Alien: Earth

Starring: Sydney Chandler, Alex Lawther, Timothy Olyphant
Creator: Noah Hawley
Rating: TV-MA
Genre: Horror, Sci-Fi, Thriller
Release date: Aug 12, 2025
Where to watch: Hulu

Overall Score

Rating Overview

Story/Plot/Script

Visuals/Cinematography

Performance

Direction

Non-Wokeness

Rating Summary

With 7 episodes in the can and only one left to go, Alien: Earth has firmly established itself as a waste of time and resources.

Audience Woke Score (Vote)

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Set in 2120, two years before the events of the 1979 film Alien, Alien: Earth follows a mysterious space vessel crash-landing on a dystopian Earth governed by five powerful corporations. A young woman named Wendy leads a ragtag group of tactical soldiers to investigate the wreckage. Their discovery unleashes the planet’s greatest threat—Xenomorphs and other terrifying creatures—forcing Wendy and her team to confront nightmarish aliens and corporate secrets while grappling with questions of humanity’s survival and her own identity.

Alien: Earth Review (S1: E1-2)

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.

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WOKE REPORT

DEIversity

The level of diversity is laughably artificial in every group the show presents.

Another Girl-Boss?

Once again, the lead for this Alien adventure is an itty-bitty chicky who has never opened a pickle jar on her own, and once again, she’s super-intelligent and super-capable. However, the Alien franchise has always been female-led, so it’s not necessarily woke to continue that trend. Furthermore, the show gives us good, if so far wasted, reasons for her abilities. Therefore, it might be tiresome to have yet another perfect female lead in an action series, but it doesn’t ding our Woke-O-Meter as much as it does our script rating for its unoriginality.
Oh, and the Xenomorph is a female. Not a queen (at least as far as we know), just a girl.
- Until now, they’ve been genderless—you know, since they don’t reproduce sexually—but that bit of canon has now been fired directly at the fans.
  - How do we know that she’s a she? A character who has no way of knowing says it.