Alien: Earth Crash-Lands With A Super-Sized (And Super Scary) Premiere — Grade It!
Sci-fi fans, your new TV obsession is here: FX's Alien: Earth expanded the world of the Alien franchise in Tuesday's series premiere — and scared the bejeezus out of us, too.
The premiere opens in the year 2120, aboard the space research vessel the Maginot, owned by the infamous Weyland-Yutani corporation. The crew are on a 65-year mission, and they emerge from cryogenic sleep to smoke cigarettes, eat and argue. (The ship is a remarkable match for the Nostromo from the original Alien, down to the retro computer screens.) They're still four months from returning home to Earth, and they're bringing back a lab full of creepy alien specimens. The ship's security officer, a cyborg named Morrow (Babou Cessay), insists that "the specimens are the mission" — and as crew members go back to sleep, we see flashes of a deadly xenomorph attacking the crew.
Back on Earth, we're whisked away to Neverland, an island research facility run by Boy Kavalier (Samuel Blenkin), the world's youngest trillionaire. He's experimenting with a new "hybrid" technology that infuses human consciousness into a robot body. A terminally ill young girl is led into a lab where her mind and personality will be transferred into a superhuman android, and Boy Kavalier excitedly tells her about Neil Armstrong being the first man on the moon: "You're going to be the first, too." He plays Peter Pan on the ceiling of the lab, and when the girl sees the android body, she decides: "She looks like a Wendy." The process begins, and the next thing we know, Wendy (Sydney Chandler) is alive and showing off her cybernetic skills, effortlessly hopping off a ten-story cliff and running full speed.
Wendy's still a child, mentally, though, and she's still getting used to her adult robot body. (She grabs her breasts and complains, "These are weird. They move around when I run.") The scientists explain to her that she doesn't have human hormones, but they're trying to replace that with synthetic ones. "If I'm not human, what am I?" Wendy wonders. "Whatever you want to be," she's told. She explains the transition process to a new crop of sick kids, who are also transferred into adult robot bodies and given names from Peter Pan. Boy Kavalier reads aloud from Peter Pan, tending to his flock of new children — but when one of the kids asks, "When do we get to go home?" Wendy has to tell her: "You don't."
Back on the Maginot, alarms are blaring, aliens are slaughtering the crew, and Morrow is calmly typing a message from a secure area: "Cargo containment has failed." A crew member pounds on his door, begging to be let inside, but he fuses the door shut, trapping her outside where a xenomorph tears her apart. "Crew dead," Morrow types. "Collision with Earth imminent." He slips into an escape hatch just as the xenomorph bursts into his room — and just as the ship hurtles towards Earth.
Next, we meet Wendy's brother Joe (Alex Lawther), a medic for Boy Kavalier's Prodigy corporation. Joe thinks Wendy died, but really, she's watching him from her island home via a series of surveillance cameras. She gets emotional as he watches an old Ice Age movie they used to watch together as kids. The next day at work, Joe is chatting with friends when they see a huge spaceship pass right overhead and crash into a skyscraper in a dense urban area nearby. It's the Maginot, and Joe and his colleagues snap into action, heading to the crash site to tend to the wounded. It's a chaotic scene, with hundreds of survivors walking around bloodied and dazed... and as Joe and his crew march inside the crash site, we see something zip behind them at a speed that's not quite human.
Wendy sees the crash on her cameras, and she barges into Boy Kavalier's office volunteering to help rescue people. Her brother is at the crash site, she explains, and Boy Kavalier marvels: "If I didn't know better, I'd say she was human." ("I am human," Wendy replies.) Boy Kavalier agrees to send Wendy and her fellow hybrids as an experiment, a sort of stress test to see how they do in an emergency. He puts synthetic Kirsh (Timothy Olyphant) in charge of them, and on her way out, Wendy grabs the blade from her paper cutter and yanks it loose, taking it with her like a katana.
At the crash site, some of the rescuers find Morrow, who holds them at gunpoint and handcuffs them together in the lab. They can't move — which is a problem when an alien insect crawls up and bites one of them on the neck, sucking out his blood and killing him. Meanwhile, Joe and other rescuers find the ship's cryo sleep pods, with everyone dead inside. One of the bodies has a huge hole in its chest, and the pod glass is shattered. "Something crawled out of here," they realize.
And as Wendy flies to the crash site, Kirsh smugly tells her: "You used to be food, you know." He means all humans, and he talks about humanity's progress from prey to predator across millennia. But modern humans aren't as safe as they think: "That's what it is to be an animal. You're born, you live, you die." Wendy doesn't agree, though. "My brother is not gonna die," she declares. Because "I'm gonna save him."
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