Alien: Earth
Entry updated 15 December 2025. Tagged: TV.
US tv series (2025-current). 26 Keys Productions, Scott Free Productions, FXP. Created by Noah Hawley. Various writers and directors, including Hawley. Cast includes Jonathan Ajayi, Samuel Blenkin, Babou Ceesay, Sydney Chandler, Adrian Edmonson, Ardash Gourav, Alex Lawther, Lily Newmark and Timothy Olyphant. Season 1 consists of 8 episodes of-64 minutes; further series planned. Colour.
A prequel of sorts to Alien (1979), set two years before the events of that film. The governance of Earth is as sketched out in the background to Alien, with five Corporations running the planet. A spaceship belonging to one of them, containing Alien specimens including the xenomorphs familiar from the franchise, crashes on Earth, and its contents are immediately claimed by a rival corporation, run by Boy Kavalier (Blenkin), a very young trillionaire whose upstart company is attempting to outstrip the established corporations. On an Island hideaway, Boy Kavalier has been uploading the brains of dying children into new adult bodies (see Identity Transfer), giving them enhanced capabilities to create a new form of human-Android hybrid. He is also obsessed with Peter Pan, seeing the children as the Lost Boys, but also as immensely valuable prototypes of an attempt to create humans who can rival artificial intelligences (see AI).
As battle ensues between the corporations, the first of the hybrids, renamed Wendy (Chandler) begins to question her surroundings and upbringing, and discovers she can communicate with the xenomorphs. Her naïve, idealist brother Joe (Lawther) continues to believe she is in need of rescue and can live a life away from the island. The rest of the "Lost Boys", tutored by the "synthetic" Kirsh (Olyphant), also discover their own powers, particularly when the deadly aliens break free from the lab and begin to kill the nearby humans. Series 1 ends with Wendy leading the children into overthrowing Boy Kavalier's operation, controlling the aliens, and deciding it is time for them to become leaders of humanity.
It is perhaps best to ignore the strict timeline of Alien: Earth within the franchise, as the events of Alien and its sequels would surely be changed considerably if the aliens were not only already on Earth, but also controllable by enhanced humans. (The series wisely ignores the misguided Alien vs. Predator crossovers.) With that caveat, this is probably the richest instalment in the series since Alien³ (1992), despite the fact that the Peter Pan-inspired story and characters clash somewhat uneasily with the more franchise-friendly elements, and the Lost Boys occasionally too closely resemble the rag tag bunch of misfits familiar from Marvel Comics and Marvel Cinematic Universe films. The pacing is at times audaciously slow, allowing proper time for the characters to reflect varying degrees of humanity and responsibility, with many effective moments of gruesome Horror and imaginatively conceived aliens. Proper attention is also paid to the xenomorphs, after they had been sidelined in recent series entries, with clever details such as their skin subtly changing colour in sunlight. The actors portraying children in adult bodies are remarkably believable, and Olyphant, Ceesay and Edmondson make for chillingly convincing hybrids.
The first series proved successful and was quickly recommissioned. [CWa]
links
previous versions of this entry