Alien: Earth combines horror thrills with existential questions

Forty-six years after the monstrous figure of the xenomorph terrorised cinemagoers, the stalking alien still strikes fear in anyone who looks upon its rows of razor-sharped teeth.

Alien fans have never had to wait too long between glimpses of the ruthless and efficient killer, but the real villains-in-chief have always been human greed and hubris.

With the extended runtime as a TV series, Alien: Earth has more room to explore these ideas of who is really responsible for all the death and destruction across this almost-five decade-old franchise.

Set two years before Ripley was awakened from stasis aboard the Nostromo (ie. the original 1979 film), Alien: Earth has the distinction of being the only instalment that takes place on what Carl Sagan termed the Pale Blue Dot.

The show opens in space, onboard the Maginot, a research vessel about to complete its 65-year-long mission, days out from returning to Earth. The ship is already in disarray with a xenomorph roaming the halls as it hurtles towards home, one lone survivor among the crew.

The events leading up to the catastrophe isn’t revealed until episode five, titled, of course, In Space, No One…, and it’s an hour-long clench-fest that rivals its cinematic counterparts. You know what’s going to happen, but it’s still suspenseful as hell.

On Earth, the central character is Wendy, the world’s first hybrid of human consciousness and synthetic body. Wendy (Sydney Chandler), named after the Peter Pan character in the first of many allusions to J.M. Barrie’s creations, is/was Marcie, a terminally ill 12-year-old girl whose mind was transferred into the specifically built adult body.

She was the first but not the last in a group of six (Kit Young, Adarsh Gourav, Jonathan Ajayi, Lily Newmark and Erana James), all sick kids who find themselves physically grown up and with super human strength – and named after the Lost Boys.

They’re “products” of scientific experiments by the Prodigy Corporation whose founder Boy Kavalier (Samuel Blenkin) is a smug, sociopathic genius whose greatest regret in life is that, according to him, he has no intellectual equal with whom to have an interesting conversation. Poor diddums.

Prodigy and the ever-present Weyland-Yutani are two of the core five corporations that now run the world with democracy declared a failed experiment.

Plutocracy is the order of the day, and Alien: Earth is clearly drawing a line between the increased influence of today’s billionaires and tech oligarchs, and the dystopia of its fictional world.

Not that you meet many “everyday” citizens, but the small glimpses in the first six episodes (out of eight) made available for review reveal that, at the very least, the cost of healthcare essentially turns you into an indentured servant.

When the Maginot crashes into Prodigy territory, Wendy volunteers herself and her group to enter the fray.

The ensemble cast also includes Timothy Olyphant, Alex Lawther, Essie Davis, David Rysdahl, Babou Ceesay and Sandra Yi Sencindiver.

Alien: Earth was created by Noah Hawley, who is best known for the Fargo TV spin-off. But the more instructive work from Hawley’s past is the under-watched Legion, a high-concept sci-fi drama set in the X-Men universe which explored power, control, identity and exceptionalism.

Alien: Earth is similarly intellectually curious about all those ideas, and about the nature of, well, nature.

Wendy is not just a human mind in an inorganic body with a lithium battery strong enough to power a city, but she and the others have also being built so that their brain processes are enhanced.

They can download an entire subject matter, master a language and become experts at anything in the time it takes for a regular person to pee. What does it mean that you can do that without the experience of learning, especially when you’re emotionally still a child?

If you’re more than human, are you still human? And are you still human if you’re no longer in control of your mind, if it can be accessed and manipulated by someone else? The parallels between Wendy and the alien specimens, even the xenomorph, that were aboard the Maginot, become much starker.

Of course, Alien: Earth isn’t only an exercise in metaphysical or existential questions. It remains true to the legacy of the films in that it is, at times, a true horror project.

Half of the initial episodes are layered with dread as characters come face-to-face with aliens that can kill you in about 37 different ways. The blood splatter is not spare, nor are the body parts. This is not something to be watched after dinner with a full meal in your stomach if you’re the queasy sort.

The production values are expansive, and its network, the Disney-owned FX, has said the scale of it is larger than its acclaimed historical epic Shogun, which should give you an idea about the money being spent here.

The sets and effects are elaborate, and the cinematography looks great. If you threw any scene up on an IMAX screen, it would still be impressive. They’re not cheating anything here just because it was made for TV.

When it comes to balancing thematic heft with thrills and excitement, Alien: Earth does both.

Alien: Earth is on Disney+ from Wednesday, August 13.