Boy, this show was a roller coaster of good ideas, bad ideas, and hit-or-miss execution. I absolutely hated the first 2 episodes, to the point that I really didn't want to watch any more of the show. But my partner was liking it (I guess?) and she wanted to keep watching, so I watched it with her. I'm not sure if I'm happy that I stuck it out, or not. It does get a little bit better -- for a little bit -- but then it completely shits the bed.
I wasn't keen on the show being about children's minds being implanted into android bodies. Going on to treat them like a super hero team was one of the cringiest things I've ever seen in this franchise (and that includes Alien: Resurrection and Prometheus).
But then the show starts to get into the ethics, morality, and metaphysics of putting someone's consciousness into an android body (and other questions regarding trans-humanism), and the mind-body dilemma that is inherent to such an idea. Here Alien: Earth starts to get genuinely good. Are the androids really the same people? Are the original people dead? Are the androids property of the company that manufactured them? Does that company have the right to control what that android does? Does that company have the right to wipe parts of that android's memory, or change the android's personality, in order to fix a "glitch"?
Of course, all of these questions can be adequately explored without having the gimmick of implanting children's minds into the androids. The writers could just as easily have written a story about regular androids becoming sentient, and pose the exact same questions about whether they are "property" or "people". It's been done a billion times before in science fiction, so even though these are all interesting questions, it's nothing particularly new or innovative. I think the use of children was done to make the audience more sympathetic and "human-like", because the people in charge don't have any respect for the intelligence of their audience. It could also have been a decision made in order to justify the characters doing stupid, illogical things, but I'll get to that later.
At the same time, there are completely new aliens that have never been seen in this franchise before, that get a lot of screen time. There's a creepy, parasitic eyeball alien thing that is probably the single best idea that this entire show has going for it. It's gross and disturbing on a visceral level, but also the idea of it tunneling into your brain and taking control of your body is terrifying on an existential level. Honestly, an entire show (without the Alien title and branding) about that eyeball parasite probably could have been worth watching on its own. But Hollywood is averse to new IPs and can't make anything that doesn't have a recognizable brand attached to it -- again, because executives have no respect for the intelligence of their audiences.
Alien: Earth season 1, episode 1 - © Walt Disney, Hulu
Treating these cyborg children like a superhero team was so stupid.
But yeah, that's as good as this show gets: vaguely intriguing.
Then it nosedives.
There's a flashback episode of the inciting xenomorph breakout and massacre that is just another soft retelling of the original Alien movie that we've seen about a half-dozen times in Alien movies already. It's executed just fine, but felt pointless and unnecessary. Personally, I think it would have been way better to have subverted expectations and made the eyeball parasite be the thing that rampages through the ship (instead of the xenomorph). At least that would have been a bit original. It could take control of different characters to sabotage different parts of the ship, or kill or manipulate other characters into doing things for it, then migrate to another host whenever it's threatened or cornered.
The final couple episodes are just an absolute trainwreck. One episode is basically the "everything goes wrong" episode, where all the different plot threads converge to throw the shit into the fan. Except that the shit going into the fan doesn't feel organic; it all comes from supposedly smart characters making absolutely idiotic decisions that cause cascading disasters due to all their previous stupid decisions..
At one point, one of the child androids has an emotional break-down as a result of PTSD. The technicians decide to purge her memory of the traumatic events, as if they are purging some corrupted data out of a database. As this is happening, I turned to my partner and asked "So they're going to tell all the other kids to not talk about the traumatic event, and to keep her away from the lab with all the aliens, right?" Well, there is a cut to black, and literally the next scene has our main character waking up the android kid after the memory purge procedure, and immediately asking her about the traumatic event.
I literally laughed out loud at how stupid this moment was, and it was the point that I had completely given up on the show. From here on out, I was only watching to see just how stupid it could possibly get. And it does get stupider, with all the characters continuing to make dumb decisions until the show just stops with an un-satisfying ending that resolves nothing. It's not even really a cliff-hanger. It's just an anti-climactic non-ending.
Alien: Earth season 1, episode 4 - © Walt Disney, Hulu
This creepy eye parasite alien is one of (if not the) only good idea in the whole show.
I have other complaints too. Like how most of the show takes place in a boring, gray concrete facility. Or how the show keeps explicitly name-dropping Peter Pan just to make sure the audience doesn't forget the allusion. Yeah, we get it -- the children will never grow up, just like in Peter Pan ... we got it! Or how Wendy has the ability to telepathically control electronic devices, which is never explained at all.
All the supposedly "genius" characters never feel like they are smart in any way. They just go around constantly talking about how smart they are, and how stupid everyone else is by comparison, without ever actually doing anything smart (and frequently doing things that are stupid). Like, there's never a point where the Boy Kavalier pushes aside some programmer who's working too slow, and says "forget it, I'll do it myself!" and then hacks a secure computer system or reprograms a complicated machine. I get that this is an attack on idiot tech-bros who think they're un-paralleled geniuses, but in reality they just took credit for other people's work, but still...
Perhaps the most baffling decision is the tonal whiplash from the choice to feature 90's and early 2000's alt rock at the end of every episode, as if we're watching a Matrix mini-series. It's a decision so stupid that it can only have come from a high-up executive, or perhaps from an A.I..
I also hated the xenomorph itself. Alien movies keep trying to make the xenomorph seem more dangerous than it actually is. In this show, a single xenomorph massacres entire squads of trained marines multiple times.
Alien: Earth season 1, episode 6 - © Walt Disney, Hulu
The idea of talking to and domesticating a xenomorph is certainly a new idea. I'm not sure if it's a good one...
Yeah, the xenomorph is supposed to be threatening, but it was never an invincible killing machine. In the original movie, a single xenomorph kills the entire cast of characters because they are a bunch of random, unarmed space-truckers who have no idea what they're dealing with. The only defense they come up with is an improvised flame-thrower. In the second movie, the marines mow down xenomorphs by the dozens. But there's only a handful of marines, and literally thousands of xenomorphs, so the marines are quickly swarmed and overwhelmed.
Again, this is where I think the eye parasite missed its potential. The parasite could have been something that adds chaos and uncertainty to the situation in order to make the xenomorph more dangerous. Instead, we just get a bunch of marines with big guns who get themselves killed because they are too stupid to ever check the ceiling above their head for the wall-crawling murder alien.
Alien: Earth has a few bright spots, but I thought it was overall stupidly-plotted and executed. I honestly don't understand why critics seem to like it so much, but I guess it's a small relief that its user ratings seem to be mixed. So clearly I'm not the only one who was turned off by the frequent cringe-inducing idiocy on display. Outside of Kirsch and Morrow (who are great whenever they're on screen together), the characters are mostly un-likeable, and its almost impossible to take anything that happens in this show seriously. I could dismiss stupid or impulsive decisions from the cyborg children, but I would have hoped for the other characters to be better (and more intelligently) written.
That being said, if they eyeball parasite gets its own stand-alone show, I might check that out.