August 13, 2025

Last night, the first two episodes of FX’s Alien: Earth premiered on FX and Hulu! This was my most anticipated show release for this year, so I thought it would be fun to talk through my thoughts on the first two episodes. What I liked, what I didn’t like, and what I think is on the horizon are all ahead! But beware: there are spoilers ahead for both episodes and light spoilers for Alien, Aliens, and Alien: Romulus.

A Brief Synopsis

Alien: Earth takes place in the year 2120, two years before the events of the original Alien film. The series opens with a quick bit of text exposition that explains the future race for human immortality. In this world, this race is pursued in the forms of cyborgs, synths, and hybrids. Deep in space, a research vessel carrying a crew of scientists and a roomful of strange, alien beings travels to Earth to deliver those beings to the powerful Weyland-Yutani Corporation. You see, back on Earth, Weyland-Yutani is in a race with another corporation, Prodigy, to expedite human immortality through morally-grey research into cybernetics and AI. The CEO of Prodigy, a young trillioniare, has just cracked the code to creating hybrids, which are fully synthetic beings that contain the consciousness of humans.

The series follows Wendy, the first of these beings who contains the consciousness of a dying child, and a crew of other hybrids on an expedition to examine and contain the harm caused by the Weyland-Yutani research ship, which has crashed into a city after some of the aliens aboard the ship broke free of their containment. On their expedition, Wendy hopes to save her brother, who is a human medic sent in on a search and rescue mission in the spacecraft crash site. This expedition will prove to be challenging, though, as one of the species that broke free in this crash is none other than the iconic, terrifying Xenomorph.

A Strong Start

All things considered, this is a very strong start to the series in my opinion. It’s not really what I was expecting, but in the best way possible. The idea of having a group of what are essentially super-powered children undergo this treacherous journey is genuinely really unique and serves as an interesting way to break free of the constraints of the Alien formula. As much as I enjoy the first two Alien films and Romulus (which are the only three Alien entries I’ve seen, for full disclosure), each of them are more or less a group of humans battling against one or several Xenomorphs. It already feels very fresh to break free of that with the main cast and with new alien creatures, but that’s on top of the fact that we’re also examining a future Earth and the battle between several mega-corporations. Despite groups like Weyland-Yutani being all over the franchise for a while, if you’ve only interacted with a few of the movies like I have, then you really don’t know much about them.

Based on these two episodes alone, I can see the threads of themes already coming together. Humanity versus AI, death versus immortality, the power of nature fighting back against a techno-futuristic world, and family. Some of these are ambitious and while they’ve been tackled before, sometimes even together, it’s really interesting to see them fleshed out in the context of the Alien franchise. If you want to make a series about nature overcoming powerful technology, I think the Xenomorphs are an excellent vehicle to drive that point home.

I also really enjoy the characters and performances. I don’t really think there was a single one I actively disliked so far, but some standouts include Sydney Chandler’s Wendy, Samuel Blenkin’s Boy Kavalier, and Babou Ceesay’s Morrow. I’m really interested to see where these three go in particular.

Not All Perfect

If there was one thing to address, though, it’s that I’m not entirely in love with the writing so far. It’s not bad, but the first episode specifically had a few moments where the writing alone took me out of it. As an example, I wasn’t a fan of how much exposition was crammed into the beginning of episode one. We see the exposition cards with valuable information about the race for immortality, but then the crew on the Weyland-Yutani ship spend most of their screen time simply giving exposition. Characters talk about their job, what they’re doing, and what is happening in such a stilted way that kinda made me worried about the direction it was going almost immediately.

It got better from there, but there were a few more moments I didn’t love here or there. This is in contrast to something like the directing, which I think is really interesting and unique. The writing in these episodes felt a little flimsy, which is disappointing when everything else was so tight.

Ultimately, If You Enjoy Alien…

I would recommend you watch it! There’s genuinely very little that I take issue with. Overall, it absolutely lived up to my expectations. The set design and scope is vast, the story is unique, and it’s well directed. I’m very excited to tune in week to week to see where this goes, and I must add…

This makes me want that rumored Alien vs. Predator reboot even more!