When the Alien prequels were released about a decade ago now, I wasn’t exactly a fan. To me, sidelining the monster in favor of the story of David 8 seemed a disservice to what came before. Why was it so hard to do a smart, stylish monster movie in the spirit of the original trilogy? So, needless to say, had Alien: Earth been released around that same time, I likely would have held similar opinions.
THE ARTICLE BELOW CONTAINS SPOILERS
But a lot can change in such a time. In the nine years since Alien: Covenant, I’ve moved past my dislike of Ridley Scott’s science fiction opera. Is it for me? Not really, but that doesn’t mean it won’t have the power to resonate with others. Since then, I’ve become more open to not just Alien but any series I enjoy taking a wild swing. After all, Alien and Aliens were not exactly carbon copies of each other. I avoided getting hyped because sometimes hype can disappoint you in the short term, only for that disappointment to fade and a new movie becoming a favorite, such as with Halloween Kills. So when Alien Earth was announced, I didn’t get hyped. I didn’t look anything up. I figured when the show came, I would just take it as it came at me and decide how I felt once it was done.
The first time I watched the show, I wasn’t that impressed. There is a lot to like about Alien: Earth, with some absolutely stellar episodes and scary moments that have joined the ranks as the franchise’s best, but it wasn’t one I planned to revisit in depth. Then some friends were interested in checking it out, so we went through the series for a second time via several gatherings at my apartment. And the funniest thing started to happen. I liked what I was watching. I mean, really liked it.
It’s true, the show doesn’t have as much Alien/Xenomorph as I would have liked, an obvious problem when the Alien is in the title. The practical animatronics are a far cry from the amazing work we saw in previous movies. Wendy, played by Sydney Chandler, is a bit thinly drawn across much of the series and only really shone in the final episode. At times, the show feels padded, spending too much time on certain story elements while skimming over much of the suspense and thrills audiences come to expect. And yet, somehow, I liked it a lot more than I didn’t. And one of the things I enjoyed the most was what it did with the Alien itself, which will no doubt be one of the most divisive elements of the series as a whole.
Now, a big issue is that there isn’t that much Alien in a show called Alien. The show primarily focuses on Wendy and several other’ hybrid synthetics’ androids given the consciousness of humans, in this case, terminally ill children who were used as test subjects, all under the Prodigy Corporation. When a Weyland Yutani ship crashes in prodigy territory containing an all too familiar monster along with several other cosmic terrors, Prodigy effectively holds the monsters hostage for research and refuses to return them to Weyland Yutani. During this time, several of Wendy’s fellow hybrid androids are targeted by Weyland Yutani forces attempting to reclaim what they view as their property, while Wendy is forming a bond with, funnily enough, one of the infamous monsters who first terrified audiences back in 1979. It’s this Alien, who becomes a seeming friend to Wendy, who gets the most screen time.
Now, this isn’t all we get. The Alien gets a lot of time to shine earlier in the series. In the blood-soaked second episode, we are treated to a suspenseful romp where a single Alien, affectionately named ‘Steve’ by fans, is tearing through the residents of a high-rise apartment building. This was the first episode to really hook me, and the suspenseful antics that followed were an absolute joy to watch as an Alien fan. Steve, the creature we see for most of the early episodes, is featured in the pilot, the second episode, and the stellar flashback episode that takes place on board the Maginot, before Wendy kills him in the 3rd episode. I might have been a bit sad upon Steve’s death.
There’s also a pretty tense subplot where Morrow, a Weyland-Yutani cyborg, threatens the family of the hybrid Slightly in order to force him to gather a specimen, which results in him clumsily allowing a facehugger to impregnate a worker before trying to smuggle the worker off the island so Morrow can collect the embryo. But these are side plots. The main story, the main thing that is focused on in terms of the Alien itself, is Wendy’s developing rapport with another Alien that has been bred in captivity. We shall call this Alien Steve the Second. Don’t like the name? Tough. In this article, the creature is named Steve the Second.
Yeah, the thing viewers really want to see is what would happen if the creature overran the Earth, so those hoping to see swarms of Aliens crawling over cities, you will be disappointed. Instead, what we have is an odd developing partnership between Wendy and the creature, who she views with increasing sympathy. The story goes into some interesting places here, with Wendy convinced that Steve the Second has reached out to her and growing to be able to mimic the sounds it makes, thus replicating what seems to be a language. I’ve always been interested in the idea that there is more going on with the Alien than is obvious on the surface. The creature regularly shows signs of intelligence and reasoning power in the movies, from sabotaging equipment to setting traps and sparing the lives of certain people so its kind can continue. And this doesn’t even touch on a lot of the fun things we’ve seen in the expanded universe. So to me, knowing about the deeper secrets of the creature and how it lives is something that, in the right hands, I wouldn’t mind delving deeper into at all.
In the tradition of the Alien series, the real villain is less the creature and more the companies trying to get it. Here we have insufferable Prodigy CEO Boy Kalavier as our big bad, a character so loathsome I actually found myself rooting for Weyland-Yutani. Boy Kavalier, the one responsible for creating hybrids, intended to sell the discovery on the basis of putting people into the perfect bodies, and dismisses the hybrids under his care as ‘floor models.’ Wendy’s main arc in the series is disillusionment with Kavalier’s antics as she begins to question her identity. Once she really gets wind that she is not safe and Boy is exploiting her the same way he is ultimately exploiting the captive creatures, she actually releases Steve the Second to dispatch the CEO’s security team and throw the island facility, known as Neverland, into chaos.
It would be easy to imagine that at the season finale, all this goes wrong, and the creature goes on a random killing spree. Instead, Steve the Second is always firmly in Wendy’s corner, following along, only attacking when commanded, and standing beside her when the series wraps up its first season. The final set piece of the show is of Boy on the run from Steve the Second, who has been sent to hunt the CEO down. While the series has definately had its share of unlikable characters getting captured or killed by the slimy beasts, this is the first time when the creature is seemingly doing so in order to help the other characters. Even those who are human.
What was most surprising to me was that Wendy doesn’t side with Steve the Second at the expense of other characters. One of the major plot threads in the show is Wendy’s efforts to reconnect with Joe, her brother from before when her consciousness was transferred. In a simpler show, Wendy would have become a villain by the end, having her new army of creatures kill Joe and choosing to side with them over her humanity. Instead, the two share a genuinely heartfelt moment where Joe offers to try and understand what she has become. Wendy in turn, rather than turning the monster on him, still tries to understand her own humanity, or at the very least what it’s become. By the time the series concludes, Joe is standing alongside Wendy and Steve the 2nd both, no longer threatened by the creature. At least for now.
Having a villainous monster or creature become a protagonist isn’t entirely new. This was a formula that proved successful in reviving the Terminator series, and is also the premise for the latest Predator film. The dinosaurs from Jurassic Park also got increasingly heroic with each film, culminating in the raptor named Blue becoming one of the main heroes. The list goes on. Still, the Alien series, being much darker and violent, does walk a tightrope in turning its slimy antagonist into a slimy hero. Such a move will inevitably divide many people. For me however, the sheer joy of playing the creature in various games has always made me a bit more sympathetic to its point of view, and seeing a film or TV series that presents the Alien more as a protagonist is something I’ve always been interested in seeing. So far, Alien: Earth is the closest we’ve come.
It at times can feel like the Alien is taking a back seat to the character of Wendy who, if we’re being honest, isn’t really an original concept and is now something we’ve seen in countless science fiction properties. At this rate, stories about robots and AI are far more common than the creature features that inspired Alien. But while the prequels put David front and center, Wendy’s relationship with the creature, at least to me, was a lot more interesting. Here, Steve the Second was something Wendy relates to, more than her brother, more than her creators, more than the company trying to capture and study the creature. To her, Steve the Second becomes a kindred spirit, someone she sees herself in, and it honestly got to the point where I, like her, was worried the monster would be killed.
So will Wendy become the villain of the series, commanding the Alien as her own personal army? Truth be told, what I’d like to see may be even more controversial than that take. One of the things we’ve been seeing a lot in series is allowing once-feared monsters to be on the same side as the audience. So, rather than Wendy using the aliens to conquer the world, what I hope to see is Wendy and Steve the Second bonding even further, with the two ultimately becoming the two heroes of the show rather than villains, and the series really delving into how the Weyland Yutani corporation ultimately seeks to exploit and victimize the creature. I want to see Wendy and the creature go on the run and get into wild adventures, and work together to defeat any number of other cosmic horrors, such as the nefarious eye.
Now this would be a far cry from the original trilogy that terrified audiences, and a softer view of the creature will absolutely not be for everyone. And there was a time when I’d be right there with you. But something about this series grabbed me. Something about Wendy, how she’s dealing with confusion rather than rage, and how Steve the 2nd becomes an anchor for her, to me, could actually be a scenario where such a premise works. It’s even been teased previously. In the 40th anniversary short for Alien: Alone, the main character was an android coexisting with a facehugger on a ship adrift between the stars, and that actually turned out to be my favorite of the shorts. What an adventure it would be to build on that idea. It might not be so great. It might be something that really works. But whether it’s either of those things will depend on whether or not the series is renewed.