Alien: Earth Episodes 1 & 2 Review
Alien: Earth premieres with two episodes on Tuesday, August 12, and drops one episode per week after that.
FX dropped the first two episodes of Noah Hawley’s Alien: Earth, and it’s clear from the beginning what this series is trying to do. It all at once pays homage to the original Alien film while also carving its own niche into the lore of a decades-old franchise which is not an easy trick to pull off. And so, episodes 1 and 2 of the series are all about merging the new and the old. Sometimes it’s in the way a cross dissolve subtly connects two images, but other times it’s literally a spaceship crash-landing into a densely populated futuristic city. The fact that both approaches work so well in Alien: Earth is a testament to everything we have to look forward to in this series.
To begin with, the broad strokes of this review are simple. This is a very good show. It’s well-crafted, well-written, well-acted and just fun to be around. But seemingly determined to skip straight to the part where his new show bursts out of the franchise’s chest, Hawley and his team immediately merge those new and old influences in episode 1’s very first scenes. The crew wakes up, lights a cigarette before they’re out of the cryopod, have a laugh over breakfast in the mess as the camera floats down the familiar hallways of a Weyland-Yutani owned interstellar cruiser. It’s not just Noah Hawley proving he’s a fan who’s seen the movie before, though. It serves two really important functions.
Number 1, okay, yeah, it proves the behind-the-camera team has seen the movie before and that they like it as much as we always have. But Number 2, it’s the setting. Wordlessly and without any other connectivity, we as viewers are put back into the place and time around the original film. It’s a signal, along with the mustache on one of the crewmembers and the logos on their uniforms and the '70s-era “old-monitor” based tech in the production design, that this takes place alongside 1979’s film.
So it starts as a more or less shot for shot re-imagining of Ridley Scott’s original film, until they start to chop it up a little bit. The edit includes several visual asides, bouncing around in time, hinting that there’s more story to this crew and these surroundings than simply “oh that looks just like the Nostromo that Ripley was on!”
That’s the savviest thing about these premiere episodes and the truly exciting thing about Alien: Earth. A lot of ink has been spilled about how this fits in with the franchise and which parts of the canon are being accounted for. But this opening sequence is crafted in such a way that Hawley and his team are saying “yes” to all of it. There is a familiar setting, in a familiar timeline, but they’re doing some new things within that structure.
One of those new things is the Peter Pan allegory at the center of this season’s story. Samuel Blenkin’s Boy Kavalier, Earth’s youngest trillionaire and chief creep of the premiere episodes, is taking the final steps in a quest for a type of immortality. Sydney Chandler’s Marcy, meanwhile, the first terminally ill child to transition into a synthetic body, takes on the name Wendy, Peter Pan’s friend that’s destined to grow up, unlike the lost boys. It’s a fitting metaphor for a franchise built on a creature whose defining trait is that it evolves into something else, and a show within that franchise about children’s consciousnesses evolving into something else as well.
But there’s one scene in particular where the form and function of the story line up in a very cool way. After Marcy becomes Wendy, there’s a lovely little TV on the Radio needle drop, and a peaceful scene where Wendy looks truly happy, looking out over the sea with not a worry in the world. A far cry from the Marcy tethered to an IV stand in the previous scene. But it’s just one achingly slow cross dissolve away from a truly eerie shot of Wendy tromping through the jungle, happy as a clam. It’s unnatural in slow motion, there’s something clearly off about it, and the coolest part about that juxtaposition is that the show doesn’t let you linger in any sort of celebration for long. Every time there’s some light of discovery, Alien: Earth hits you with a bit of darkness as a reminder that none of what’s happening is all good.
Meanwhile, Morrow, the security officer aboard the Maginot played incredibly by Babou Ceesay, is set up to be the most fascinating character in the show. He’s a cyborg, just a regular dude who chose to be augmented. Morrow is, as we’ve seen with synthetic characters like Ash and David from elsewhere in the franchise, a company man through and through. He had the agency to become this way, which paints his decision making in a whole new light. He’s not a complete synthetic created and programmed to carry out company protocol, but he does serve that function we’re all familiar with from the Alien films. He’s cold and calculating and just as terrifying as any artificial person has ever been in the franchise.
The other real win for the premiere episodes is the scope of this show. In terms of episode 1s (or in this case episode 1s and 2s), it does an incredible job of communicating the type of scale we can expect from the series. A god damn spaceship crashes into the middle of a city and it looks like a war zone. But wouldn’t you know it, Hawley isn’t just employing that scale for the sake of it. The search and rescue team making their way through the wreckage go back and forth between the old familiar Nostromo-style ship, and the new environment here on Earth. In episode 2, we get some incredible haunted house style sequences that echo the original, with the xenomorph stalking our main characters. The highlight for me though, is the xenomorph interrupting some kind of Elizabethan Bacchanal where a bunch of obliviously entitled rich folks refuse to evacuate the building. It doesn’t end well for any of them.
The xenomorph itself, though, is another example of the classic iconography of this franchise meeting a new menagerie of beasties. The old reliable xeno gets its chance to shine in a typically monstrous way, metal teeth bared and stabby tail at the ready. There’s nothing new about him or the way Hawley is deploying his KY covered carapace. The xenomorph is playing the hits, as it were. But this very purposefully leaves room for the new aliens, however; an inventive bunch of creepy crawlies including an eyeball octopus that, I’m calling it now, is going to be the standout of the show when the dust settles.
Credit Roll Needle Drop Check In
One of my favorite little details about the series is the hard rock tracks Hawley uses over the credits. I wrote in my full season review about the loose connections the tracks make lyrically to the action on screen. I, quite frankly, adore the fact that they’ve pointedly decided to choose heavy metal tracks to communicate a vibe, so I can’t help but write a quick note about these songs in each of my weekly reviews.
Episode 1 ends with “The Mob Rules” by Black Sabbath. From 1981, the track comes from the Ronnie James Dio era of Sabbath, and features just a hint of ‘80s glam along with it’s speedier flavor of metal. As episode 1 ends with the Lost Boys on their way to the crash site and Wendy determined to save her brother's life, the first riffs from “The Mob Rules” highlights our hybrid protagonist’s edge and an attitude that’s lurking under the surface. But the lyrics that open the song are a metal warning of what’s to come.
Close the city and tell the people that something’s coming to call.
Death and darkness are rushing forward to take a bite from the wall.
Depending on how you want to take these lyrics, they could be referring to the xenomorph or the dystopian future of a corporate controlled team of hybrid children, emotionally ported into nearly impervious supercomputer bodies. Which, if my math is correct, is awesome.
Episode 2 meanwhile wraps up with the feedback build up of Tool’s “Stinkfist.” From 1996’s Aenima, the track features the band’s signature Drop-D tuned brand of heavy darkness. However, they edit around the opening verse of the song that is, ostensibly, about anal fisting, and jump straight to the more metaphorical chorus.
It’s not enough, I need more, Nothing seems to satisfy.
I don’t want it, I just need it, to breathe, to feel, to know I’m alive.
In this moment Wendy, who’s participated in more than one conversation about whether or not she’s still human to this point in the show, has found her brother and had him whisked away again. There’s a determination in her not seen in the other Lost Boys, and this mid-90s heavy metal classic features these lyrics that underline this part of her character, while being a compositionally spooky piece of music to play while a half-robot child is left tending a bunch of xenomorph eggs in a crashed spaceship.
Anyway, over-thinking these song choices is going to be a feature of these reviews, so… you know… get used to it.
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