The rich irony at the heart of the storied “Alien” franchise is that at the core of these encounters with the monstrous animal is a question of what, in fact, makes us truly human. The grand twist of the original 1979 masterpiece was the revelation that Ash, the crew’s science officer, was not in fact human, but an android, creating a blurred line that subsequent films have all toyed with in one way or another. In the second era of reboots, with “Prometheus” and “Alien: Covenant,” the franchise ushered in terrifyingly existential questions about man as it looks, in a sense, into the face of God.
It’s only a matter of time, then, that this story of extraterrestrials should land where its core questions lie: here, on Earth, home to humans. In “Alien: Earth,” it’s on our planet that the franchise’s mythos gets the most expansive and awe-inspiring treatment that previous films have always only gestured toward, in its narrative and visual scope, and also in those heady questions about the nature of our species.
Taking place two years before the original film, Noah Hawley’s dazzlingly haunting epic is all about what exactly defines us as human: Our bodies? Our minds? Our memories and our emotions? You might say it’s our humanity that makes us human: our sense of mercy, our feelings and sentimentalities. But, the show seems to wonder, maybe it’s in fact our hubris that is distinctly human, along with a kind of perversely advanced barbarity that makes us far more animal than any alien could be.
All these ideas are neatly encapsulated in a new invention that becomes the show’s protagonist. In a dystopian future, where five corporations rule the world, the Boy Kavalier (Samuel Blenkin), the sneering genius CEO of Prodigy Corporation, has ushered in the possibility of immortality via hybrids. In a world of cyborgs (cybernetically enhanced humans) and synths (artificially intelligent beings), scientists have found a way to download the consciousness of a terminally ill child named Marcy into a synthetic body — an entirely new form known as a hybrid. In other words, the memories and experiences of Marcy are all still there, but now they’ve been placed into the immortal, advanced body known as Wendy (Sydney Chandler).
It’s a world-altering breakthrough that encapsulates the most human paradox of all. In our race toward the inhuman, which is to say toward immortality, we are fleeing from our most primal, existentially human fear of all: death. Wendy seems to have offered the possibility to eradicate death, but who or what exactly she is becomes the crux of the show’s philosophical interests, and where it collides with those terrifying aliens.
After her successful transition, more kid consciousnesses are transferred into synthetic bodies (the classic fable of Wendy and the Lost Boys serves as an eerie backdrop throughout the show), and eventually they form a crew that go on a rescue mission toward a downed space ship carrying outer-world specimens.
Naturally, alien battles come into play. For all its grand lore-building, Hawley’s series is remarkably adept at balancing the old pleasures of the franchise with the newer questions and sensibilities (and a more sprawling narrative enabled by the transition to TV). The alien fights, while less of a focal point in the show (there are also more monsters than just the iconic xenomorph), can be breathtaking, and a standalone flashback spaceship episode is clearly meant to serve as the show’s spin on the original film.
Perhaps most satisfyingly, Hawley has captured the distinct sense of unease and eeriness from Scott’s opus, with its slow fades and the alienating horror of the existential. The series’s own spin on that ethos, though, shares a sensibility with another Scott masterwork. As Wendy and others come to question their true nature, a body whose soul has, in a sense, been engineered at the hands of a corporation, there is the particular blend of dystopic android despair of “Blade Runner” that “Alien: Earth” comes to be shot through with. Its questions, though, are far more disconcerting and resonant in an age of A.I. and an oligarchic billionaire class whose ideas of human progress have become increasingly warped.
That perhaps is the truer horror that Hawley’s show wants to get at. As Wendy finds an increasing connection with the xenomorph, the question becomes less of whether she is more human than robot, but more alien than human. That possibility, in fact, might be less terrifying.
“I don’t want to be people anymore if this is what people are: killing things, taking them apart just to see what’s inside,” Wendy says at one point. The terror in 1979 was that “in space, no one can hear you scream.” Maybe that was better all along — here, where we can hear each other scream, we might be the monsters.
“Alien: Earth” premieres Tuesday, Aug. 12 on FX and Hulu.