We’re only four episodes in to Noah Hawley’s Alien: Earth TV series, and while it continues to meaningfully build upon the lore of Ridley Scott’s expansive sci-fi universe, there’s a recurring issue so far that seem to be rearing its ugly head. That ugly dome-like head is sadly the Xenomorph itself.
**Spoilers for Episodes 1 – 4 of Alien: Earth Below**
While the Xenomorph has long been the central terror of the Alien franchise, its presence in Alien: Earth — at times — risks feeling like a tired plot device. Getting more specific, a sequence in Episode 3: Metamorphosis helps to illustrate my point. In it, Prodigy’s brand-new hybrid, Wendy, is tasked with venturing into the crash site of the Maginot to find and rescue her brother, Hermit, who has been captured and cocooned by a Xenomorph.
Here, Wendy confronts the iconic space monster and fights the creature, injuring it with a meat hook before ultimately decapitating it. While she collapses from the injuries she sustains from her battle with the perfect organism, the imagery — where she’s basically dragging the Xenomorph like a small dog into the hanger — sort of neuters the fear factor that the Alien so perfectly encapsulates.
Sure, I know we saw marines mow down countless Xenomorphs with a quick burst of a pulse rifle in James Cameron’s Aliens, but that was refreshing at the time as his new action-centric take was a fresh direction for the sci-fi horror franchise. Furthermore, Cameron managed to significantly expand the lore and the life cycle of the Xenomorph by introducing a Queen alien into the mix, which fans absolutely adored.
So far, outside of the new creatures that Alien: Earth has cleverly introduced into the Alien universe, we’ve not yet seen any major developments when it comes to the Xenomorph, outside of Wendy’s seeming ability to be able to communicate with them. Compared to some of the other grotesque monsters we’ve seen — the Octopus Eye, the Giant Blood-Gorged Ticks, and the Venus Flytrap-like Plant — our overfamiliarity with the Xenomorph almost works against its horrifying nature. It’s almost as if the other litany of parasitic space critters are the real stars of the show, which is a little concerning, to say the least.
Adding to this is the fact that Wendy’s brother, Hermit, has encountered the Xenomorph numerous times throughout the first opening chapters of the show, and he still manages to evade the Xenomorph. Sure, he gets stabbed in the chest by its tail, but his plot armor is so thick, it’s starting to expose some of the cracks in the show’s narrative. Well, for me anyway. Maybe we can just chalk this up to the fact that we’re watching a TV show as opposed to a movie? After all, this is the first time the Alien series has ventured into the TV show format.
Helping to add some additional context to this concept of plot armor is an interview that Noah Hawley conducted by the official Alien: Earth podcast.
An Alien movie is a two hour survival story at its heart, and it has a certain amount of setup, and then a lot of runaway, and then a certain amount of fighting back, and then the movie is over. That is not what a television show is.
Noah Hawley via the Alien: Earth official podcast
A television show is 10, 20, 50 hours of a continuous story about a group of characters who can’t all die. In fact, most of them can’t die. If you really want to tell stories about these people that an audience invests in, and so then the function of the monster becomes different in a television show than it is in a film.”
As you can see, perhaps the fact that Alien: Earth is a departure from the filmic depictions that we’ve grown accustomed to in the past, this new TV format could be the root of some of my issues I have with how the Xenomorph is occasionally portrayed in the show.
Since the 1979 OG classic, the iconic creature has been depicted in countless iterations — lurking in dark corridors, bursting from hosts, and serving as the ultimate predator against vulnerable humans. What was once shocking and truly alien has — through repetition — become dulled and expected. In Alien: Earth, the familiar beats of discovery, infection, and survival are once again poised to unfold, making the terror more predictable than truly terrifying.
The thing is, part of what made the original Alien so effective was its restraint, as you’d rarely see H.R. Giger’s space monster for more than a few seconds, usually shrouded in darkness, hidden in the shadows, or lurking in the smog — the Xenomorph was a mystery, both biologically and thematically.
With Alien: Earth, however, there’s a sense that the franchise is unwilling to truly evolve Ridley Scott’s iconic creature, even at the expense of narrative freshness. While the Xenomorph still embodies the fear of the unknown, it no longer feels unknown, which is something that will hopefully be ameliorated — or exacerbated — as the TV series continues to unfold.
