Alien: Earth delivers a gritty glimpse into Ridley Scott’s dystopian 2190 Earth, where corporate overlords rule a bleak, barely recognizable planet Earth. Until now, the franchise has only teased this oligarchic hellscape and its degraded quality of life. The showrunners nail a tactile, lived-in vibe for this grim future—no small feat.

But the show stumbles hard in balancing setup and payoff across its opening episodes. Episode 1 introduces a promising core cast and fresh sci-fi wrinkles to the Alien universe. Standouts include Sydney Chandler, who shines as a dead 12-year-old girl whose consciousness now inhabits a bionic 20-something, raising thorny questions about personhood and identity. Timothy Olyphant, known for earthy charisma in roles like Justified, flips the script as Kirsh, a cold, precise synthetic tasked with training cybernetic hybrids. His performance hums with quiet menace—a fun departure for the nearly 60-year-old actor.

Then comes Episode 2, which jettisons those intriguing metaphysical threads into the Nostromo’s reactor core, disintegrating them in a 300-megaton narrative explosion. Instead of leaning into its big ideas, the show pivots to a pack of awkward tween cyber-zombies—Chandler among them—stuffed into scrawny, super-strong synthetic bodies. They’re sent, sans weapons or training, to bumble through a crashed ship turned alien-infested horror house. Why dispatch these experimental robo-kids, who are presumably high-value corporate assets, instead of disposable mercenaries or, say, the corporate-owned military? Simple: So the show can happen. Lazy writing at its finest.

Worse, the show mangles the Alien franchise’s iconic Xenomorph life cycle. Once a near-character in its own right, defined by primal drives for procreation and survival, the Xenomorph here is reduced to a glorified jump-scare machine, playing a brutal, canon-defiling game of hide-and-seek with a crew of randos acting like brain-dead NPCs from a ‘90s video game. The episode devolves into 45 minutes of tiny alien predators and parasites doing their thing—mostly cheap scares—while the story goes nowhere.

Visually, Alien: Earth mostly impresses. The creature effects are suitably horrifying without tipping into gratuitous gore, and the world feels expansive and real. But a few missteps, like an amateur-hour greenscreen moment meant to carry emotional weight in Episode 2, yank you out of the experience.

There are also some pretty significant script issues in both episodes. Namely, it's exposition-heavy, and that exposition is often incredibly clunky.

Ultimately, there are equal parts to like and loathe in these initial offerings. It's a toss of the dice whether or not the remaining 6 episodes with be Worth it.

This episode is a thematic nightmare, a confused casserole of unrelated sci-fi elements with interesting potential but no narrative synergy. The children's status as immortal synthetic/human hybrids is irrelevant to the Xenomorph's animalistic nature, except as a gimmicky plot device.

However, this episode's biggest problem is that it introduces a number of questions that are simply not that interesting, and it's mostly due to convenience writing. That is, writing that conveniently changes character intelligence levels and already established rules of the show's (or franchise's) reality to fit whatever narrative goals said writers might have.

I simply don't care about anyone or find anyone in the show moderately interesting except perhaps for Olyphant's character, but that's not enough. I'll keep watching for you guys, but if it were just me, I'd bail.

It’s only been a day, and I can already barely remember watching this episode. That’s how little happens—and how uninteresting what does.

As with many modern series, the writers of Alien: Earth seem tasked with stretching too little story across too many episodes. In this episode, instead of a real plot, we’re given a sequence of loosely connected incidents, each designed to provoke a different kind of unease. But with so little thematic or narrative glue holding them together or plot-driven relevance, they play more like disconnected vignettes than the building blocks of a story already halfway through a season.

Episode 5 of Alien: Earth is arguably the series's best offering to date. Unarguably, that's a stark condemnation of a very messy and shockingly underwhelming show.

"In Space, No One?" (yes, that's its horrible title) is what you'd get if the Nostromo's crew were the laughably diverse offspring of the idea of running in a straight line from a single, slow-moving object falling toward you in Prometheus.

It should be quintessential viewing for writing students learning the importance of logical consistency and believable behavior. The lesson would go something like this: "Do the exact opposite of everything done in this episode."

In it, characters behave contrary to all of human experience, while the diversity hire second in command emotes sea sponge levels of nuance and feeling.

Of course, that we already know what happens to this crew (because we saw in the first episode), and that none of them are likable or empathetic in any way doesn't exactly help the viewing experience.

Now that we've passed the series's halfway point, I feel more than comfortable recommending that you watch almost anything other than Alien: Earth.

P.S. This episode features a synthetic smoking and seemingly enjoying a cigarette. How exactly does nicotine do anything for a robot?

What even is this show?

Thirty years ago, writers could create a decade's worth of seasons for a single series, each with up to 24 original episodes and each of those having complete and fully fleshed-out plots and complementary secondary stories, featuring characters whom you knew and cared about. Today, we get Alien: Earth, another feature film script, inexpertly and inelegantly bloated with soy protein and cellulose meant to fill up 8 episodes.

Episode 6 also has the distinction of featuring the laziest writing of an already snooze-inducing series. In lieu of crisp and engaging characters behaving consistently with their established rubrics while dealing with extraordinary circumstances organically, this entry gives us a group of Keystone Cop "super geniuses" making one boneheaded decision after another for no other reason than that the writers couldn't think of an intelligent way to move the story to the next chapter.

"The Fly" (this episode's title) does nothing to expand the Alien: Earth universe or deepen our understanding of or connection with the characters.

I'm at a total loss as to what to write about this waste of time.

Everyone acts like complete idiots.

There's no completion of thought in any scene or arc. Instead, every scene is a tease for next week.

And the main robokid becoming the Xenomorph Whisperer is lamer than lame.

A regrettably constant, yet well-earned, refrain on this site is the criticism that modern writers seemingly have no idea how to craft characters about whom audiences can care. It wasn't that long ago when storytellers understood that even the most unremarkable plots could make for engaging and entertaining programs if the audience cared about everything that befell the characters. We once had villains and heroes to quote for generations, but now there's no choppa' to get to, and the only thing that's inevitable is our collective disappointment.

Unfortunately, Alien: Earth's creator and lead writer, Noah Hawley, seems to have forgotten virtually everything that won him the Primetime Emmy for penning 51 episodes of Fargo. Character depth has been traded in for quirksome idiosyncrasies, and a layered plot with a laticed structure of organic cause and effect has been jettisoned out of the airlock and replaced with happenstance and a glut of unexplored sci-fi elements. This misshapen and skeletal story is missing its narrative tendons, let alone having any meat on the bone.

Characters selectively behaving as though lobotomized to move a story piece into place for the next "thing to happen" or to smooth out one of the show's innumerable plot holes have been peppered throughout the series. However, like the Mount Vesuvius of vapidity, episode 8 erupts in a geyser of liquid hot retadation, smothering every aspect of the show.

For example, the opening scene has one of the lead scientists inexplicably leaving the security of the compound to place flowers on the graves of the children's corpses. First, the graves make absolutely no sense. From the beginning, the show has made an effort to transition the children from their old lives to their new ones, giving them new names to go along with their new bodies, and severing all of their ties to the past. This was done, in part, to help prevent each of the $6 billion prototypes from having mental breakdowns caused by an existential crisis. You know, like seeing their well-maintained and clearly marked graves lying, with signs of mourning no less (i.e. the flowers) in the middle of an equally well-maintained path. Second, the boy genius (who, eight episodes later, I couldn't recall his name) is far from sentimental, and everything the program has told us about him makes it beyond clear that he would never, ever, allow the graveyard to knowingly exist.

But we're not done. Now, the scientist (who's responsible for the children's mental well-being) who has left the compound has done so during a containment breach, one of which she is perfectly aware. The xenomorph has escaped the compound and has spent the last few hours brutally murdering armed and armored soldiers. So, you can see why it makes sense that she (the scientist) has changed outfits to some hippy eveningwear to pay her respects. Shockingly, the xenomorph sneaks up behind her, but before it can strike, a soldier blasts it in the face with a machine gun round... which does almost no damage to the creature despite umpteen million examples in past films of machine guns tearing through them, and it runs off.

Remember, this is only the opening scene. The rest of the episode consists of bizarre and shifting character motivations and personalities, and absolutely every character making utterly inexplicable decisions, with no resolutions of any kind.