SPOILER ALERT: This article contains major spoilers for the first two episodes of “Alien: Earth,” now available to stream on Hulu.
In space (or from the safety of your couch), no one can hear you scream.
Ridley Scott’s “Alien” franchise has landed on TV with “Alien: Earth,” a prequel series set two years before the original space horror movie. It follows a brand new cast full of humans, synths, Xenomorphs and more as a group of soldiers investigate a crashed ship on Earth and discover some terrifying secrets inside.
The series starts aboard the Maginot, a Weyland-Yutani spaceship carrying some extraterrestrial cargo. Don’t get too attached to the crew. The most notable person — technically, he’s an cyborg — onboard is Morrow (Babou Ceesay), who sabotages the ship after everyone wakes up from a 65-year cryo-sleep. They’re transporting some Xenomorph eggs, a parasitic eye monster and a full-grown Xenomorph that soon runs rampant. Morrow seemingly betrays his fellow crewmates on purpose, and sets the ship to crash into Earth, while he stows away and survives.
Before the crash, we stop by a Prodigy research center on Earth that’s run by young trillionaire Boy Kavalier (Samuel Blenkin). The aptly named genius is the CEO of Prodigy, one of the four companies that control all of Earth and the rest of the solar system’s planets. Boy has made a major scientific breakthrough by putting the consciousness of a dying girl into a synthetic body. The successful transfer results in Wendy (Sydney Chandler), the first human-synth hybrid, who has near-superhuman strength as she maintains a childlike innocence. Named for the “Peter Pan” character Wendy, she oversees the creation of her fellow family of hybrids, aka the Lost Boys, who later investigate the Maginot crash site with their creepy synth mentor Kirsh (Timothy Olyphant).
From her human life, Wendy has a brother named CJ (Alex Lawther), aka Hermit, who’s a medic and doesn’t know his sister is still alive or in a synth body. He and some Prodigy soldiers are sent to the Maginot crash site to look for survivors, but two of them are quickly picked off by a blood-sucking parasite. Wendy is determined to save her brother, and leads her synth group to his location on the ship by magically controlling computer screens. In a Episode 2 flashback, it’s revealed that Hermit attempted to resign from his post the day before, but was denied, and somehow Wendy remotely tapped into the medical drone he was speaking to and rewrote its code to talk indirectly to her brother.
In the second episode, Hermit narrowly survives two run-ins with the Xenomorph. It ambushes him as he jumps across a gap in the floor, and then follows him as he tries to evacuate some ignorant rich folks in a fancy apartment next to the downed ship. They’re in the middle of a bizarre Victorian dress-up party, but the Xenomorph crashes their fun and tears them apart. Just as the alien is about to pounce on Hermit, Morrow intervenes and electrifies the creature. The cyborg bags the beast and incapacitates Hermit so he can escape, but Wendy soon finds her brother and reveals her identity to him., but Wendy soon finds her brother and reveals her identity to him. The siblings bond — even though Wendy is in an older, unrecognizable synth body — and discover a nest of Xenomorph eggs back in the ship. Escaped from the gross goo sack, the Xenomorph abducts Hermit at the end of Episode 2, leaving Wendy to go after him once again.
How will the two escape the murderous Xenomorph? Why did Morrow crash the ship in the first place, and who is he working for? Will Weyland-Yutani or Prodigy take ownership of the aliens? And most importantly, who will survive the crash site and live to see the next morning?