Alien: Earth starts out In the year 2120, two years before the events of the movie Alien, a spaceship the USCSS Maginot, owned by Weyland-Yutani, crashes into Prodigy City, deep into a Prodigy building. Prodigy is also a major competitive cooperation. The ship is loaded with alien specimens, not like friendly specimens of course, but the Xenomorph is the one we all know, but also an eye-ball alien thingy with legs, which turned out to be interesting. First of all, the ship was headed to earth, that was their intention, WHY!? Why would you want to bring these dangerous alien creatures to earth? Why not continue research on a nearby uninhabited planet or moon or something. The problems of the ship already start in space, during its dive into earth, it rams another ship, I would think that this ship immediately sets of all kinds of alarms on earth?

Then the situation at Prodigy, led by Boy Kavalier (Samuel Blenkin), a child prodigy…yes, clever, five terminally ill children get the chance to live on in a synthetic body, they all get a new name, they are Wendy (Sydney Chandler), Smee (Jonathan Ajayi, Curly (Erana James), Slightly (Adarsh Gourav), Nibs (Lily Newmark) and Tootles (Kit Young). So all small children, oldest was I believe Wendy, 11 or 12. Yes, all Peter Pan references, so cute! When the ship crashes, Kavalier approves that the newborn synths get to be on the rescue mission, led by Kirsh (Timothy Olyphant), a synth himself. So, Kavalier, still child himself, approves that these kids go with Kirsh into a very dangerous situation, these kids cost billions of dollars, but he doesn’t care apparently! Morrow (Babou Ceesay), a robot, is the only survivor of the crashed ship, mostly his doing, the aliens have killed off the rest of the crew, Morrow tries to escape. Marcy is Wendy’s real name, her brother thinks she has died, but when Wendy sees him as being one of the people going into the crashed ship to give aid where he can, she wants to join this mission with Kirsh and hopefully meet her brother (Alex Lawther). Not sure what to think of this character, someone who is gullible enough to think that he can take his sister home, besides that, it is a strange dude! Atom Eins (Adrian Edmondson) and Kirsh make to him very clear he is a moron. Atom has a surprise in store in the finale episode but also turned out to be underwhelming.

This was only the set-up which we see in the first episode. My favorite characters immediately were Kirsh and Morrow and perhaps the first episodes also Wendy with her wonderous look on the world, however this changes quickly. I thought it was weird, children in adult bodies is weird enough, but also bringing them into a hostile situation. The first impressions of these kids are dreadful. The Xenomorph aka the bitch, at least in the movies, unfortunately not that impressive, especially because we often get to see in broad daylight, and yes, then you can see it is a man in a suit. It is not for nothing that the Alien movies are usually set in dark settings. Boy Kavalier, the prodigy, it is said that he is so smart, he is so bored with the people around him that he hopes one of the children, will become smart enough so that he can have a intellectual conversation. Perhaps he is smart, but Boy does come over as a stupid brat, one who does not do smart things all the time, more like stupid things as also his decision making, certainly regarding those kids.

There is one episode I mentioned earlier, “In Space, No one….”, for me, it is the best episode up to that point, perhaps because I see some familiar things that made me think of the original movie. But again, the outright stupid things that happen in the lab on the ship, it is just preposterous! Eating in the lab, being so f*cking careless when she’s dealing with these unknown alien species and their housing. Also two medics who are doing an autopsy on bodies totally unprotected, how stupid and careless can you be? You would think these people know what they are doing? Bad writing that is all I can say. It is almost like it is meant to be a parody.

Back at the facility we see these synthetic kids do all kinds of stupid and dangerous things, which you cannot even blame them, they still are just kids in grown-up bodies. They let these kids in the lab, without real supervision, no one is there to keep an eye on these kids, yes, they may look like adults, but they aren’t older then 11 or 12! Later in the season we see so many soldiers outside, but inside, at the lab, what must be considered as the most important area of the building, there you see hardly anyone standing guard. Kirsh is an interesting character to me, in part because I really like Timothy Olyphant in almost anything he does and I also like this character Kirsh. Still, after finishing the first season I do feel that his character did not evolve very much, not sure how to explain this but I expected his character to do something extraordinary, something you didn’t expect, something totally out of character, but that didn’t happen, his character stayed status-quo up until the end.

During the season Wendy does evolve, but that does not mean that I root for her or anything. She has a special connection with these aliens, especially with the Xenomorph. She discovers she can communicate with it and soon it becomes sort of her pet, she controls it and the way she communicates, with her mouth open and making strange sounds, becomes very tiresome and annoying very quickly. I find it so stupid, why would such a creature let itself be controlled? There are many more annoying and stupid things happening, like Arthur opening a lab door when he sees one of the kids lying dead in an alien cubicle or when they take away memory engrams from Nibs, because she really was frightened aboard the ship and she still had issues with it, but then don’t tell the others not to talk Nibs about what happened on the crashed ship! Next comes Wendy in right after the procedure and tells her everything that happened in detail! It can not get any more stupid…or can it!? There is so much more stupidity but I am not gonna bore you with, just read the word document below to read more of that. But I want to say something about the season finale.

Again, in itself, the episode is not horrible, but when you are done with this episode you realize, there is not one character you can really root for, except perhaps still for Kirsh, because he’s Olyphant. Yes, quickly we see that the people working for the Prodigy company are not people we root for, perhaps Dame Sylvia (Essie Davis) and her husband Arthur (David Rysdahl), but these kids become just as evil in the end, they decide that everyone else should be afraid of them and they act on it. So, as it stands, when the season ends, we have no longer a protagonist, they are all evil and annoying. Perhaps there is one left, in the final moments we see dead Arthur suddenly stand up after the eye-ball alien has merged with him!

Final Word:

Most likely Alien: Earth gets a second season, and as I said, I did like parts of it, sometimes just because of how stupid some characters behaved, sometimes I watched it as if it was a comedy, because most parts I really could not take seriously. I expected an intelligent piece of television, well, you can forget that, but if you go in, expecting nothing, treat it as a parody, then I think you can like it. Will I check out season two? Not sure yet, I’ll be honest, I much rather they cancel it now, but as I said, it most likely will be renewed. So perhaps, in 12-14 months time, with the knowledge I now have about this show, I can actually enjoy it from the start, treating it as a parody, like Galaxy Quest on Star Trek…but not as good of course!

Screencaps taken from IMdB & Google Search