The success of last year’s Alien: Romulus has ignited interest in the franchise once again. While I wasn’t a fan of the latest film version, I was intrigued when a TV series was announced. The series creator is Noah Hawley, who also wrote all the episodes and directed two or three episodes of the series. I was excited because Hawley also created a series based on another film, Fargo. It’s one of the best series on TV right now, so I was excited to see what Hawley could do with the Alien franchise.

The series is set a couple of years before the events of the first Alien film. The year is 2120, and five tech companies control Earth and the colonized solar system. The USCSS Maginot, which belongs to one of the tech companies Weyland-Yutani, a deep space research vessel, approaches Earth after a 65-year expedition to obtain extra-terrestrial specimens, among them facehuggers.

On Earth, at Prodigy’s Neverland research island, Marcy Hermit (Florence Bensberg), a terminally ill child, becomes the first hybrid, having her consciousness transferred to an adult synthetic, and renames herself Wendy (Sydney Chandler). Adjusting to her new body with the assistance of synthetic mentor Kirsh (Timothy Olyphant), Wendy oversees several other children who undergo the same procedure.

When the USCSS Maginot clashed on Earth somewhere in Southeast Asia, which is now being controlled by Prodigy Corporation, its CEO, Boy Kavalier (Samuel Blenkin), orders Kirsh to take Wendy and the other synthetics to retrieve whatever is inside the spaceship. When she arrives at the crash site, Wendy finds out that her human brother Joe (Alex Lawther) is a medic and part of the rescuing team. She also realizes that an alien creature is the one that caused the ship to crash on Earth and killed everyone on the ship except Morrow (Babou Ceesay). Morrow is a hybrid of synthetic and real human. When the CEO of Weyland-Yutani (Sandra Yi Sencindiver) realizes that her ship has clashed with her rival territory, she orders Morrow to retrieve the alien species at any cost.

Let’s start with what I really like about this series. The new story and concept are great. I’m tired of seeing the same idea from the previous three films in the series. Prometheus, Alien: Covenant, and Alien: Romulus have the same concept. A group of people went to a planet, or in the case of Romulus, a lost ship, and they discovered the Alien species, and they must fight to survive.

Here, we finally see the Earth in this universe, and a new idea was introduced. We also see some other alien species. The xenomorph is still the killing machine, but we see some other nasty creatures that will destroy anything near its path. Visually, Hawley shot the whole series in vintage anamorphic lenses to give the look of the first film, and I thought it looked amazing. Hulu doesn’t offer surround sound in Dolby Atmos, but the sound design for the show is great too, even though it’s only in 5.1.

While the story and visuals are great, I didn’t really like any of the characters. Morrow was the most interesting character to me, and they dedicated one whole episode to him. I wish Morrow were the focus of this series. I like what Hawley did with Wendy at the beginning, but then she essentially became like David (Michael Fassbender) from the prequel films. A synthetic being who believes she’s superior to humans. Now, I think because Ridley Scott is still heavily involved in the making of the films and TV series, I must assume he wanted this series to head that way since he couldn’t finish his trilogy for the prequels.

Hulu hasn’t announced a second season yet, but the way it ended, I’ll have to assume they’ll make another season. I’ll give it a watch, but I hope the series makes some changes to keep me watching. The first couple of episodes were good, then the middle episodes were quite a drag. The last couple of episodes were decent, but they didn’t really deliver a satisfying conclusion in my opinion.

Have you seen the ALIEN: EARTH series? Well, what do you think?

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