CABLE | 'Alien: Earth' Arrives in the Future Past on FX

"It’s like a zoo, but the animals got out."

FX Productions / Scott Free Productions

FX and Fargo show creator Noah Hawley reteam for their engrossing new science-fiction horror prequel television series, Alien: Earth. Set two years before the classic 1979 Ridley Scott (also an executive producer) directed original Alien film, the dense show takes its colonial deep space mythology to new depths, but this time on our home planet (a first for the franchise), as you might have guessed from its subtitle.

A child-like Sydney Chandler, a relative newcomer and daughter of Kyle Chandler, stars as one of the first "hybrids," named Wendy, made from the mind and human consciousness of a terminally ill girl transferred into a synthetic transhumanoid body. Her existence and storyline slowly build around separate but interconnected sets of characters that come into contact when a xenomorph crash-lands and arrives on Earth after killing everyone aboard a corporate Weyland-Yutani spaceship secretly collecting extraterrestrial species.

At the heart of the series' interesting Peter Pan-esque narrative, Alex Lawther portrays a desperate human soldier, closely tied to Wendy, who investigates the crash site with his unit before she brings her own team to secure any specimen findings from the research vessel. It's an intriguing setup in its own right, featuring various ragtag groups in the tradition of all the previous Alien entries, but only set on Earth. Then there's the silver-haired Timothy Olyphant (always entertaining to look at) playing a synthetic mentor to the hybrids, who serves in the long tradition of cold but calculating androids in the franchise.

Hawley takes his own complex approach to the famed space horror saga by layering sci-fi themes through conventional television storytelling and a chilly, atmospheric tone. How he employs the actual alien creature element stretches the sense of dread from episode to episode appropriately, as it explores issues of rival corporate sabotage in a past vision of the future in a series worthy of the durable property.

Alien: Earth's eight-episode first season begins airing weekly on FX and will be available to stream on Disney+ in Canada (and on Hulu in the U.S.) starting August 12th.


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