The Best Part of ‘Alien: Earth’ Was the Aliens
The best episode of Alien: Earth was also the most basic of season 1’s eight hours—the flashback where a ragtag spaceship crew finds itself ill-matched against an extraterrestrial threat that picks them off one by one. It comes smack dab in the middle of the season, serving at once as Alien: Earth showrunner Noah Hawley’s winking homage/remix of the original Ridley Scott 1979 classic, and also a concession of familiarity for the audience to catch their breath before Hawley gets back to the weird, big, bold ideas he spent the rest of the series (before and after) throwing at the wall.
Hawley should be celebrated for not turning the entire show into one big cover song, reheating the movie series’ greatest hits with his own distinct touch. Alien: Earth has a lot on its mind, taking present-day concerns of tech oligarchy and corporate overreach to their logical, nightmarish extreme and hitching them to Hawley’s staple themes about identity, destiny, nature versus nurture, and so on. Season 1 just concluded this week; it was many things but hardly ever dull. But ironically, it shined the brightest when Hawley kept things simple, scary and savage.
Hawley made his intentions to upend your Alien expectations clear when he introduced the signature xenomorph without much pomp and circumstance early in the first episode. There was no stock discovery of the eggs and subsequent facehugger-to-chestburster pipeline shock and awe, no tense build-up and shadowy reveal. Just big Xeno—grills gleaming, dripping swag and also literally acid—fucking shit up, first on a spaceship and then on Earth after a forced crash landing. But that was a feint to set up Alien: Earth’s true gem: a coterie of equally vicious and cunning extraterrestrials, origins unknown with nothing but murder on their mind.
The octopus-like tentacled eyeball (known variously as Trypanohyncha Ocellus, T. Ocellus, or Species 64) is the crown jewel of Hawley’s creations, but the rest of the pack is just as unsettling, from the slithery blood-draining leeches to the weird venus flytrap thing that posts up on any given ceiling like a stalactite. Across most of the episodes, these creepy-crawlies were assembled in various states of captivity like an alien supermax prison; perhaps no group of franchise characters have ever been dumber than the supposed geniuses who quickly fell prey to their plotting. The lasting, definitive image of this series (or at least, this season) will be a snow-white sheep with the bulbous Evil Eye protruding from its face, patiently moving dumb humans and robots around like chess pieces for its escape.
What I’m saying is, as intriguing as Hawley’s whole Peter Pan Lost Boys-themed immortal child-robot idea was initially, the show really came alive when any of these outer space felons were on the loose wreaking havoc. Hawley’s innovation shone here too, maybe more than he even realized. He turned the xenomorph into a glorified troll in a way that it’s never really been before in the films; at one point it pretends to be a lobby statue to get the drop on a group of soldiers hunting it down. By the end of the season they’ve become loyal pets who have an unexplained rapport with lead child rebel soldier Wendy. There’s no scene more tense in the eight-hour pack than the one where the leeches put more priority on contaminating a water bottle than they do actually escaping, just to sow chaos. And when the Eyeball Sheep flawlessly manuevered a synthetic kid into getting trapped by a fellow creature, I yelled.
Timothy Olyphant is always great, but—minus the fatally-committed company man cyborg Morrow, played by Babou Ceesay in an excellent breakout performance—not one human character had as much gravitas as any of these faceless, voiceless aliens. None of the monologues or grand gestures about the soul, Peter Pan or Ice Age hit as thoroughly as when Hawley just indulged the urge to see people die savagely at the hands of savage beings. Alien: Earth’s ambition was interesting, but it was at its best when it was just a really well-executed creature feature. If there’s a season 2, let’s hope Hawley realizes that too.
