The Familiar Alien

I finally started watching Alien: Earth, the new series set in the universe of the Alien franchise. I'm kind of surprised by how bland the first couple episodes are, given the kind of talk I've heard about the show. I assume the show must improve later, at least I hope so.

Some have been calling it Andor for the Alien franchise. It does feature an actor from Andor, Alex Lawther, who played the tech guy who wrote a manifesto in the heist arc in Andor season one. I saw yesterday that Andor star Denise Gough got a role on the otherwise unpromising new Narnia movie from Greta Gerwig. So Andor seems to be having the Game of Thrones effect in which actors from the series steadily appear in other projects for years afterwards. We still live in a post-GoT world as far as casting goes. I just finished watching Sandman which had at least two GoT actors.

The primary protagonist of Alien: Earth seems to be Wendy (Sydney Chandler), who's a young woman implanted with the brain of a child who'd been dying. So we get some dialogue about how she thinks it's weird to have breasts now. How can we go back to TNG Lal when we've had Pretty Things' Emma Stone? Anyway, Wendy is among a group of "hybrids", the brains of kids with terminal illnesses transferred into adult bodies with super strength and reflexes. The child in adult body idea has been explored in many other science fiction and fantasy media, this example has yet to distinguish itself.

The other side of the show is a very faithful recreation of the Nostromo interiors, though the ship is not the Nostromo, just another of the same model. We get another crew eating a meal around a table after cryosleep. I know they were going for the nostalgia but mostly what it does is invite an unflattering (I know that word has fallen "spectacularly" out of favour but I'll use it anyway) comparison. It's like a thought experiment--what if Ridley Scott had been fired at some point in Alien's pre-production and a hack studio director had been brought in? It's Alien for ADHD. The pacing is faster, the dialogue doesn't overlap as much, there's no effort to make the crew especially realistic. The "space trucker" vibe is replaced by the usual "office worker" vibe. But maybe that's just a difference between something made in the 1970s versus something made in the 2020s.

So far, I'd say it's not so much the Andor of the Alien franchise but the Ahsoka. Okay, that's too harsh. Maybe the Obi-Wan Kenobi.

Alien: Earth is available on Disney+ in Japan.