There’s an academic theory that proposes that each film in the Alien franchise is about the problems of a specific generation. Ridley Scott’s Alien is about blue-collar labor and misogyny; James Cameron’s Aliens is about the fallout from Vietnam; David Fincher’s Alien³ is about the AIDS crisis and the pro-life movement; and so on.
All of it is very much subtext, and easy to skate past for a viewer looking for grisly sci-fi/horror thrills and nothing else. But that’s not as easy to accomplish with Alien: Earth, which has a lot of other things on its mind that don’t involve H.R. Giger’s xenomorphs.
The 22nd-century Earth of Alien: Earth is a cybercapitalist nightmare where five corporations control all aspects of human life in ways that make 2025 feel like a hippie utopia. One of those corporations is, of course, Weyland-Yutani, and one of the others is Prodigy, run by a trillionaire robotics wunderkind, Boy Kavalier (Samuel Blenkin), who’s essentially every real-life billionaire sociopath rolled into one barely-post-pubescent package. Satirically sketched, he’s an obnoxious villain whom audiences will want to see eviscerated within 10 minutes of meeting him.
Kavalier’s latest innovation involves a process by which a human mind can be transferred into a human-synthetic body. His prototypes for the process are all terminally ill children for whom the new grown-up body is a genuine blessing, but Kavalier’s reasoning for pioneering in his field goes no further than “finally having someone intelligent to talk to.”
Going with a cartoonishly on-the-nose Peter Pan metaphor, Kavalier names the first child Wendy (Sydney Chandler) and the rest after the various Lost Boys. He monitors their every move with a curious but cold elder synthetic named Kirsh (Timothy Olyphant).
Where the expected elements of the Alien series come into play is that some years before Weyland-Yutani sent the Nostromo out to investigate a distress call on LV-426, another ship, the Maginot, was trawling through space to collect new species of alien life. Of course, one of those species turns out to be the xenomorphs, but they’re not the only aliens aboard the ship.
The most conceptually terrifying of these is also the smallest: a cephalapoid parasite that rips the eyeballs out of its host, burrows into a socket, connects to the brainstem, and camouflages itself as the host’s single new eye, waiting with eerie stillness for a better, more capable host to wander by. When the series gets down to bloody business, it lives up to its pedigree.
Series creator Noah Hawley’s angle on this universe is in sync with that creature’s approach. When the Maginot finally crashes in one of Kavalier’s megacities, he decides to send Wendy and the Lost Boys to scavenge the wreck. Never once does he consider that they’re all still mentally and emotionally children, nor what an encounter with extraterrestrial creatures would do to their psyches, and thus begins the distressing, slow-burn thrust of the season, as the children find out firsthand just how little humanity still remains in humanity, contrasted against the aliens’ “unclouded judgement” that Ian Holm’s Ash was warbling about in the first film.
The fifth episode, “In Space, No One…,” shows us what actually led up to the Maginot’s crash. It’s the most straightforward, frighteningly effective episode of the season. But aside from that episode and the season’s opening sequence, which shows the last moments before the monster-infested Maginot crash-lands on Earth, it’s quite a while before Alien: Earth starts resembling its cinematic forebears, and much of what comes after doesn’t whatsoever.
The series is slower, dreamier, and hallucinatory than many of the Alien films outside of Alien³ and Alien: Resurrection, snapping the audience out of its hypnotic spell with either sudden, shocking bursts of violence, or with the well-curated ’90s alt-rock needle drops that end every episode. Perhaps owing to just how much so-called artificial intelligence has infected every facet of Western life in reality, the Alien franchise’s increasing focus on the three-way dance for dominance between humans, monsters, and robots comes to its logical apex here.
Like Legion, Hawley’s take on X-Men, Alien: Earth is fascinatingly druggy and uneasy. It doesn’t withhold its thrills like Prometheus was lambasted for doing. The threat of varying flavors of violence is such a menacingly oppressive shadow over it all that the moment something happens feels less shocking than its viscerally horrifying inevitability.
Ironically, the weakest part of the season is the xenomorph, which is dragged too often into broad daylight, where its psychosexual design feels the least threatening, and whose purpose largely comes to provide thematic contrast to the “children” devolving into monsters. Compared to most stories of artificial intelligence in decades past that posited that machines would begin resembling humans, the show’s androids find themselves creeping in the other direction—not dissociating from the human condition as we currently know it, but warping it, every new child baptized at birth by cruelty. Alien: Earth, then, shows us all the varied horrors Gen Alpha must adapt to for survival—with no promise of a future outside the one the oligarchs made for them.
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