Alien Earth: A Franchise-Breaking Disaster of Stupidity and Bad Writing

This is a full season breakdown of Alien Earth—or perhaps more accurately, a full season mental breakdown. For lifelong, 30-plus year Alien obsessives, every installment in this franchise has been a unique marker. Ridley Scott's prequels, for example, were risky, gorgeous, and introduced riveting new ideas, opening up the series beyond just pulse rifles and motion trackers. The film universe is the baby of its creator.

That trust, however, has its limits. Over the past decade, we've seen what happens when beloved franchises end up in the hands of people who think they know better. When it was announced that Noah Hawley, the mind behind the brilliant Legion and Fargo, was helming this project, excitement went nuclear. Here was a creator known for risky, thematic deconstructions. The expectation was a genius reinvention that would take the series into the next dimension.

Instead, week by week, Hawley prolifically fumbled the bag. Alien Earth isn't a brilliant deconstruction or a trippy mind-melt. It reveals nothing new about Earth, the Xenomorph, or the series that wasn't already known or assumed. We are left with the smoldering ashes of an eight-week television show festering with some of the worst writing, world-building, characterization, and direction the series has ever encountered. Even if you removed all the lore-breaking elements, you'd still have a lopsided, horrifically edited, and deeply ill-advised sci-fi show.

This logically empty and exhausting approach to television is a trend that has run rampant in our streaming era, and Alien Earth is the chief offender—a show where the "cool idea" comes first, and logic comes a distant, forgotten later.

The Unregulated Stupidity Infecting Every Scene

The strongest strand of DNA that ties Alien Earth together is unregulated stupidity. It runs through the veins of the show like a pathogen, infecting every character and scenario it touches. People thought the characters in Prometheus were unforgivable, but that is a mere sunspot on the face of the broiling neutron star of idiocy found here.

Remember the outrage when a crew member in Prometheus took his helmet off in a breathable atmosphere? Let's introduce Raheem, the chief medical officer on what is supposedly the most dangerous scientific mission in history. He is found chain-smoking cigarettes in a room filled with oxygen tanks. On the Nostromo, a ship crewed by ore miners, they at least had the sense to wear protective gear when inspecting the alien. Here, on a dedicated science vessel where the crew is fully aware of the dangerous nature of their samples, the lead doctor rips a butt in a surgical room with no protection whatsoever before getting himself killed by poison gas.

It gets worse. The head of a billion-dollar industry, one of the sharpest minds in the world, leans over an alien egg with no safety protocols at all. The crew of the Prometheus had no idea what they were facing; this character knows precisely how dangerous these samples are and doesn't even bother to put on socks while dangling his face over an Ovomorph.

This isn't just about characters making bad decisions. The stupidity is baked into the very premise of their missions.

•  The Maginot's Mission: In a universe where humans can be frozen in cryo-sleep, why can't an alien egg or specimen be frozen? Why did the experiments need to begin on the ship during a 65-year journey, and not in a secure facility on Earth?  

• Lack of Security: Why did Weyland-Yutani leave a skeleton crew of less than 20 people to guard the most dangerous organisms in existence with almost no weapons, security officers, or androids?  It's pure, unadulterated idiocy.

Systemic Failure: When the World Itself is Poorly Written

Take any element of this show, put it under a microscope, and it disintegrates. Neverland Island is a cool concept, but it has no security whatsoever. Wendy, an android with a child's mind, can interface with the most secure computers and speak to the Xenomorph, yet she is allowed to wander the facility completely unchecked. Is anyone surprised when she releases a Xenomorph? The entire facility crumbles within 72 hours of the specimens' arrival because it was never a secure location to begin with.

This brainless writing infects every plotline. If a character in Alien Earth comes up with a plan, it is guaranteed to be as stupid as the day is long.

•  Morrow's "Master Plan": He thinks he can get a Xenomorph sample by kidnapping a family and tasking a 12-year-old robot with transporting the alien across the island. He should know this plan would instantly fall apart, as any real-world corporation would have teams monitoring all communications and security around their multi-billion dollar androids. The only reason the plan even partially works is due to completely broken, backward screenwriting. 

• The "Muppet Babies": The show's central characters are meant to act stupidly because they have the brains of children. But when you have intentionally stupid characters living in a world that is accidentally written to be stupid, you get one of the most IQ-dropping experiences in TV history.

The idiocy is unending. A secret, $6 billion android project is immediately exposed to the public by sending them into a disaster zone with no training and a paper cutter as their only weapon. The most dangerous creatures in the universe are stuffed into a single room with big windows, where 12-year-old idiots can interact with them. It's a level of stupid that is simply unforgivable.

Demystifying the Monster: How Alien Earth Ruined the Xenomorph

Somehow, all of this could have been manageable if the titular Alien was handled properly. But that is where Alien Earth truly falls to pieces. In a franchise first, this show has turned the Xenomorph into an actual joke.

The practical creature effects are the worst in the franchise's history, which is staggering considering the show's $250 million budget. James Cameron's Aliens was made for $18.5 million. Stan Winston created masterpieces for a fraction of the cost. The Xenomorph here looks dry, shiny, and less like a horrifying monster and more like Robocop. Ridley Scott knew how to frame, light, and edit the creature to keep it mysterious and terrifying; Noah Hawley has done everything in his power to demystify, deterrify, and completely pussify the H.R. Giger Xenomorph.

This new alien sets traps, carrying its prey like a baby into a storage unit instead of ripping them to shreds. It spends half the show sitting in a cage looking forlorn, only to escape and become a lap dog for a 12-year-old. The alien eggs are no longer a threat; they just close if you walk away. The tension is completely diffused as two children play "grab-ass" in a nest that should be terrifying.

The bungling extends to every stage of its life cycle. The idea of a Xeno being born from a human lung is presented, but it robs the creature of its body-horror origins. The terrifying notion of being turned into a living incubation chamber is gone, replaced by a pound of flesh and a tadpole. It feels like the last thing anyone cared about in Alien Earth was the Alien itself.

A Prequel That Destroys Its Own Foundation

Strip away the stupidity and the mishandled monster, and you are left with a highly destructive prequel. Alien Earth takes place just two years before the original Alien, but it doesn't function as a prequel because its events don't gel with what comes next.

•  Weyland-Yutani's Knowledge: The show suggests that two years before Alien, Weyland-Yutani knew where to source a Xenomorph with ease. If this is true, then the entire premise of the first film—a chance encounter by a crew of ore haulers—falls apart. Why didn't the company just go get more of them?  

• The LV-426 Contradiction: If the specimens came from LV-426, why would Weyland-Yutani put a colony full of families there years later in Aliens? Why wouldn't they have stripped the planet clean for research?  

• The Nostromo's Mission: In this show, the company knows exactly how deadly the Xenomorph is after the Maginot and Neverland Island disasters. So why, two years later, would they think a handful of space truckers on the Nostromo could safely secure a specimen? 

The logical conclusion is that Weyland-Yutani didn't know any of this, which is essential to the narrative of the first film. By ignoring this, the writers have sided with a "cool idea" without examining its damaging ramifications on the franchise. Aliens were not on Earth before the movie Alien. The first two films of the series now make less sense because of the existence of this eight-hour turd sandwich.

A Finale Without Resolution, A Betrayal of the Audience

The finale of Alien Earth was easily the worst episode of the series, exposing the show as utterly directionless. Unlike every Alien film, which ended with a sense of finality, this episode resolved next to nothing and served only as a 40-minute setup for a second season.

•  Mauro and Kirsch fought, but nobody died.
• The Muppet Babies were captured and placed in a prison with the door wide open.
• The Xenomorph did nothing cool.
• Plot armor flowed like wine, as absolutely no one of importance died.
• The only resolution was maxing out the power level of the Mary Sue Robot, who can now control synths, computers, and Xenomorphs with her calculator brain.

There was no big battle, no big reveal, and a finale that felt like it ended before it began.

Conclusion: Fans Deserve Better

Being a fan of a franchise does not mean blindly accepting any piece of content that bears its name. When creators who are entrusted with the stories we love effectively destroy them out of hastiness, laziness, and stupidity, we have every right to criticize. Alien Earth is a disrespect to its source material, a joke of bad writing, and the worst entry in the Alien franchise.

If your immersion wasn't shattered by the lore-breaking and disrespect to the series, it suggests a lack of understanding of what made the franchise great in the first place. Fans should not have to lower their mental bar to a degree where writing this bad has no effect. We deserve better, and we shouldn't be afraid to ask for more from the people paid millions to take our beloved stories and reduce them to their dumbest form imaginable.