber suit (and sometimes a woman, to be fair). This is particularly ironic given Ridley Scott, who didn’t have access to CGI in 1979, went to great lengths to hide the fact that his monster was a man in a rubber suit. The lighting, the framing, and, in particular, the editing of Alien is a huge part of what maintains the horror. We never once lose the illusion that we’re facing a terror from the depths of space.
A lot of that goes out of the window here.
Last point. I do have a theory that the xenomorph in the first movie is scary precisely because it is so human-adjacent. We can clearly see that it’s not human, but it has the shape of a human. It has human attributes like a rib-cage (admittedly, one on the outside). It has vaguely human-looking teeth. It has feet and hands. It’s a human turned inside out, distorted, and made monstrous. Later movies have tried to make the xenomorph more insect-like or reptilian—more alien—which, as much as I love the way that Cameron’s xenomorphs jump lithely from surface to surface, somewhat misses the point.
Also, finally, to be blunt, I simply don’t like the design of the xenomorph in the TV show.
The mood
Let’s get back on track.
Noah Hawley has said that his goal, when making a TV show based on an existing property (he also made the Fargo series), is to replicate the mood of the original piece. With Alien there are two aspects of this to play with. The first is the production design. By avoiding a deliberately futuristic aesthetic, Ridley Scott and the production design team for Alien created a look that still works as a vision of the future after almost half a century. The only other sci-fi films that have come close to this longevity are Star Wars (which directly inspired Scott) and Blade Runner (which … well …).
Even though it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense, the design of the USCSS Maginot being a near exact replica of the Nostromo from Alien is a major delight of the series, and surely a part of the reason why the episode set wholly on board the Maginot is the series’s highest rated.
The other element of mood is the visceral horror that audiences in 1979 would have experienced upon seeing the facehugger, the chestburster, and the ‘big chap’. There had been nothing like it before. A life and death cycle that went well beyond the usual routine of a monster stalking you so it can eat you up. This aspect is the legacy of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre—another major influence on Scott—a movie that renders its teen protagonists helpless in the face of unnatural barbarity (itself inspired by real-life serial killers of the day).
The problem here is that the ‘big chap’ has been done to death by now; even Scott only reluctantly resurrected it for Alien Covenant. It simply doesn’t have the same impact as it used to. This is why Hawley introduced five new creatures for his show. Five new creatures that could, in their separate ways, bring back the horror of the original alien creature. Creatures that invade and violate the body in various different ways. It’s particularly interesting, then, that the most inscrutable new creature—and the one that you can most see becoming a new fixture of the franchise—has the one thing that the xenomorph lacks: an eye.
I expect that one of the reasons we find the xenomorph so terrifying is its lack of eyes. It further removes its humanity. It provides a barrier for contact or reason. Without eyes we can’t even know where it’s looking, even less what it’s considering. Bold step, then, to devise a fresh horror that consists almost entirely of an eye.
Containment
So my original premise was that Alien Earth was a pretty enjoyable series in its own right, but a bit redundant as an Alien series. I also went into the show assuming, for some naive reason, that it was a standalone, one-off, limited series. I’m not sure why I imagined this but it wasn’t until the final scenes of the last episode that I realised they were gunning for a second series and things wouldn’t be completely resolved. In a way this is good—I felt consistently that while the characters were exceedingly well developed, most of them felt rather underexplored. I would have welcomed another couple of episodes just for the sake of digging a bit deeper into, well, at least half of the line-up.
I don’t know at this point if we’re actually going to get a second season, but there are some pretty major seeds planted and plenty of meat still on the bones. So if we go back to the four themes identified and ask how well they were represented in the first season, and are things set up in a way that they can continue to be explored in the next?
- Will synths protect us or be used as tools to destroy us? Do they have their own agenda?
- The human body is mortal and penetrable.
- Space is dark and full of horrors.
- Your corporate employer will probably try to kill you. And if they don’t do that they will, at the very least, treat you as disposable property.
The first is even more interesting now. The main corporation featured in the show has created a new breed of synth (hybrids) and those creators are now faced with the prospect that their creations might conceivably destroy them. The second one is also a big yes and all I’ll say on that topic is that I can barely wait to see what’s going to happen with the eye midge (optipus / T Ocellus) next season. Third: well, we’re not in space any more, but we’ve brought the horrors back to earth and most of the non-primary cast have paid the price for that. Personally I hope we’ll get another Maginot flashback next season—surely it can’t have been a simple task for the crew to find and gather all of those specimens, right?
On the fourth one we, again, have an interesting twist. The season ends with Weyland Yutani forces flying in on their gunships, determined to take back their alien haul. It’s unlikely they intend to leave any survivors, but of course they have no idea that all of the alien creatures are loose, nor that there are five hybrids who have just about had enough of corporate shit (and who have a pet xenomorph) waiting for them.
In Alien, when the crew of the Nostromo first discover the derelict spaceship—complete with fossilized space jockey and a bumper crop of xenomorph eggs—it prompted audiences to wonder where the eggs came from and whether the space jockey belonged to a race that had created them. The answer that Ridley Scott eventually provided is irrelevant because it’s the question that’s important, and it’s next door to the one that we love to ask ourselves: where did we come from?
Even with the scant evidence we have from Alien it’s not a huge stretch to posit that the space jockey belongs to a race that employs xenomorphs as weapons of war but ultimately succumbs to them. There are plenty of other perfectly reasonable interpretations (again, ignoring Prometheus) but most still align with the main thing that Ripley ends up fighting against which is not the xenomorph, but corporate entities who will try to exploit something that ultimately cannot be contained and will destroy us all.
So we have an obvious link between creation and destruction. Many people cite Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (the novel, not the Kenneth Branagh film) as the birth of science fiction and it’s the original tale of a creation that cannot be contained, with hefty subtext of who the actual monster is.
And this is where Alien Earth is taking us: directly into a maelstrom of corporate forces that can’t contain what they create, or believe they own; creations that have usurped their masters; and a suite of alien life forms that may or may not be the real monsters.
Bring it!
