In space, the Alien franchise once told us, no one can hear you scream. But left unsaid in that elegant bit of branding is the terror. Why you were screaming in the first place. In the 22nd century, where Ridley Scott’s Alien films were set and where Noah Hawley’s Alien: Earth has returned, space is controlled by corporations. And while becoming the host body for an ancient extraterrestrial murder being is scary, it’s somehow scarier that when a cyborg built by Weyland-Yutani hears you scream, he’ll be too much of a company man to do anything about saving you.

As it sets up its own reality, A:E is also having a ton of fun with sci-fi history. The USS Maginot, a Weyland-Yutani research-class vessel, rightly looks like a ship built in our 1970s. As its crew wakes up from cryo and repairs to the mess for cigarettes and cans of beer, they could be colleagues of Tom Skerritt as Captain Dallas, or Sigourney Weaver as Ripley. Fellow union cardholders, working people of the future, on a 65-year hump to the edge of space, tasked by their corporate overlords to collect a cargo of live specimens. With the slow turning title cards and clean, eerie music cues, its matching film stock, the look and feel of the ship, the crew’s uniforms – even the typeface of the close-captioning – Alien: Earth in these early scenes is bringing its franchise’s past into its present.

The Maginot, teeming with the specimens it collected, is now hurdling on a trajectory toward Earth. And as Weyland-Yutani security officer Morrow (Babou Ceesay) stresses, whatever gripes the crew might have about their employer, “the specimens are the mission.” A hard stare. Morrow is also a W-T cyborg. Its message? The human crew are expendable. But their cargo, like a tentacle-bodied sentient eyeball with multiple retinas? Crucial.  

In Alien: Earth, the Maginot is returning to a planet divided five ways by corporate nation-states. There is Weyland-Yutani, but also outfits like Dynamic, which controls the Moon, and Prodigy, the heaviest new player in the synthetic human game. Cyborgs – humans with robot parts – and full synthetics – like Ian Holm’s Ash in Alien, or Lance Henriksen’s Bishop in Aliens – were already things. But Prodigy, led by big-brained whiz kid and world’s first trillionaire Boy Kavalier (Samuel Blenkin), is preparing for the launch of a brand-new human-ish product. An individual consciousness, still malleable but wholly unique, traveling by wire and filament into a sleek and powerful factory-built body.

It’s all happening now at Kavalier’s secret island palace headquarters, known as Neverland, where (human) scientist Dame Silvia (Essie Davis) and (synthetic) scientist Kirsh (Timothy Olyphant) prepare a sickly 12-year-old named Marcy to have her adolescent mind and memories inserted into the head of “Wendy” (Sydney Chandler). They fire up the consciousness-transfer machine. It looks sufficiently whiz-bang and grotesque. And soon, Prodigy’s entry into the surging corporate race for immortality seems to be a smashing success. Days go by, and Boy Kav watches as Wendy becomes a fully-powered hybrid person/big sister to the other terminally ill kids in line for Prodigy’s program. 

While all this is going on, and the Neverland team is bickering about the nature of what they created – “Why are we pretending she’s human?” asks Kirsh; seems like something they should’ve worked out in R&D, but we’ll see – shit is going completely kerblooey on the USS Maginot. Back at the start of this packed-to-the-rafters lead episode, Alien: Earth did wonderfully to introduce us to the personalities and rhythms of the ship’s crew. But now those same folks, or their remains, are only seen in quick flashes. Unsettling edits. Splattering body parts. And the coming of the facehuggers, the xenomorphs we know in their skittering, mobile gestating form. Warnings from Mother, the ship’s computer, blare. Cargo Containment Has Failed. Collision Imminent. And Morrow, the cyborgian security officer, uses a torch to seal off his escape compartment from the last remaining human crew. Their screams are the sound of their Weyland-Yutani contracts being canceled.

In Alien: Earth, Alex Lawther is Hermit, a medic in a unit of Prodigy’s private army who’s stationed in the city of New Siam. (You loved Lawther as Karis “There will be times when the struggle seems impossible” Nemik in the first season of Andor.) And in this premiere ep of A:E, we’re introduced to Hermit during another segment that feels much deeper and longer than it actually is. He’s a soldier, but he’s also empathetic, and loves to watch Ice Age. That film’s fanciful characters remind him of his childhood, in the time before his little sister Marcy got sick. Yes, Marcy. Hermit has memories he still shares with his sister, even though he has no idea her own were transferred, along with her personhood, from her terminal physical body into Wendy’s custom-built skull.

Wendy can watch Hermit through whatever surveillance cameras and assorted device screens he passes. As a hybrid person, it’s one of her powers. And so she instantly has eyes on the situation when the USS Maginot careens through earth’s atmosphere, overhead Hermit and his squad, and smashes into the base of the biggest skyscraper in New Siam. Is it cool if we crash here? As Hermit and fellow soldiers Siberian (Diêm Camille) and Rashidi (Moe Bar-El) approach the site in an APC – another sound technical reference to the technology of the Alien franchise – they have no idea what biological alien terrors have crashed with it.

As they head from Neverland to New Siam, Wendy is convinced of two things. One is that she will protect her brother from harm. And two is that despite her technical upgrades, she perceives herself as human. It’ll be an ongoing issue for Alien: Earth to work out – the defined essence of Prodigy’s hybrids – as Kirsh and Wendy lead the other “Lost Boys”: Slightly (Adarsh Gourav), Smee (Jonathan Ajayi), Nibs (Lily Newmark), Tootles (Kit Young), and Curly (Erana James). Welcome to this show’s version of the 22nd century. Humanity has manufactured a theoretically limitless extension of life, just as corporate greed has brought to earth an entity with the ability to eradicate our species entirely.

Specimens for Alien: Earth Episode 1 (“Neverland”):

• No one can hear you scream in space, but can they hear you jam? Alien: Earth incorporates a Cream song couplet as a kind of audio logo – “Straaange breeew…kill what’s inside of you…” – and runs Black Sabbath “The Mob Rules” over its end credits. RIP to the Ozzman, but “Mob” has Ronnie James Dio on vocals, and the aggression of the track contributes mightily to the rush of xenomorphing insanity we just witnessed in the crumpled passageways of the USS Maginot. 

• At Neverland, Boy Kavalier’s Prodigy play space, laboratories lit in clean futuristic light are paired with communal spaces and a leader’s lair designed like 1970s romper rooms. And what’s the deal with the man in a hazmat suit using an automatic sprayer on the hallway’s surfaces? He looks like something out of Brazil, or Jacob’s Ladder. For now we’ll say it’s an indicator all is not so clean and genius-coded at Boy Kav’s Prodigy HQ.

• Another purr-fect Alien franchise throwback: the ship’s cat who resides in the physical plant of the USS Maginot. Remember how Jonesy was one of the heroes of Aliens? We like how cats sorted how to survive for centuries into the future by doing what they’d always done: rely on their instincts. Some cat-rillionaire didn’t need to mess around with trying to transfer consciousness into robot feline form.

• “You stopped being food. Or, I should say, you told yourself you weren’t food anymore.” The entire cast of Alien: Earth is really working at a high level immediately. But getting Timothy Olyphant as a synthetic in the cold, detached, observing-of-humanity vein of Michael Fassbender’s David from Prometheus is a stroke of casting genius.

Johnny Loftus (@johnnyloftus.bsky.social) is a Chicago-based writer. A veteran of the alternative weekly trenches, his work has also appeared in Entertainment Weekly, Pitchfork, The All Music Guide, and The Village Voice.