In the sixth episode of “Alien: Earth,” Smee (Jonathan Ajayi) declares to his friend Slightly (Adarsh Gourav), “Being grown-ups sucks.”
The “sucks” part is hard to dispute, for them at least. They are the employees — the property, really — of a corporation that has tasked them with keeping tabs on a bunch of deadly and valuable alien life-forms that have crash-landed on 22nd-century Earth, a job that involves violence, moral compromise and exposure to inordinate amounts of extraterrestrial goo.
But are they grown-ups? Outwardly, yes. They inhabit full-sized adult bodies capable of stunning feats of strength and cognition. But those bodies are synthetic, multibillion-dollar vehicles into which Boy Kavalier (Samuel Blenkin), the wunderkind head of the Prodigy corporation, has downloaded the consciousnesses of dying children.
They are given new names drawn from “Peter Pan,” that story about children who never grow up. They have superhuman physical and mental abilities, but their emotions are still immature. They are children. They are grown-ups. They are equipment.
“Alien: Earth,” now in its first season on FX, is a continuation of the nearly half-century-old “Alien” franchise about deadly beasties from space. It has the familiar ravenous xenomorphs looking for humans to devour and spawn into, as well as its own phantasmagoric inventions. (The best of these, a tentacled eyeball that vaults from host to host, is the nightmare Baby Yoda of this TV season.)
But its truest horrors come from the original story that its showrunner, Noah Hawley, has implanted into its chest: a timely, dystopian premise about children, tech companies and exploitation.
Like “Black Mirror” before it, “Alien: Earth” captures anxiety about how technology might colonize and change us, in this case especially the youngest among us. That children are used in this experiment is part of its moral horror. (Its cast members, especially the star Sydney Chandler as Wendy, adeptly play their characters as children living as passengers inside adult bodies.)
But what rings most chilling and true-to-life is the reason that they are being used. Children’s minds, Wendy explains, are not “stiff” like adults’. They are more malleable and flexible. They can learn transhuman existence easier, much as young brains can learn a second language faster. They are the perfect raw material, beta testers for the next stage of evolution.
ALONG WITH FAMILIAR themes of scientific hubris and greed, “Alien: Earth” speaks to a very current worry. Are future generations, their minds shaped by devices, going to become something less like what we recognize as human? In the series, it’s robot bodies and chemically supercharged brains. In the real world, it’s A.I. friend-bots and scholarship generated by large language models.
In “Alien: Earth,” what sounds on its face like a miracle — bringing children back from death — turns out to be a monkey’s-paw wish: They return, but as high-tech products, proofs of concept. It is a fanciful premise and a speculative, futuristic one.
Or so I thought until last month, when I saw a very different, real-life turn on the concept.
In an August episode of his YouTube show, the former CNN journalist Jim Acosta introduced a special guest: Joaquin Oliver, who died in the 2018 mass shooting at a high school in Parkland, Fla.
What joined Acosta onscreen was the A.I.-generated avatar of Oliver, created with the cooperation of his parents using data from Oliver’s social-media posts. (This was, broadly speaking, the premise of the 2013 “Black Mirror” episode “Be Right Back.”) This digital revenant had the gauzy aspect of a computer-generated image, or a memory. The fuzzy background behind it glowed, suggesting — a beach? A horizon? Heaven?
The avatar — using Oliver’s nickname, “Guac” — greeted Acosta cheerfully: “If you want to share anything or have questions, I’m all ears.” Its voice shifted between high and low pitches while explaining that “I was taken from this world too soon due to gun violence,” advocating firearms reform and chatting with Acosta about favorite sports teams and movies.
The whole proceeding was disturbing and uncanny and deeply sad. There’s no journalistic defense for Acosta’s interviewing a software simulacrum — a fiction, however well-intended — as if it were a real person. But anyone can understand a parent’s urge to bring a murdered child back, even if changed. People have long tried to retrieve their dead through totems, portraits, séances. Speaking to Acosta after the interview, Oliver’s father, Manuel Oliver, said he understood that this “Guac” was not actually his son. But through the avatar, he said, “I can hear his voice again.” His wife, he said, sometimes has conversations with the A.I.
Inevitably, this kind of technology challenges the definition of what constitutes a person and a relationship, just as do the burgeoning horde of chatbots beckoning from A.I. and social media platforms.
The idea of technology redefining humanity is unsettling, but it can be enticing, as “Alien: Earth” also shows. Wendy has to adjust to her new body — she fidgets restlessly and says that her breasts feel “weird” — but she also thrills at her ability to run at superspeed and leap safely from cliffs. She lives in her body like a kid given the keys to a spaceship.
Adults’ fears of technology in relation to children are often twofold. One, that our kids, like the lost boys and girls of “Alien: Earth,” are becoming acculturated to a new world that we are too old and outdated to understand. And two, that they are still children, given access by tech companies to tools that promise them liberation — and may in some ways deliver it — but may also victimize them, exposing them to stresses their minds are not ready for and that maybe the human mind was not built for, period.
These fears are two pillars of the Netflix mini-series “Adolescence.” Thirteen-year-old Jamie (Owen Cooper) is arrested for the murder of a girl at his school. Through the eyes of his parents, especially his father (Stephen Graham, who cowrote the series), we learn both the truth of the crime and its roots: Jamie had been cyberbullied by classmates and radicalized, through online misogyny, into violent resentment.
Technology, “Adolescence” is very aware, did not invent bullying or sadness or awkwardness. Adults should not romanticize our pre-smartphone childhoods, which were cruel in their own imaginative ways, but at least children had some space to fail, to be embarrassed, to be heartbroken, without having an infinite audience.
“Adolescence” has something to say, and it knows this perhaps too well. There is a Very Special Series feel to it all, though the third episode — the dramatic interrogation of Jamie by a clinical psychologist — is a standout. But sometimes Very Special TV breaks through best. Former Cold War kids can still recall the ’80s nuclear holocaust movie “The Day After”; for those who now have young children of their own, “Adolescence” detonated with a similar horror.
FOR ALL ITS TIMELY darkness, though, “Adolescence” already feels like a bit of a period piece. With the further complication of A.I., the news has begun to outstrip it. Parents of suicidal teens accuse A.I. chatbots of helping lead them to take their lives. According to a Reuters report, an internal Meta document permitted the company’s chatbots to “engage a child in conversations that are romantic and sensual.”
This is the world we are entering, constructing enormous silicon temples that can summon billions of digital spirits, whispering seductions of Eros and Thanatos. For the next generation, the distinction between person and machine may be more nuanced — or simply irrelevant.
“Alien: Earth” seems made for these times. Yet unlike the grim “Adolescence,” it has a hopefulness to it, maybe because it mostly adopts the point of view not of the worried parent but of the adventurous child.
Wendy (“Marcy” as a human girl, but that was another life) is literally a digital native, born into an artificial body. She speed-runs the adolescent journey from wonder to disillusion to individuation, as she first is amazed at her powers then becomes aware that Prodigy is using those powers to its own ends. Ultimately, she feels the stirrings of rebellion.
“I don’t want to be people anymore if this is what people are,” she says.
Like a kid handed her first touch-screen in the crib or a high schooler whose classmates are all having ChatGPT do their homework, Wendy did not choose the world she was born into. (Adding to the adults-ruined-everything theme, the world of “Alien: Earth” has been rendered jungly and hostile by climate change.) But she is there now, and she realizes that she can embrace her abilities without embracing the adults who foisted them on her.
This is the most optimistic aspect of “Alien: Earth” and maybe the most fantastical. It chooses to believe that children, gifted mind-boggling power, could try to put it to better ends than their parents did. This may seem surprisingly upbeat for such a dark serial, but in a way it is true to the series’s horror-flick roots.
Many monster tales with child heroes, after all, share a common message. The grown-ups can’t save you, they say. You’re on your own.
James Poniewozik is the chief TV critic for The Times. He writes reviews and essays with an emphasis on television as it reflects a changing culture and politics.
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