The Alien franchise is finally dead

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Alien has always been a story about…

…go on…take a guess…

…the alien. The xenomorph. The terrifying other.

The non-human.

Alien Earth is a story about the Alien finally arriving on Earth.

And fighting it out with humanity 2.0 – cyborgs, synths and hybrids.

If Alien was a story about the non-human.

Alien Earth is a story about the posthuman.

Watch the full video on youTube here

Watching Marcy become Wendy

We’re in the territory of characters like Motoko “The Major” Kusanagi of Ghost in the Shell, Altered Carbon’s Takeshi Kovacs and Battle Angel Alita

Humans who have transcended the human

To the posthuman

But as we watch the bleak process of killing a girl so a facsimile of her mind can inhabit a new synthetic body

All the questions that haunt the posthuman haunt us. 

Is a copied mindstate real, or just a copy? Is killing the original murder, or just like deleting a backup?

Is the new posthuman human at all?

And what even is human?

But as the imagery of Peter Pan flashes past, Alien Earth hints at an answer we haven’t heard before,

That the human dream of transcending beyond pain and suffering to the near immortality offered by posthumanity.

Beyond the reality of being just food.

Is just a fantasy.

A fantasy that the super-rich and powerful have always wanted to make real

The First Emperor of China, Qin Shihuang, as he grew old, sought the secret of immortality, eventually drinking mercury

A well health tonic

Watching forty something Bryan Johnson try to “not die”, fifty something Elon Musk seeking the technology to upload consciousness, and seventy somethings Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping trading tips on harvesting the organs of political dissidents to stay in power forever

We realise that for our mentally deranged billionaire oligarch dictator class

The posthuman future, and the ideology of transhumanism, are a reality they are determined to bring about

Alien : Earth places the delusional, hyper-privileged human elite at the core of the story, telling us about the five corporations competing to iwn the posthuman future

And showing as two competing oligarchs, the Yutani in Weyland-Yutani, and the Kid Cavalier behind Prodigy

Who wants to live forver?

Rich people

Who pays the price?

As we watch a starship crash into Earth so mental cyborg can deliver a lethal alien sample to the oligarchs who want its secrets.

As here on real Earth we keep being told this AI tech could destroy us all but we have to keep building or shareholder value will suffer.

It’s clear the answer is us.

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And

Alien Earth is is also about a massive, epic build-up to a kick-ass battle.

Here are your well known xenomorphs. Acid blood. Stabby jaws. Etc. We know these well by now.

And here are your hybrids. Super powered synthetic bodies housing the minds of kids who feel no fear, because they already died.

The build-up to the inevitable Aliens vs Hybrids fight-fest about 53% of the joy of Alien : Earth

Add in a bad motherfucker cyborg, a brother in need of saving, and the Roy Batty you buy on Temu

BATTY QUOTE COMPARISON

Yes, Alien : Earth does seem to be the unification of Ridley Scott’s two scifi masterpieces

And you get the best thing in the Alien mythos since Aliens. 

Which proves that Hollywood can still make art not IP slop

when the showrunner can actually write.

Alien is a great horror movie set in space with scifi trimmings. But Dan O’Bannon’s excellent worldbuilding gave just enough sense of a universe beyond the Nostromo – Wayland Yutani corp, the Space-Jockey – to tantalise audiences.

Aliens is the best action movie ever set in a scifi future. It gave us pulse rifles, Colonial Marines, and a few more hints of the larger universe.

Alien 3 is more maligned than it deserves. David Fincher is one of only a few directors who you could credibly rate up there with Ridley Scott and James Cameron.

And then the Alien mythos

Well

Ehn

Went full IP slop. Honestly, I’d forgotten Alien Ressurection existed until I said the words just now. 

Probably because a Joss Whendon script and the director of Amelie are about as un “In Space No One Can Hear You Scream” as they sound.

Romulus and two Alien vs Predator slop fests finished the job of turning the Alien mythos into just another corporate entertainment franchise.

But before that there was the Return of the Creator. Ridley Scott’s Prometheus and Alien : Covenant aren’t bad movies.

But they revealed something uncomfortable: Ridley Scott may be a genius director, but his ideas are… old. Psychopath aliens, sociopath corporations, the universe as Hobbesian war of all against all. It’s all a bit Science Fiction 101.

By 2025, Alien felt like a dead mythos. So I had no Earthly reason to watch Alien Earth.

Until I saw it was written and directed by one man televisual juggernaut

Noah Hawley

But of course, no good tv show goes unpunished.

Alien : Earth scored a 93% critic score on Rotten Tomatoes

But that barrage of 1 star reviews dragging the user score down ti 73% ?

Are from the usual contingent of angry nerdbros squawking Woke Woke Woke like brain damaged parrots

The same people who think the Critical Drinker is actual movie critic and complain that movies today are “written by children”

Can’t recognise good writing when it’s playing on the second screen because they are too busy watching their “girlfriend” on Only Fans

So the angry nerdbros have completely missed that Alien : Earth is what happens when the showrunner can actually write

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Back in the day successful tv producers were really just ideas men.

Steven Bochco, the powerhouse behind Hill Street Blues, LA Law, NYPD Blue and

Doogie Hauser MD

Would devise characters, settings and episode ideas, then hand over writing chores to a whole team of screenwriters

This was the era of network tv, with at least 24 or more episodes in a season, and little or no overarching plot. With each episode a stand alone drama, tv could operate as a production line, producing content to maximise ad revenue.

But as first the DVD box set, then streaming platforms, moved from ad revenue to subscriber revenue, the network format of 24+ episodes was replaced by the prestige format of 10 to 14 episodes telling one continuous story.

Network format tv could be written by teams of good or mediocre writers.

Prestige format tv only works when you have great writers.

The reason shows like The Sopranos, Breaking Bad, The Wire, Mad Men, Succession or Severance are so great

Is because of great writers.

So the first thing to look at when assessing any new tv show is…who is the writer?

And the writer of Alien Earth is Noah Hawley

(There is a 1992 franchise novel titled Alien Earth by Megan Lindholm, better known as fantasy novelist Robin Hobb, but it’s unrelated to the show)

Noah Hawley came to widespread attention with the idiosyncratic choice to bring Fargo to the small screen.

Joel and Ethan Coen’s classic crime movie seems like a strange choice to reboot as a tv show, but has been a huge hit.

A success built on the writing skills of Noah Hawley, who penned a staggering 48 out of 51 episodes across 5 seasons.

The three seasons of Legion, based on legendary comic book writer Chris Claremont’s character of the same name, also saw Hawley pen 19 out of 27 episodes

Legion is also really good, but Hawley’s decision to make the character an unreliable narrator meant it needed a high level of attention to follow what was actually happening.

(A similar problem as the much maligned Acolyte which dumfounded second screen audiences with the same unreliable narrator technique)

So at a time when Disney and others are cranking out low quality tv shows from unskilled writers to milk old scifi franchises of any remaining shareholder value

The only reason to feel optimistic about a new scifi streaming show is if it has a really good writer. Andor had Tony Gilroy. Alien Earth has Noah Hawley.

Is it the new Andor? That remains to be seen.

But Noah Hawley’s Alien : Earth at least has something to say

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About humanity.

Posthumanity.

In the first fifteen minutes of Alien Earth episode 1 Noah Hawley rehearses.

first Alien as we see a crew much like the Nostromo’s go through the same Xenomorph encounter.

Then Aliens as more Colonial Marines run to their inevitable deaths.

But it’s the way Hawley reframes the central theme of Alien that is truly new

This monologue and the scene that follows are trademark Hawley.

This could be Lorne Malvo meeting Lester Nygard.

Two characters, a bitter realist and a delusional optimist, the killer and the innocent, offering two different takes on the story’s central theme.

Humans have always had dreams and fantasies that we can be something other than food. Or, in the case of Alien, something other than the meat substrate for the xenomorph reproductive cycle.

We’ve fantasied of being gods and heroes, wielding magical powers or powerful weapons, of being immortal or reincarnated, of having a soul that can escape the flesh…

…that is food.

Posthumanism is the latest and most potent iteration of these fantasies

Old dreams reimagined in the new symbolism of scifi.

In place of an immortal soul we are the bearers of infinitely replicable data structure, that can be copied from our brain like a program from a hard drive, and installed on a new body.

A better, stronger, faster body.

Cyborgs, Synths and Hybrids would be Monsters, Demons, Angels in ages past. But to us today posthuman ideas of cybernetic implants, android bodies or digital consciousness occupy the space of science fiction.

Things that never happen, but feel like they could happen.

Posthumanism is a fantasy made real enough for us to believe.

The Lost Boys are maybe the most important symbols in fantasy

JM Barrie’s Peter Pan is an escapist fantasy that leads readers, young and old, to a moral lesson about escapist fantasy.

Like the Lost Boys you can escape into fantastic adventures and fight Captain Hook for eternity.

But at the cost of our humanity. Lost Boys never die, but they also never live.

So Wendy and the Lost Hybrids seem likely to deliver us the same moral message as Peter Pan

Our oligarchs can enjoy the fantasy of posthuman fantasy immortalitu to their hearts content. Until the stabby jaws of mortal human reality call time on them.

In fact everything science has shown us in this century agrees that dreams of Posthumanity are just fantasies

Cognitive acience proves we are not an abstract data pattern running on a grey computer to animate a meat machine. We cannot be infinitely copied, uploaded, downloaed to a synth body.

We are our bodies. We are meat. We are food.

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What happens when the showrunner can actually write?

You get Alien : Earth, a show which from the word go inverts the core theme of the Alien mythos

Alien has always been a story of the external threat to humanity from the alien other

Noah Hawley makes Alien : Earth a story about the inner threat to humanity of our posthuman fantasy tinescape

being human

We get to watch the newest incarnation of super-powered posthumanity fulfil our fantasy of being more than food

Up against the ultimate modern symbol of our foodiness

And briefly enjoy the posthuman fantasy

Then see it literally torn apart

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Alien Earth is the latest in posthumanity

Learn about the first posthuman fantasy here.

Listen to the podcast audio here