Alien: Earth - Season 1 - Review 

Rating: 4.5 out of 5

EVER since the one-two punch of Ridley Scott’s Alien and James Cameron’s Aliens, filmmakers have strived to recapture the brilliance of those two seminal classics with varying degrees of success.

But while most entries - from Scott’s own one-two of Prometheus and Alien: Covenant to Fede Alvarez’s most recent (and flawed) Alien: Romulus - have contained some great ideas and a lot of mediocre or just plain bad ones, the consensus remains that none have come close to recapturing the brilliance of those genre defining originals.

Step forward Noah Hawley. Just as he did with his Fargo iterations, he now transplants the xenomorphs to the small screen and opts for a serialised format.

He also combines the best of what has worked throughout with other, wider influences, from Blade Runner to Ex_Machina.

The result is both genuinely thrilling and insanely intelligent, widening the scope of the franchise to incorporate some really big ideas, as well as some new and highly inventive ways to gross people out.

Hawley, by his own admission, went into the challenge of making the series knowing two key things: whereas a two hour movie can be content with being a countdown to a bloodbath with some room for big thought, an 8-hour series has to offer something more to remain interesting.

And secondly, the xenomorphs themselves - while still beloved by audiences - have lost their ability to surprise as they did in the first two films. We know what to expect. So, how do you recreate that initial sense of WTF? dread?

Taking on the former, Hawley expertly pays clever lip service to most of the essential Alien conventions. There’s plenty of xenomorph and face-hugger action, with characters dying all manner of grisly deaths.

But he also mixes things up by introducing four new creatures: monsters collected by Weyland-Yutani (the regular big bad of the franchise to date) but hijacked and kidnapped by a rival corporation, Prodigy, on its way to Earth.

These are the monsters that pose the biggest chill factor - the mounting sense of dread surrounding what they will do once unleashed helping to recreate that uncertain horror that so infused Scott’s first foray into the genre. Heck, Hawley even directly referenced the poster tagline of that original movie by sliding in a standalone episode 5, entitled ‘In Space, No One…’, in which he went back and showed you what actually happened to the crew of the ill-fated Maginot before it crash landed on Earth.

The ensuing hour or so was, arguably, the best Alien movie since Alien itself: filled with nerve-shredding tension (including an icky water bottle sequence), well shot xenomorph action that recalled (or subverted) some of the original, while also letting rip with a couple of the new beasties (step forward the blood sucking bugs and scene-stealer Trypanohyncha Ocellus, aka T. Ocellus). It was a blast!

But elsewhere, the series excited as much by virtue of its intellect as it did its big horror set piece moments.

Hawley chose to make Alien: Earth as much a cautionary tale about a future run by corporations as it was an ideological debate on the nature of humanity.

The Prodigy corporation, run by a juvenile genius named Boy Kevalier (Samuel Blenkin), was not only responsible for sabotaging the Maginot, but also for creating a new kind of hybrid, by uploading a human consciousness into a fully synthetic body, preserving the individual's memories and personality while granting enhanced abilities. The humans used, however, were terminally ill kids, which meant they were basically children in grown up bodies, renamed Peter Pan characters within a sort of Neverland facility.

It’s a creative decision that also gave Hawley a lot of room to play with, in terms of what Alien: Earth had to say about the theft of childhood, the pursuit of immortality and corporate ownership. Were the children still children, for instance? They certainly acted that way quite often, either by their innocence in poking things that ought not to be touched, their naivety in placing trust where it shouldn’t be, and their inability to process emotional trauma.

But in Boy Kevalier’s eyes, they were merely property; their humanity forfeit to the gargantuan cost of creating them.

And by series end, those who did grow up and understand more about their predicament, such as Sydney Chandler’s superb Wendy, they evolved into something more: beings capable of making their own choices, of rebellion and retribution.

Throughout the series, there was so much going on. Conversations either have rise to great ideological and philosophical debates, or they set up intriguing rivalries. Motivations were frequently muddied. Survival always hung in the balance.

As such, the cast were uniformly excellent. Standouts included Chandler and Blenkin, but also Timothy Olyphant’s Kirsh (whose agenda was fascinating to try and work out), Babou Ceesay, whose relentless, remorseless Morrow was a terrific anti-hero (of sorts) and Adash Gourav, whose groomed Slightly provided the catalyst for all hell to eventually be unleashed.

But, in truth, everyone deserves praise in some way, however big or small their part, as all played a massive contribution to the overall success of the show.

Likewise, the cinematography, the set designers, the creature creators and actors who sometimes portrayed them: all served to create an immersive, visually inventive and big screen worthy experience.

Alien: Earth may have left some questions hanging, or contained moments or mid-steps that may have been polarising - such as Wendy’s apparent taming of a xenomorph or the lack of a really big payoff for T. Ocellus - but even its shortcomings felt tame by comparison to its successes.

And given the cliffhanger ending and the highly likely prospect of at least one more series, then many of the unanswered questions - such as how it will eventually feed into the events of Alien two years later without tampering with any franchise canon - could yet be answered.

Hawley always promised his own vision and a degree of originality, while respecting the legacy of what has worked so well before. It’s safe to say that Alien: Earth achieved all it set out to… and more.

It was one of the television events of 2025.