I’m 2 episodes into the new Alien: Earth series. I’m finding it to be a bit of a mixed bag so far. Here are some scattered thoughts…

I was expecting more from Noah Hawley, what with his excellent work on Fargo and Legion.

My first impression is that it has all the parts of a good story, and a good Alien story at that, but they are thrown together in a less than satisfactory way. Bad editing? It almost feels like a ChatGPT remix of Alien components.

The Characters 🔗

• Wendy - the protagonist, a child in a synthetic body. Autism coded? Perhaps: hearing things that others don’t (lemme tell you about fluorescent lights some day); viewing the world through an invisible barrier; the Amelie hair…I may be reading too much into this
• Hermit - Wendy’s (still human) brother. Somewhat flat affect - trauma?
• Kirsh - an android with a quiet disdain for the animals around him, apparently guiding Wendy towards posthumanity
• Morrow - a cyborg, the only one who knows the score and how expendable everyone is, including himself
• Boy Kavalier (no, really) - Peter Pan in this scenario, the oligarch who made Wendy
• The Lost Boys - Wendy’s companions, other hybrids like her, all children

A shout out to Atom Eins, played by Adrian Edmondson, and Shmuel, played by Michael Smiley.

Characters I Care About 🔗

• none
• actually Morrow, the only one under any kind of apparent stress

Storytelling 🔗

So far the editing seems pretty clumsy. I like crossfades, I wish they leaned into them more. The meeting between Wendy and Hermit is pretty flat. I can stand the Ice Age references, what with its doomed mammals facing the abyss, but that Sid popup doesn’t work for me.

Some clunky exposition too. Shmuel explaining the world to his dumb sidekick (is that how you see us, Disney?).

Themes 🔗

There are some interrelated themes running through all the Alien films, good and not so good, such as:

• Cosmic Horror - what is “in space no one can hear you scream” but an expression of this? The void is a monster that will consume you and it makes no difference.
• Biomechanical/Body Horror - the horror of nature, even our own bodies are alienated to us.
• Capitalism - the dominant life form on Earth, embodied by AI, hugging human faces before it was fashionable, casting humans into the void as bait.

What does the TV show have? Ostensibly the same, but it feels surface level. A couple of threads stand out though, which may be developed:

• the recombination of human and machine
• extinction
• childhood, and viewing the world through the eyes of a child (Kavalier literally does this with Wendy’s eyes)

I hope the show can find its feet and get on with things. I’ll keep watching, but it has a hill to climb.