'Alien: Earth' - What I wanted VS what I got

I was really excited in the lead-up to Alien: Earth, a brand new show by Noah Hawley set in the Alien franchise. We’ve always wondered what it would be like if Xenomorphs landed on Earth, and we saw the presence of the evil corporation Weyland-Yutani on our planet. OK, setting it on Earth does remove the infamous tagline of “In space, no one can hear you scream”, but placing the elements of the Alien franchise in a setting that we all recognise could really work, right?

Well, from what we’ve seen of Alien: Earth, it’s certainly ambitious. The show has a lot on its plate, with a plot about the minds of sick children being transferred into a synthetic adult body mixed in with the more traditional Alien fare - a space vessel full of Xenomorph specimens crash-landing on Earth and causing carnage. And a lot of people seem to love it for these ambitious plans and its massive scale. Personally though, I can’t help but feel a bit deflated as this isn’t really what I was after from an Earth-bound Alien show.

One of my favourite parts of the Alien franchise is the claustrophobia. No matter the direction the films took, each instalment understood that a cast of humans and androids trapped on small space vessels facing unknown monsters was the root of the horror - after all, the first film is basically a haunted house ride in space. 

Alien: Earth’s first episode introduces a massive metropolis-like city as its setting, which instantly takes away the terror of our characters being trapped in a confined space. A lot of episode two tries to scale things back, as soldiers storm an apartment block overrun with Xenomorphs, and this is easily the stuff I’ve enjoyed most from the show so far. It’s just a pity we keep cutting back to a group of relatively uninteresting synthetic characters all named after ones from Peter Pan. This side of the plot isn’t bad per se, and I love the island setting (appropriately dubbed Neverland) where these synthetics are created and experimented on, but I feel that this storyline clashes with the more stripped-back horror sequences. There just seems like there’s too much happening, which is slightly troubling given we’re less than halfway through the series at time of writing.

And even those, while fun and well-directed, don’t really hold up under much scrutiny. You wonder why a group of characters, who are apparently going into a crash site as a rescue party, would be brandishing massive rifles. You wonder why an apartment block that has been severely damaged still has a top floor intact where a bunch of wealthy residents are hosting a fancy-dress party. There are so many contrivances that are piled on top of each other to create these sequences of tension and, whilst they’re worth the wait, the rest just feels like needlessly lazy writing. 

I would’ve loved to have seen a folk horror-inspired story of a ship full of Xenomorphs crashing into a rural village, or just one that isn’t set in a huge futuristic city which takes away the core appeal of an Alien series on Earth as far as I’m concerned. Alien: Earth is by no means bad, and I can’t deny I am having fun with the more claustrophobic horror side of the show, but this is a far less interesting version of an Earth-bound Alien show than I’d hoped for.