Alien: Earth is one of the best series of the year

On hearing that the first TV series set in theAlien universe was being developed, I was excited but nervous. Ridley Scott’s 1979 movie Alien and the 1986 sequel, James Cameron’s Aliens, are classics that gave us one of the all-time great cinematic heroes in Sigourney Weaver’s Ellen Ripley and one of cinema’s scariest monsters, the near indestructible alien “xenomorph”. No one wants their legacy tarnished.

I needn’t have worried. Alien: Earth is a triumph.

It is set in 2120, two years before the events of Alien. The science vessel USCSS Maginot, returning to Earth from a 65-year mission to gather alien specimens, crash-lands in New Siam, a megacity under the control of Prodigy, one of the five corporations that run the planet. Prodigy search and rescue teams scour the wreckage of the ship and the building it crashed into. Unfortunately, the extraterrestrials are loose, and these five previously undiscovered species aren’t cuddly Ewok types.

The searchers are soon joined by another new class of being: “synthetics”, artificial humans with the consciousness of a sick child. “Wendy” (Sydney Chandler) was formerly Marcy, a dying 12-year-old; now she’s a kid in an adult woman’s body. She has superhuman strength and acts as a big sister to the “Lost Boys”, five other synthetics created from kids. This is a secret technology developed by Boy Kavalier (Samuel Blenkin), the youngest ever trillionaire and the founder of Prodigy. Kavalier has an obsession with Peter Pan and has even named his research island “Neverland”.

That’s the set-up for this thrilling eight-episode series. The showrunner Noah Hawley – of Fargo and Legion fame – has said of the Alien franchise: “For me, the first film may be the best horror movie ever made, the second film may be the best action movie ever made.” His love of those works is abundantly evident throughout his series: in specific references, the visual design, and unsettling atmosphere of dread.

However, he is not in thrall to the previous instalments. In the terrifying new aliens – but also in Wendy and the Lost Boys, who provide a powerful emotional heft – Hawley has introduced elements that make this very much his own show. There is horror (one of the new monsters, a parasitic eyeball with tentacles, is destined to become as iconic as the original xenomorph) and action aplenty, but Alien: Earth also raises questions about AI and corporate responsibility that feel very relevant today.

The cast is tremendous. Timothy Olyphant as the enigmatic Prodigy executive Kirsh and Babou Ceesay as the Maginot chief of security cyborg Morrow will both have their champions, and I got a real kick out of Ade Edmondson as Kavalier’s hatchet-faced consigliere.

The stand-out performances, however, are from Chandler in a star-making turn as Wendy and Blenkin as Boy Kavalier. When despatched to the crash site, Wendy grabs both a weapon and a soft toy. Chandler imbues her with a fresh-faced innocence, but she is also resourceful and tough. “If I’m not human, what am I?” she asks plaintively. “Whatever you want to be,” comes the answer. What she is is Alien: Earth’s Ripley and early on, there are hints that she might be much more than the company girl that Boy Kavalier thinks she is.

Meanwhile, Blenkin (like Ceesay and Edmondson, another Brit) plays Kavalier – who spends most of the time lolling around in his jimjams – as insufferably smug and utterly loathsome. Within just a couple of episodes, I was praying he would be dispatched in the goriest way possible by an alien.

I’m also praying that Noah Hawley gets to make more of this stuff. It’s one of the shows of the year.

‘Alien: Earth’ is streaming on Disney+. New episodes stream on Wednesdays