‘Alien: Earth’ Episodes 1 and 2 Review

The ‘Alien’ franchise has been expanding quite a bit in the last few years since Disney acquired 20th Century studios. Now, for the first time, it’s come to the small screen with the new Hulu series ‘Alien: Earth’.

In the show, a Weyland-Yutani ship has gathered alien life forms from across the galaxy, obviously they escape and it crash lands on its return to Earth, landing on an island owned by the Prodigy corporation. To prevent the creatures escaping and to secure them as potentially valuable assets, a team of human-android hybrids are sent into the wreckage to secure the area.

From the first two episodes, the show is already throwing up unexpected surprises that weren’t present in the trailers. What looked like a fairly simple “aliens on Earth” premise has taken on a new dimension–not necessarily for the better. 

One of the main characters is Wendy, a terminally ill twelve-year-old girl who had her consciousness placed into the body of an android, giving her an adult form but still a child’s mind. This idea is heavily overlaid with Peter Pan references and analogies. She’s named after a character in the book, as is the group of similar human-androids known as the Lost Boys, and the island the action takes place on is called Neverland.

It’s all in service to the idea shown in H.M. Barrie’s book about children who never grow up, but instead play endless games in Neverland. Their youth gives them a sense of being indestructible, and they treat their battles with pirates and life-threatening scenarios as if they were games. Here you have children placed into the strong, fast, and durable bodies of androids.

The problem is it all comes across as a bit too much. It’s not a very subtle analogy and it doesn’t make sense in the way it’s used in the show. Why would you send a group of these “hybrids”, as they are known, into such a dangerous situation? They still think and talk and act like kids; they are afraid of the aliens and they have no training that makes them suitable for such a role. It’s even more strange as we already know there are regular androids in this world, as well as cyborgs which are introduced in the show, surely they would be more effective?

It feels like there are two shows here fighting for dominance. One is the show where aliens escape on Earth, causing chaos and carnage with plenty of action and horror as the humans desperately try to hunt them down. The other is a androids’ story asking the usual questions about what it means to be human. Either one might have been entertaining on its own, but they don’t mix.

Maybe the story following the Maginot collecting and transporting these creatures would have been a more interesting one. Yes, it’s similar to what we’ve seen before, but from the brief scene we got aboard the ship and the characters we saw, it looks like it could have been good, and I wouldn’t mind if we got some flashbacks to that.

Because after two episodes I really don’t have a clear idea of where this show is going or what it’s trying to say. I don’t feel any attachment to the characters, which is a bad thing for a show where many likely won’t make it out. None of them are particularly likeable or well-developed, and seem to be going down the ‘Prometheus’/’Covenant’ route of making silly decisions. It seems like it wants to have the philosophical element of those two films, where David (also an android) would monologue about humanity and creation, but like those films it all feels undercooked, tacked on to a show that should be about shooting monsters.

On top of that it’s also very slow. The two-part premiere lasted around two hours, but we’ve hardly moved ahead at all. This is the length of an average movie, but we hardly know anything about the characters. At the same time, the action and horror scenes are intercut with long, slow character moments with lots of dialogue that give it slow, stuttering pacing.

Maybe things will pick up later on, but for now it’s not a very triumphant start for the Xenomorph’s TV debut.