a few thoughts about ALIEN:EARTH

*I openly spoil the ending of Alien:Earth season 1 as well as several more of the Alien films here. A short summary of my thoughts on the season without spoilers is that I think it's pretty good. It goes in new directions while homaging the long running film series in a way that was far less grating than Alien: Romulus last year (even if I still enjoy that particular film). I remain resolute in my feeling that its a generally bad idea to take things that are movies and make tv-shows out of them, even I think this one by and large works.*    

    Perhaps because AI then did not exist, nor does it really exist now in the way they thought it would, the conception that AI could teach us about the human soul is almost equally prolific a science fiction trope as its malicious world destroying counterpart. For every Terminator, Hal 9000, and human battery farm, there is a reformed T-800, Haley Joel Osment, and a little girl stuck in a train station (that of course being a reference to The Matrix sequels for those who hold them to their proper esteem). From the sarcastic considerations of Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy or even C-3PO and R2-D2, to the the tragic replicants of Ridley Scott’s (and later Denis Villeneuve’s) own Blade Runner, the science fiction prognosticators of the twentieth century seemed to believe in equal measure that while a genuine artificial intelligence could very well spell our end, in the same breath our human empathy ought to extend past ourselves to these creations, or rather programmings, of our our hands. Today, AI is a buzz word, perhaps as much as it indeed a real threat, and while fears of a “singularity” misunderstand, and in many ways diminish, the very real environmental, artistic, and monetary blight that AI is only beginning to inflict upon our world, it is of no small consideration that these friendly programs of fiction very well may be serving the same corporate interest the ever lovable Wall-e tries so hard to stand against. 

Alien, initially at least, existed as an exception. The 1979 film’s sole synthetic Ash, more than simply turning on his entire crew, is revealed to be a purely corporate agent, blind to anything but the mandates of Weyland-Yutani, all other considerations secondary. Ash’s actions are irredeemable, and while his posthumous appearance in Alien: Romulus is almost equally egregious for its profane resurrectory nature, the character is an example of a purely malevolent AI, devout only to its corporate programmer with little interest in the well being of any humans around it. While the series eventually integrated its benevolent opposites, first in Aliens’ Bishop and again with Romulus' Andy, Michael Fassbender’s David in Prometheus and Alien: Covenant is, until the advent of a certain eyeball, the series’ greatest non-xenomorph antagonist, helping clinch the general depiction of the synthetics, of AI, in the Alien series as by and large malevolent. 

Crashing at last upon our native shores arrives now Alien: Earth, a tv show which, largely thanks to my unending adoration of all things xenomorph, actually got me to press play. The series centers around a loose, if still very overt, Peter Pan metaphor, though its Wendy and troop of lost boys are not children learning to fly but a group of synthetic humans, embedded with the personalities and allegedly even consciousnesses of terminally sick children. While the children’s human bodies are later buried and disposed of, their synthetic forms live on, creating a rich mine of philosophical questions of which the series is eager to explore. These Lost Boys reside in their own Neverland, a company owned island (upon a future Earth hellishly divided into a corpocracy consisting of five rival CEOs) run by a “boy genius,” their own dark Peter Pan. This Peter is less an inspiration as much as dictator, who never ceases to remind them their new bodies are indeed products, demos, created and owned, by him. The action this sets up is fascinating, and a new direction for the series to take, and while the performances of the adult-children vary in their success, the writing weaves them along a dark path, integrating the xenomorph excellently into its considerations of corporate influence, a previous sub-text now, maybe even at last, upon the surface.  

Yet, when the season ended, with somewhat less fanfare and completed narrative arcs than expected, featuring this troop taking control of the island (and the xenomorphs), it seemed to me initially that perhaps it was playing into the trope of the benevolent AI. In the context of our modern world, I was a little surprised, and indeed have grown tired of, movies seeking to mine sympathy for AI, even if our AI is quite different from some kind of robot soul. In reality AI is more a name these companies assigned to their advancements in programming, less a vision of human thought recreated, more a (theoretically) more powerful search engine. It is notable that in many films depicting that AI with a soul, for example recently in The Creator from 2023, the AI program teaching its human how to love, is always still played by a real person, assigning the intangibles of human experience to a narratively imagined robotic other. Real AI is not capable of these experiences, even as its corporate owners seek so desperately to convince us all otherwise (not to mention the increasing groups of people falling into mirages of relationships with these lines of code). Thus, when Alien: Earth concluded with its synthetic forms of children in a moment of veritable triumph, my initial impulse was partly to see more, if still rather subtle, techno-fascist propaganda.

However, upon further consideration, I wondered if there was not still something darker there, something which I believe is truthfully more hopeful. To be hopeful about the world we must first look it in the eye, and much of Alien: Earth excels at this, crafting a startling vision of a world where corporate interest has fully usurped and absorbed governmental authority, where technology remains their main weapon, where nature is not only underestimated, but indeed the focal point of violation and control. In this view, the ending (or standstill) of season one reaps a number of potential readings. On the one hand, the children taking control, the xenomorph weaponized against those who would abuse it, could be considered as humanity triumphing over the corporate. However, another reading takes a darker look at the human characters, seeing them as long since deadened by complete corporate supremacy, now at the hands of their own inhuman experiments. This reading decides the children are no longer human in fact, meaning the only full human in the cage at the end is Boy, barely human at all, now at the mercy of the creations of his own hubris.

After further reflection, I think ultimately it is a little of both. I don’t think Marcy/Wendy and her cohorts could be called fully human, and in that sense, we have a film where sympathetic AIs are triumphing over human counterparts. Yet, the barbarity of those human characters, and the corporations they lead, make them ultimately less human than the synthetics they've created, a common, but effective, science-fiction concept. Thus, I do think the series, somewhat reclaiming the world “alien,” perhaps depicts a group of people irrevocably bruised by the world they live in, destroyed, mutilated and even murdered by it, yet, in their own considerations finding of their own power. So while it might very well be guilty of engaging in irresponsible, corporately supported, tropes of the “friendly AI with a soul,” I think the series ultimately is more complex and myriad. We are bruised by capitalism, but that doesn’t mean we must stand down.

We see this in the lung given to Joe, a tool used further to ensure his servitude, in the robotic arm of Babou Ceesay's Morrow, the show's most dynamic character, and most centrally we see this in the children, their very bodies usurped in the name of corporate progress, one eagerly patented and sold with as much speed as possible. Even the central mechanism of the xenomorph is here reframed, or rather re-contextualized, as a further act of creation the violates the natural order in the name of these companies. The xenomorphs are forced into this world, always with some nefarious purpose, and while their barbarity is always properly depicted, ensuring the series never falls into the benevolent blue velociraptor shaped trap of the World movies, keeping the creatures as neither inherently good or evil, their employ into the plot lends their creation a different weight perhaps than before, or at the very least one which takes the subtext in a new direction. Now that the aliens have at last crashed upon our shores, we find that the monsters we already have, the ones we are already, are indeed worse.

Ultimately, the series just works. The performances of the children are varyingly successful, and while some episodes are stronger than others, especially a bottle episode that remixes Alien, the overall impact of the show reads strong and never feels like an unnecessarily extended movie, the way so many film-to-TV adaptations often land. It adopts a slow and deliberate pace, one which feels completely foreign to much of TV, let alone cinema, these days, and while the use of fades was almost instantly recognized as bizarre, especially by virtue of a certain Sid the Sloth, the actual function here is hypnotic and engaging. Even more surprising, this is likely the most violent and brutal of any Alien project thus far, something simply of note, I suppose, allowing the brutality of the subtext to land with even further resonance. However, while I enjoyed this quite a lot, and especially considering this year has also given us the all time great seasons 2 of Severance and Andor, does this mean that I will eat my words and no longer whine when I hear of an approaching film-to-TV project? Not a chance, in this corporate world of our own, it seems pretty safe to assume this show and Andor remain the exceptions and not the rules and I sincerely hope to see my favorite monster on the big screen again. However, for what its worth, Alien: Earth presents a interesting wrinkle into the storied history of sci-fi AIs, provides a new direction for the series, while effectively rendering overtly what was previously only subtext, and for that I will count myself amongst this project's fans.

Then again maybe I just love the xenomorph too much, it's just so much fun. 

It's on Hulu until that becomes Disney+ or they unceremoniously remove it or whatever.