(spoilers for Alien: Earth Season 1 and the rest of the franchise)

The basic rules of an Alien movie are:

  1. The Alien is absolutely terrifying.
  2. No really, the Alien is so terrifying that any attempt to harness its power fails horribly.

(yes, I know the proper term is “xenomorph,” but Alien is shorter)

From Alien (1979) to Alien: Romulus (2024) this recipe works: First, we get scared on a visceral level when we see the Alien slaughter characters we care about. Second, we learn that Evil Management is trying to use the Alien somehow, but it is just so wildly powerful that containment - much less control - never succeeds. (Even the oddball Alien vs Predator movies repeat the theme: Aliens are too dangerous even for Predators to manage!)

Alien: Earth (2025)’s promotional art suggests continuity:

Alien: Earth on Hulu, showing a cracked Earth

Exact same sickly-green fissure as from 1979:

Alien 1979 poster, showing a cracked egg

Other graphics suggest the same recipe will be used:

Facehugger wrapped around Earth

Alien drooling above Earth

Definitely looks like the Alien will be a terrifying threat to our planet! But Alien: Earth Season 1 seems to make every effort to downplay its danger:

  • Lots of deaths, but many episodes pass before the Alien kills a named character.
  • We see the Alien in, um, embarrassing situations: grabbed awkwardly by the tongue, later struggling as it is wrestled with.
  • Worst of all - breaking the most basic rules of an Alien movie - the Alien becomes Wendy’s loyal servant: It can be harnessed and utilized. Easily, in fact. Evil Management was right all along!

So, what is going on here?

  1. Perhaps Alien: Earth defies tradition very intentionally. All the other monster species in the show look entirely unusable as weapons (except as “nukes from orbit”), making the xenomorph stand out when it obeys Wendy as if she were its hive queen. Maybe the point of this prequel is to say, yes, Evil Management was right. They had proof from the start that the Alien could be controlled, and that is why they kept trying in all those other movies you’ve already seen. Kind of a neat new perspective to give us about all prior Alien content, but is it a satisfying one?

  2. Or is this a slow-burn setup, and Season 2 will horrify us with xenomorphs slaughtering Wendy and everyone she cares about? But Season 1 spent so much time underplaying the Alien that I’m curious how that would work. The Last Of Us doesn’t start with harmless Infected!

  3. Or maybe the show is - unlike past films - NOT about a terrifying Alien and the hubris of trying to tame it, and instead is exactly what it appears to be: the story of the hybrid children, superbeings whose souls were transported from their dying bodies à la Black Mirror, in conflict with their “parents,” with some dangerous alien lifeforms in the mix (in fact, some of them more horrifying than the Alien). Not an Alien movie, but a sci-fi show with some very cool things like Timothy Olyphant and the eye-monster.

In Alien: Earth, Morrow asks “When is a machine not a machine?” We might ask the same question of the xenomorphs in the show.

Comments

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