It’s usually a bad sign if you’re wondering what the heck is going on in a drama when you’re two episodes in, but there is an exception: you can happily ride on if you sense that, although you don’t know what it’s doing, the show definitely does. Such is the bristling, bewildering, overpoweringly confident aura of Alien: Earth, a new TV take on cinema’s greatest sci-fi horror franchise by writer-director Noah Hawley of Fargo fame.
We are in the year 2120, just the right setting for a show that plays on our fears that our grandchildren and great-grandchildren are going to live in hell. Simple green-on-black text, styled like a computer readout from the 80s, informs us that, in this broken future, corporations have taken over the universe, and which one achieves total domination will be determined by which of three technologies wins a “race for immortality”: cyborgs (enhanced humans), synths (wholly artificial beings) or hybrids (synthetic bodies with human consciousnesses implanted).
The last of these is our primary concern in a first episode that mostly consigns the flesh-ripping aliens to flash-forwards so rapid they are almost subliminal. In Neverland, the laboratory complex of trillion-dollar disruptive startup Prodigy, a girl who looks to be in the last stages of terminal cancer lies down next to an inert adult figure she names Wendy. When the procedure is over, her brain has been copied from her ailing body and pasted into the entirely lifelike synthetic woman. The newly alive Wendy (Sydney Chandler) is the first hybrid and, soon, the leader of a gang of child-robot soldiers mentored by the enigmatic Kirsh, played by Timothy Olyphant sporting harrowing bleach-blond hair, an unnerving murmur and a turtleneck sweater that says something really isn’t right here.
Up in space, meanwhile, a crew of humans have signed up for a job with big workers’ rights issues. If being managed by a humourless cyborg named Morrow (Babou Ceesay) wasn’t appalling enough, their cargo of captured alien life-forms are about to break out of the laughably weak glass containers they’ve been stored in, kill everyone except the self-preserving Morrow, and cause the spaceship to crash as Morrow grimly tries to fulfil his obligation to the super-rich Weyland-Yutani Corporation by returning the bounty to Earth.
As the ship mingles with the rubble of the tall urban Earth building it has ploughed into and a Prodigy search-and-rescue (-and-steal-anything-valuable) team descends, led by Alex Lawther as listless medic (and Wendy’s long-lost brother!) Hermit, the monsters are finally on the loose. The setup is loose compared with most of the Alien movies, since the human and humanoid protagonists aren’t confined with the creatures in a tin box surrounded by an endless, scream-proof void, so Alien: Earth has to find other ways to create bone-deep dread.
Most obviously we have the aliens, who aren’t yet particularly innovative but are suitably awesome, from a scuttling, leechlike bug to an eyeball with many, many legs and a shiny xenomorph that comes over as a little more man-like than its previous incarnations. They’re the classic nightmare fuel updated and sharpened and, when they strike, they leave behind the sort of oddly beautiful tableaux of torn corpses we haven’t seen since Hannibal.
Even better is the casting, with Lawther bringing the same blank resignation he lent to The End of the F***ing World, and Chandler offsetting it with a disturbing blend of naivety and concealed power. In an obvious allegory for the rise of AI, the hybrid Wendy has been given abilities beyond what even her creators understand. Most pleasing to see is Samuel Blenkin, rewarded for his fantastic supporting turn as the resentful weakling Prince Charles in Mary & George with the key role of Boy Kavalier, the “genius” CEO of Prodigy and the Neverland project. With his comfy robes and puppyish, young-Wonka bounce, he is the frighteningly influential tech-bro pseudo-visionary who might bring the whole world crashing down, essentially just for a laugh: one of many nice touches in Blenkin’s performance is the way the Boy takes a crucial video call by lying on a bed and gripping a tablet between his raised bare feet.
What Alien: Earth lacks in its opening two instalments is a propulsive, linear narrative or clarity of thematic vision, to the point where it sometimes approaches Westworld levels of making us ask the gloomy screen what in the blazes is happening. But whether it’s a padded corridor filmed at a 10-degree angle, a landscape of jagged concrete and raining sparks, a wriggling creepy-crawly from space or just the look in someone’s jaded eye, the series always has a way of making us feel like helpless prey being circled. Something gloriously horrific is just around the corner.
