‘When is a machine not a machine?‘
The Alien franchise has always been a bit of a mess. Ever since David Fincher ripped apart the narrative of the first two films in Alien 3, there have been a slew of directors, timelines and crossovers, some of them successful, some of them downright awful. Alien: Earth, the long-mooted, Noah Hawley created TV show for FX serves as a prequel to Alien and yet another origin story for the humble xenomorph…
In 2120, Boy Kavalier (Samuel Blenkin), the world’s youngest trillionaire, develops the first human hybrid by removing the consciousness of a dying child and installing it inside Wendy, an adult synthetic (Sydney Chandler). Meanwhile, the evil corporation Weyland-Yutani has captured several extra-terrestrial specimens on a 65-year expedition into deep space, among them a bunch of facehuggers and a whole new selection of grisly alien beasts to enjoy. The starry supporting cast includes Alex Lawther as Wendy’s human brother, Joe, Adrian Edmonson as a senior synthetic employee of the Prodigy Corporation and an incredibly sedate Timothy Olyphant as the Prodigy Corporation’s chief scientist and mentor to the ‘Lost Boys’ (the collective name for the new human-synthetic hybrids).
The fact that I have only scratched the surface of the many dual narratives at play here is perhaps an indication of why this thing doesn’t quite hold together. As with some of the later seasons of Hawley’s other big show, Fargo, the plotting is simply too dense. Eight episodes should be enough to tell a story set in a cinematic universe in which every other entry hovers around the two hour mark, and yet, I always felt like Hawley was trying to cram too much in here. That being said, ‘In Space, No-One…’, the fifth episode of the season and the one that feels most like a homage to Alien, is one of the season highlights, providing jaw-dropping visuals and some genuinely terrifying scares, and there are other highlights for long time fans along the way. This is more than just a nostalgia exercise, however. While the xenomorphs and facehuggers are wonderfully rendered here, it is the other species captured by Weyland-Yutani that really steal the show. We are introduced early on to Trypanohyncha Ocellus (T-Ocellus for short), a hyperintelligent, parasitic creature that burrows its way into the unfortunate host’s eye socket and then interfaces with their nervous system in order to take control of their consciousness. The fact that this grotesque creature spends much of this first season of Alien: Earth living inside a motionless sheep staring out from a glass cage does nothing to dampen it’s ominous sense of dread.
Now that Alien: Earth has all but confirmed a second season, the challenge is to strip this world back to its composite parts, whilst also feeding into Alien, and remaining its own compelling thing. There is enough evidence here to suggest that Hawley and his talented cast are capable of such a transition, but there is definitely still work to be done.
