Screen Time | "Alien: Earth," the Slimy Series, Finally Arrives Home

By Laurence Lerman / New York City

The xenomorphs bring it home to the Blue Planet in Alien: Earth

SCREEN TIME

For nearly five decades, the Alien franchise has thrived on a simple but potent conceit: the terror of the unknown, lurking in the cold vacuum of space. Since Ridley Scott’s 1979 classic Alien, the ever-sliming, ever-deadly xenomorph has stalked through sequels, prequels, spin-offs, comics, and video games — yet always kept its distance from Earth. That is, until now.

FX’s Alien: Earth, the handsome (and expensive!) eight-episode streaming series that premiered on August 12, doesn’t just break the franchise’s television barrier; it finally plants the horror on our home turf. It’s a bold recalibration — and the boldness pays off.

Set two years before Scott’s original film, the series envisions a future ravaged by corporate overreach and technological hubris. The setting is less spaceship corridor than corporate dystopia: gleaming labs, grimy back alleys, C-suites where mega-conglomerates scheme with AI systems far too powerful for their own good. It’s a world that feels alarmingly close, as if the nightmare was always destined to creep from the stars to our own doorstep.

Sydney Chandler’s consciousness is transferred to a manufactured body

At the center of this new take is the singularly named Wendy, played with electrifying precision by Sydney Chandler. Wendy’s a young woman whose consciousness has been transferred into a synthetic body and she’s the first of her kind — equal parts pioneering miracle and existential crisis. Wendy is both soldier and soul-searcher, battling extraterrestrial monstrosities while grappling with the question of whether she herself qualifies as human. Chandler’s performance channels shades of Sigourney Weaver’s iconic Ripley from Alien but adds a new vulnerability: she isn’t just fighting for survival, she’s fighting for her own legitimacy.

Alien: Earth’s creator is Noah Hawley—the man behind FX’s popular Fargo (2014-2024), based on the 1996 Coen Brothers classic, and Legion (2017-2019), a superhero series taken from the Marvel Comics character of the same name. Hawley steers his latest Intellectual Property adaptation with a trademark blend of cerebral and visual flair. He writes or co-writes every episode, and directs two, including the standout “Episode 5,” — a nerve-shredding voyage aboard a doomed spacecraft that recalls the haunted-house-in-space atmosphere of Scott’s Alien while unleashing a menagerie of new alien horrors. (Its title, “In Space, No One…” pays direct homage to the original.) At this point, it’s the series’ high-water mark, and confirms that Hawley knows exactly when to honor tradition and when to jolt the mythology forward.

The show’s alien creatures, too, are worth the price of admission. Some are oozingly faithful to artist H.R. Giger’s original xenomorph designs, while others are fresh nightmares: insectoid predators, parasitic organisms, and tentacled, multi-eyeball creepy crawlers that feel as unnerving as they do bizarrely plausible in their biology. The effects lean heavily on practical craftsmanship, with CGI deployed sparingly to flesh out what latex and animatronics can’t achieve. They all look (feel?) remarkably tactile — creatures you could almost reach out and recoil from.

Timothy Olyphant is a synthetic scientist with an agenda

Thematically, Alien: Earth takes big swings. Questions of identity, mortality, and the ethics of consciousness run through every episode. Wendy’s relationship with Kirsh, a synthetic scientist played with wry menace by Timothy Olyphant, becomes a mirror for the franchise’s oldest question: what separates us from the machines we create? Meanwhile, corporate overlords like the sinister Weyland-Yutani company manipulate alien encounters for profit, loudly echoing ideas that were introduced in the earlier films but updating them for an era obsessed with data, biotech, and AI.

Not everything lands perfectly. Philosophical detours occasionally bog down the momentum, and the pacing wobbles when too many storylines compete for attention. And, yes, a handful of visual effects lack the polish of the big-screen entries. But even these missteps feel like the byproducts of ambition — a willingness to stretch the canvas wider than the familiar “monster loose on the ship” template.

Creatures from outer space aren’t the only danger

What makes Alien: Earth so compelling is that it works as both an expansion and a homecoming. It honors the claustrophobic dread that defined the original, but it also dares to ask: What if the nightmare were never out there, but always waiting here? That shift makes the show resonate in ways one wouldn’t have initially expected.

As the first season barrels toward its September 23rd finale, no renewal has yet been announced. But its critical acclaim, strong audience response, and the sheer scope of its world-building suggest this won’t be the last time Earth gets a visit from the xenomorph and its slimy buddies.

After 46 years of terror in the stars, Alien: Earth finally turns the series’ gaze back on us. The monsters have landed, the corporations are hungrier than ever, and humanity itself may be the most fragile organism of all. It’s a thrilling, unsettling reminder that sometimes the scariest destination for a series packed with interstellar organisms is the one place we can’t escape: home.

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Laurence Lerman is a film journalist, a former editor of Video Business--Variety's digital media trade publication—and husband to The Insider's own Gwen Cooper. Over the course of his four-decade career, he has conducted one-on-one interviews with just about every major filmmaker working today, from Martin Scorsese, Quentin Tarantino and Clint Eastwood to Kathryn Bigelow, Bernardo Bertolucci, and Werner Herzog. Most recently, he is the co-founder and editor-in-chief of the online review site DiscDish.com, the founder and curator of FilmShul.com, a multi-part presentation on the history of Hollywood and Jewish America, and a commentator on various 4K UHD and Blu-ray home entertainment releases.