Alien: Earth, and other TV notes

I’ve noted on this blog many times that I’m not much of a horror fan. But the Alien franchise has always been kind of an exception. Space horror might be a little better than the garden variety, just because it’s space. But mostly I just enjoy the sci-fi worldbuilding, usually in the early stages of each movie. I’m less enthusiastic about the parts where we watch people die one by one, although the Alien movies have a better track record than most of having characters act with agency.

Which is probably why I liked Alien: Romulus last year, mostly because it showed us new aspects of the Alien universe, with a pretty cool tie in from the original movie. So the Alien: Earth TV show was on the top of my must-watch list when it got released. We see Earth, and not in any cheap fashion. This is a future Earth which looks shiny and advanced, and yet is a corporate dystopia. It’s a future where corporations have replaced states, including the infamous Weyland-Yutani from the other movies, and a major competitor named Prodigy.

The show actually starts a couple of years before the original Alien movie takes place. But this is a universe where interstellar travel and communication takes years, so whatever happens, at least in this first season, can’t affect or be affected by what’s happening with the Nostromo. Another ship, the Maginot, which stylistically looks a lot like the ship from the first movie, has been gathering alien specimens for several decades. However, on its approach to Earth, something goes wrong, and it ends up crashing in the city of a rival corporation: Prodigy.

Of course, the ship’s specimens include facehugger eggs and a live xenomorph. But also a variety of other nightmares, including a creature that appears to be an eye with tentacles, one that can quickly force itself inside another organism and take control of it. Prodigy dispatches troops to deal with the disaster, which include a medic named Joe Hermit.

Prodigy’s CEO has been experimenting with mind uploading. However, the process is still rough, and can currently only be done with young patients. So he experiments with a number of terminally ill children, uploading their minds into synth bodies. (“Synth” is short for synthetic being, essentially an android.) Wendy is the first “hybrid”, the first girl whose mind is copied into a synth body. But she’s quickly joined by others.

Wendy’s human name was Marcy Hermit. She is (was?) the sister of Joe Hermit. When she realizes that her brother is in jeopardy, she asks the CEO, Boy Kavalier, if she and the other hybrids can provide assistance. Boy decides to send them in as a test, even though he’s reminded that these are the minds of children in adult synth bodies.

The sole survivor of the Maginot is the ship’s security officer, named Morrow, a cyborg, who, despite being at least partially human, seems as single-mindedly devoted to Weyland-Yutani as any synth. It’s revealed that Morrow did have a family, but has been away for a lifetime, and so has effectively lost them. Morrow is ruthlessly determined to retrieve the specimens and return them to Weyland-Yutani.

That’s pretty much the setup for the show. It does have its share of horror and gore, including at least one or two obligatory chest-bursting scenes. But so far, going through the first season, it doesn’t seem to have taken over the entire plot. Instead, we have an examination of the differences between humans, artificially intelligent synths, child-minded hybrids, and the one ruthless cyborg, with the space horrors eventually running loose and causing mayhem.

The hybrids are an interesting addition to this world. It allows the show to play a bit with teleporter-type paradoxes when the hybrids discover the graves of their original bodies. I was a little worried the show might go for cheap horror with them, and there is a little of that, but so far, they’re dominated by their child-like humanity, albeit with superhuman abilities, including Wendy learning to communicate with the xenomorph.

The timeline might provide clues about the eventual fate of the hybrids. The events here can’t affect the ones in the original movie. But assuming the show still considers the sequels canonical, they may be a constraint. Ripley doesn’t seem to encounter a hybrid civilization when she gets back in Aliens, although we might imagine it and Alien 3 happening in the outer colonies where the changes haven’t reached yet. But Alien Resurrection is 200 years further in the future and ends in Earth’s atmosphere, although there are comments warning that Earth is not a good place by then.

It’s been decades since I’ve seen the later movies, so there may well be details I’m not remembering. Or maybe the nature of Wynona Ryder’s character in Resurrection isn’t accurately described by the other characters. If not, then the lack of hybrids in the later movies seems to indicate that the technology doesn’t become widespread. Hopefully, there will be additional seasons for us to find out what that means for the hybrid characters.

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I’ve also been watching Foundation and Wednesday. Foundation, I’m still mostly enjoying. There were a few things I groaned about this season, like the Starkiller Base ripoff, which wasn’t much more intelligent than the Star Wars original. The show did have an interesting twist on the Mule, and it’s not the one most of us who’ve read the books were anticipating. And it appeared to deviate from the books in a major way with a key character, although appearances of radical variance last season turned out to be less than it seemed, so we’ll have to see what next season reveals.

The second season of Wednesday continues to be fun. To me, the Addams Family has always been a cool gag. How far can the macabre be pushed and still be funny? The original comic did it for a single panel. The old TV show for brief scenes in short episodes. Wednesday introduced new concepts, such as outcasts, to enable the bar to be pushed further and more sustainably. I don’t have stringent expectations for the show, just for light entertainment, which it’s providing.

I tried to watch season 3 of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds and just…couldn’t. The writing in the first episode seemed lazy, and then the second episode seemed to be another Spock love-life cringe story, and that’s about as far as I got. From what I’ve heard, the rest of the season isn’t much better. I’ll probably eventually watch the rest. Maybe.

That’s what I’ve been watching. Seen any of them? If so, what did you think? Watching anything else interesting?