Alien: Earth Season One – Review
I was a bit skeptical when I saw that there was a television series based on the Alien franchise. I suspected it might be a cash grab, throwing out something substandard and hoping for an audience based on nostalgic memories of earlier Alien movies.
I was wrong.
Of course, that might have been the motive, but it was not the result. Alien: Earth was quite fresh and I really enjoyed it. In fact it is something that people unaware of the long Alien history can still enjoy.
It is set close in time to the original Alien movie. Even if you were not familiar with the history, the fact that the crew smokes on the spaceship tells you there is a connection.
We see that there is a human spaceship and that something bad has already happened, something too close to what happened in the original movie. Except these humans were looking for the aliens.
Alien: Earth makes a number of important additions to the Alien universe. It expands the role and the number of the corporations running the show. Alien has always had a heavy corporate presence but this series dives deep.
Another part of the existing franchise is the quest for immortality. We have seen the synths, human-looking androids. This series adds as competition, cyborgs and synthetic bodies in which human consciousnesses are transferred. They dig into these themes very nicely.
Finally, and probably most controversial for long-time Alien fans, it expands the number of alien species. In previous movies, it looked like the only extra-terrestial life were the xenomorphs and the aliens who created them as seem in Prometheus. This series gives us some truly terrifying new species, especially the “eyeball monster.”
But this is not just about building the Alien universe. It is also about telling a story and developing characters. The main character is Wendy, a young girl dying of cancer whose consciousness is placed in a synthetic body. She is extremely interesting and I loved how they unfolded her story.
I thought Alien: Earth was incredible and it was the most enjoyable of the recent additions to Alien. It ended on a cliffhanger and I am hoping there is a second season to take us further into the story.
