It is not the least of this world’s wonders that it’s been nearly half a century since Ellen Ripley, in the person of Sigourney Weaver, sent the Alien, in the person of a person in an Alien suit, hurtling into space — that place where, according to “Alien’s” immortal tag line, no one can hear you scream — and an afterlife of sequels and prequels and side-quels.
As these things go, the franchise has managed to stay classy through the years, with directors including Ridley Scott, James Cameron, David Fincher, Jean-Pierre Jeunet (“Amélie,” if the name doesn’t ring a bell) taking a swing at it; prestigious casts (notwithstanding the “Alien vs. Predator” offshoot); pricey productions and special effects; and Weaver on board for the first four films, lending the young franchise her personal and professional cred.
Now, as all IP seemingly must, the franchise has come to television, with “Alien: Earth,” an eight-episode series landing Tuesday on FX and Hulu (with two episodes). It’s been created, mostly written and directed in part by Noah Hawley, who helmed the successful televisionization of “Fargo” and the marvelous Marvel-based “Legion.” As with “Fargo,” he’s made something true to the spirit of the original yet colored by his own goofy predilections. Hawley has a penchant for poetic concepts, literary references, political inferences and out-of-the-mainstream ideas that may not always make perfect sense, but his ambition shows through. He knows how to keep things interesting over a long series, and he understands the assignment here.
“Alien: Earth” is darker — or, I should say, more relentlessly dark — than either of those series, and a sensitive viewer might want to consider the wear and tear eight hours of body horror and rarely relieved tension might have on a human. Even when the mood is relatively light for a moment, you know what’s coming. And it comes.
It’s rare that a newcomer joins the ranks of the famous monsters of Filmland — Frankenstein’s creature, Dracula, the Wolfman, King Kong, Godzilla, that lot — but the H.R. Giger-designed Alien, or Xenomorph, has definitely made the cut. A big vulpine armored lizard with a mouth inside a mouth, the better to eat you with — and it is a very messy eater — it is perhaps the most disturbing member of this club. At the same time, after nine films, we know its tricks pretty well, so that when a baby Alien pops out of someone’s chest, as famously happened in the first picture, it’s more a matter of, “Well, they finally got around to that” than, “Oh my God can you believe what just happened?” In recognition of the need for novel scares, the TV series offers a little tentacled eyeball monster, shaped and smart like an octopus, that zombifies its hosts.
The series begins in space, appropriately, aboard the USCSS Maginot. USCSS stands for United States Commercial Star Ship, though in the future that “Alien: Earth” posits, the world having been completely corporatized, “united states” must be a vestigial concept, like the vermiform appendix or democracy. The year is 2120, just before the events of “Alien,” if you are interested in chronological order, and the ship belongs to the Weyland-Yutani corporation, which controls North and South America. Naming the ship Maginot, after a famously failed French defense in World War I, is clearly a little joke for history buffs, and also apt.
The crew, who are near the end of a 65-year mission — suspended animation keeps them young and pretty — are transporting an extraterrestrial bestiary back to Earth. Given the typical body count in these films, I declare it Not a Spoiler to tell you that only one of them, a security-officer cyborg named Morrow (Babou Ceesay), will survive to the second episode and that the ship itself will come crashing to Earth in New Siam, territory controlled by the Prodigy corporation and its bathrobe-wearing CEO, 22nd century tech dude Boy Kavalier (Samuel Blenkin), the “youngest trillionaire ever” — just that description makes me want to see him eaten. (“I don’t know how things are done here in Bureaucracyville,” he’ll say in a meeting with rival corporate head Yutani, played by Sandra Yi Sencindiver, “but in the future, where I live, we move fast and we make trillions,” and if that doesn’t sound familiar, you’re not listening hard enough to 2025.) The aliens, of course, will emerge intact to become the focus of industrial competition and skulduggery.
To the usual agglomeration of humans, half-humans, humanoid robots and outer space beasts, “Alien: Earth” adds a new variety of beings, upon which it builds the series’ central metaphor/literary reference: J.M. Barrie’s “Peter Pan,” not subtextual but explicit, spread all over the screen. In a brand new unexplained technology, Kavalier uploads the consciousness of terminally ill children into adult synthetic bodies, creating a human-robot hybrid. He seems to identify himself with Pan, whose narcissism he shares; he has named his secret “research island” Neverland, reads passages from Barrie’s book and shows his young subjects a clip from the 1953 Disney film before their transfer. (The actual process is the work of a wife and husband team played by Essie Davis and David Rysdahl, who have differing ideas about family; it’s a theme.)
The initial subjects are children because, says Marcy (Sydney Chandler, making a strong impression), our heroine and the first to go, because “grown-up minds are too stiff — they can’t make the trip yet.” To hammer home a point, she will become Wendy (because her new self “looks like a Wendy”), while the kids who follow her, and who are not nearly as smart, brave or competent as she, will be referred to as the Lost Boys (though there are girls among them) and given their names: Tootles (Kit Young), Nibs (Lily Newmark), Slightly (Adarsh Gourav), Curly (Erana James) and, stealing a moniker from Hook’s crew, Smee (Jonathan Ajayi). Just why these particular kids have been chosen is not mentioned, possibly because there is no reason other than their individual usefulness to the plot, but the cognitive dissonance of being kids in grown-up bodies — often the stuff of comedy — is one of the more intriguing aspects of the series, if not as deeply explored as it might have been. But there are monsters fighting for screen time; they cause a lot of exciting havoc — and fair enough, they didn’t ask to be kidnapped — but they’re fairly one-note dramatically speaking.
As usually happens when robots or androids or other artificial people with personalities are in the picture, questions arise as to A) what makes a human and B) what’s so great about being human, anyway, which form the emotional core of the series. (It does have one.) “Blade Runner,” “Star Trek: The Next Generation,” “A.I.”— it goes all the way back to Karel Čapek’s 1920 play “R.U.R.,” which I mention particularly for the fun fact that it is the source of the word robot, from the Czech “robota,” meaning “forced labor,” if you’d care to think about that. (They kill all the humans.)
Not even completing this cast of characters are Alex Lawther as Marcy/Wendy’s brother Joe, an army medic with whom she will reunite, and Timothy Olyphant as Kirsh, a synthetic person who is her mentor, a cynical realist but not unkind, and the only funny character in the show; they have conflicting ideas about what’s best for Wendy, who has her own ideas about that as well. Olyphant, who has dyed his hair and eyebrows white for the part, manages to be expressive while hardly changing his expression and funny without saying anything funny at all. Someone has to be.
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