Noah Hawley’s Alien: Earth Is Not Such a Tight Ship
The latent thrash of Alien: Earth is only one of several crannies of the Alien cosmos into which Hawley extends a curious tentacle. The new show is more minutely interested, for instance, in the complex biology and reproductive cycle of the iconic Xenomorph alien than any film in the series, and it spends a tremendous amount of time explicitly explaining and clinically exploring that topic. It is fascinated by the franchise’s depiction of androids, and it situates these beings within a kind of politicized class hierarchy of synthetic, humanoid AI on the planet of their manufacture. It wants to know way, way more about the Earthbound economic environment that led Weyland-Yutani Corp. to put Sigourney Weaver on that ill-fated spaceship in the first place.
Alien: Earth, in other words, has a lot of ideas. So, too, did Alien, Aliens, and all the rest, up through the recent reboots and reimaginings. But all of those films—seven in the canon, along with two crossovers with the Predator universe—shared a kind of brutal simplicity and cutting restraint, the space of the ship serving as a literal representation of the movie’s compulsory narrative economy. The pictures had lots to say about AI and humanity and God and science and bodies and machines, but the language they used was the bloody and direct language of a slasher set on an intergalactic submarine. Even the most philosophically minded of the films, like 2012’s Prometheus, work dirty. (When an enfeebled trillionaire finally meets his alien creator to ask the meaning of life, the giant alien just smacks him so hard he dies.) Given an epic canvas, Hawley introduces new moods and modes to investigate Alien’s enduring themes and images, from boardrooms to futuristic cities to jungle laboratories. But the series often feels as though it’s missing the ruthless, rigid organization of the tin can hurtling through space, its ruminations grander but, given new room to breathe, less urgent. In ways both good and bad, Alien: Earth is not such a tight ship.
There’s a scene in the fourth episode of Alien: Earth when what’s colloquially called a “chestburster” alien infant breaks out of its containment. The creature initially has no legs or arms, and it slithers on its tail like a cobra as it stands, making eye contact with one of our characters. Were chestbursters always snaky guys? In the moment, as I ogled the slippery beast staring from the screen in front of me, I couldn’t quite remember. And the reason for that is that the Alien films have always been defined by speed and darkness. The original chestburster scampers away before you really get a good look at him. The fully grown Xenomorphs dodge in and out of the shadows. In this show, the aliens are well-lit and fully featured. We see them closely, and at length. We probe their strange life cycle, ask and answer questions about them, even hear and try to understand their voices. Some of this makes for fascinating drama. It scratches an itch I have, as a fan, for answers. But part of what made the films so itchily brilliant was their mystery, their play with the dark, their slinking and scampering. Can an extended look at these creatures in the light match the experience of being sideswiped by them in the dark? Are greater mysteries to be found the deeper we go? Can the TV show’s slaking our curiosity replace the visceral thrill of the Xenomorph on the hunt?
