TV Review: Alien: Earth Season 1 (2025)

Alien: Earth Season 1 (2025) created for television by Noah Hawley based on elements created by Dan O'Bannon and Ronald Shusett

A Wayland-Yutani Corporation science freighter is on its way home to Earth when it goes out of control and crashes into a city. The Earth is divvied up among several different mega-corporations. The space ship crashes into territory controlled by Prodigy, a recent success led by an obsessive, self-described "boy genius" (Samuel Blenkin). His main project is creating synthetic bodies for people to inhabit so that they can be immortal. He's acquired a group of terminally-ill children and used them as the first test subjects. He renames them after the Lost Boys from Peter Pan, imagining himself as Pan. But the new freighter is full of biological specimens gathered across the galaxy, including a sentient and malevolent eyeball, a Venus flytrap-type plant, and the eggs that hatch xenomorphs, the iconic Alien of the franchise. The boy genius sends in his forces to contain the specimens and bring them to the island where he's developing the synths. He has a lot of obstacles, including the executive from Wayland-Yutani, an obsessive (and lone) survivor from the freighter, and the brother of one of the synths who wants to bring her home.

The focus isn't so much on the boy genius (though he is the catalyst for a lot of the dramatic turns). The synths are the most developed character, especially Wendy (Sydney Chandler), whose brother (Alex Lawther) gets to the island in a desperate attempt to free her from Prodigy. The other main actor is the survivor (Babou Ceesay) whose focus on getting the "cargo" back is more a personal vendetta than an effort to secure his share of the payday. 

As anyone should expect for the Alien franchise, the show is fairly gory and horrifying. The new creatures on the ship add to the tension and danger as they find ways to escape or to manipulate the scientists and caretakers trying to keep them in their containers. Many situations spiral out of control, leading to awful consequences. The human characters make bad choices or are pushed into hard situations that they can't get themselves out of. Things go from bad to worse all the time in this show.

That result became a problem for me. The few sympathetic characters in the show are either killed off or start favoring the evil choices that are open to them. It's an embodiments of Hobbes's "nature red in tooth and claw" idea, with the victors at the end promising to take their turn as the oppressors. The ending was very bleak and a little implausible.

I did like the exploration of the human children being "ported" into the synths. Eight- to ten-year olds are give adult-sized bodies and some superhuman strength and other abilities that they clearly aren't ready to handle. At least that's clear to the viewers, not so much to the characters in the story. Their struggles with their identities were the most interesting parts of the show for me, though it was only part of larger story lines.

Mildly recommended--this is better than a lot of the Alien content out there, but still has a lot of flaws.