ON EARTH, THE ALIEN CAN HEAR YOU SCREAM: A REPORT FROM A FUGITIVE.

Is the eight-episode TV format a millstone around storytelling? ALIEN: EARTH. I am four episodes in, with four to go. At that point, always ask two questions. One. Is the final episode going to fuck this up and taint anything of value that came before? Two. Is the final episode a trailer for another series?
   Don’t know. Is there anything of value that came before? The series I’ve been watching, ALIEN: EARTH, is really BLADE RUNNER: THE SERIES. You can hear the corporate blood curling, curdling, as executives tell you, through gritted alien teeth, that we tried to do something new with the franchise.
   Rule one. ALIEN should never have been a franchise.
   And rule two. See rule one.
   So they gave us something different. Didn’t they? A spaceship that has the interior of the spaceship from ALIEN. This one has a crash-cupboard for one lucky character to occupy. Didn’t see that in Ridley’s movie. But then, Ridley’s spaceship didn’t crash. So we’ll retroactively say it was kitted out with a safety cubicle all along.
   Same spaceship interior. But the guy in the crash-cubicle is a cyborg. That’s new. Is it new? Or is that a fusion of other elements? If you crossed Yaphet Kotto with Ian Holm from the original movie, and threw in some cyborg gadgets, you’d have the cyborg. Morrow.
   Perhaps he represents tomorrow, despite the character’s history being deep in the cryogenic past. We are told, in a BLADE RUNNER opening text, all about cyborgs and synths and hybrids, oh my. All represent different quests for immortality.
   The cyborg idea is new to the TV show, if not to the American superhero comic book.
   Synthetic characters are mechanicals, along the lines of Ian Holm’s performance in ALIEN or Lance Henriksen’s turn in ALIENS. The characters of Ash and Bishop are machines with artificially intelligent brains.
   So the idea of immortality there is one step removed. Humanity creates these synthetic beings, artificial persons, in humanity’s image: leaving them to travel the universe as reminders of humans when humans are no more.
   We shall say nothing of digging Ian Holm’s performance up from the grave to appear in a spot of tenth-rate fan fiction as Rook – the rubbish one.
   One step beyond the synth is the hybrid. Take a human mind and load it into an artificial body. Create something that is more human than human, to borrow liberally from another Ridley movie.
   So far, so BLADE RUNNER.
   The key point of any story featuring the ALIEN franchise is this: at some point, smart people in space must do dumb things for the story to move forward. And so it goes, here. Morrow is returning from deep space with a contraband cargo of alien creatures.
   Something goes horribly wrong on that ship. The ship crashes on Earth™. An alien transfers from the ship to a skyscraper, and hijinks ensue. Yes, the alien literally crashes into the BLADE RUNNER story that’s front and centre in this production.
   But we have to put something new in here. How about new aliens? New to the franchise, perhaps. Or maybe not. Let us pause to consider the Skullfucker Octoball. Spiders are passé. I blame Stupid Sexy Shelob™ over in the strip-mined franchise of J.R.R. Tolkien for that.
   Give us an octopus. The octopus is intelligent. Give us more. An eyeball. And if this creature skullfucks your eyeball, it will dig down into the brain and take over the body. We see this in the zombie cat creature.
   Oh, spoiler alert. Am I spoiling anything?
   But we’ve seen this. It’s a cat. And it is sick. Wait. It’s been possessed by the Skullfucker Octoball. And this was in Ridley’s movie, originally. How? Symbolically. They took a thing from Ridley’s film and they made it fucking literal.
   Characters in ALIEN tend to have two syllables. There are exceptions. Brett and Kane spring to mind. But there’s also Jones. The cat. As part of the suspense, you think the alien is going to be there. It’s the cat. Then you are left wondering. Well, is it just the cat? No, it’s the alien.
   And so. Here, we have both at the same time. Is it just the cat? No, it’s the cat and the alien, all rolled into one. Is anything truly new, here? Bugs that drain you of blood. Those are all across the movies. Nothing new to see here. And the plant that might not be a plant? If it camouflages itself against a backdrop of plants, it ain’t blending in on a spaceship.
   I didn’t have much time for triffids in The Day of the Triffids. This maybe-plant or possible-animal needs a jungle to hide in. Oh dear.
   Welcome to Fantasy Island. Or Jurassic Park. I misremember which. The alien is simply acting on instinct to survive. Evil corporations are the true monsters, and ALIEN is a comedy about corporate greed.
   The alien crashes into a skyscraper owned by Elon Zuckerberg. He’s a young quirky trillionaire who runs his own cult on Fantasy Island. A dash of Jurassic Park. Throw in a hint of Doctor Moreau. Add a splash of so much money that you never really need to count it up. Microwave until the cheese melts. Elon Zuckerberg funds the hybrid special project.
   And there’s your villain. Except. There’s another villain. She phones in her performance. Nothing against the actress. It’s that kind of show – if you want hologram communications, go and watch STAR WARS.
   As sure as night meets day, these separate plot elements collide. One corporation brings the aliens to our world. Another corporation sends the hybrid team to salvage goodies from the spaceship. Aliens are bagged, tagged, and dangerous to know. They all go back to Fantasy Island for illegal experiments, milk, and choc chip treats.
   What of these hybrids? They are children, destined to die from disease. And only children’s minds can survive the transfer to artificial bodies.
   This means they already tried the procedure with adults dying from disease. Elon Zuckerberg is young. But not young enough for the transfer. So he must have trawled the elderly wards in the hospitals, looking for disposable candidates.
   Let’s gloss over this the same way the TV show does. There are science fiction products that dip heavily and lumberingly into other areas. Resident Evil gives you a movie experience based around Alice and the Red Queen. So far, so Wonderland.
   Tron owes a debt to The Wizard of Oz.
   No one watched that Winnie-the-Killer-Bear film.
   Here, as this is streamed on the Disney+ channel, there’s Disney property to strip-mine. And so the belaboured imagery revolves around animated clips from Peter Pan. But Wendy Battle Angel Alita Darling is the star.
   She faces a problem or two. Sometimes the effects aren’t that great. Jumping off a cliff to show she has superpowers…could have been done better. If you have the choice between an effect and a stunt, go with the stunt.
   Lifting the children looked better as a sketch than as the scene itself. We get it. She’s a superhero. And she can battle Angel Alita the alien threat.
   Wendy faces other things plundered from Neverland. Neverland is the first episode. Doesn’t get much more on the nose than that. Morrow has handy gadgets in his fist, so that makes him Captain Hook.
   We are fucking told that the alien is the crocodile. Wendy can hear a clock ticking inside the alien. Or something like that. Her friends, the dying children, transfer to robot bodies and become the lost boys and girls.
   In that grouping, we have Space Ginger from the SOLO STAR WARS HEIST movie. (Admittedly, she’s dark blue in her scene at the start of the film. Everything is dark and blue in her scene from the SOLO film.)
   Space Ginger is playing the Veronica Cartwright Veronica Cartwright character from ALIEN. You know. The one who loses her shit. And we have a few other boys and girls in the mix. But one character steals from C.S. Lewis. We’ll call him Edmund Pevensie. Morrow, the Captain Hook character, offers Edmund a piece of Turkish Delight.
   This sticks to Edmund’s neck and creates a chat room for the two of them. Morrow is left behind at the crash. But he wants to see the mission through for his boss on the phone. So he befriends Edmund with tales of friendship online. Edmund lives in Narnia Neverland.
   All Edmund has to do is this: wander around Fantasy Island until he can find a smart human dumb enough to go near an alien egg, and Edmund will watch the alien impregnate the human. For his online friend.
   Okay, groomer.
   The synthetics are child minds inside adult bodies. You got that bit, right? All of these plotlines swirl together at the island. Wendy Darling wants to investigate the alien ship so that she can be reunited with her long-lost brother who thinks she died.
   Fighting the alien, Wendy is bwoken. And so is her brother. His lung is donated to a corporate think-tank, which is an actual tank full of lung and fluid. And then a transparent alien sperm creature comes along, and, damn, this is a short hop, skip, and a jump from being a musical.
   Wendy recovers from being bwoken, as she is Battle Angel Wendy. Her brother recovers from being bwoken as he’s fixed up and bought body and soul by the company. For a show with ALIEN in the title, there’s 10% ALIEN and 90% BLADE RUNNER tomfoolery featuring evil corporations.
   The original alien creature is by turns noticed, ignored, forgotten, killed off, cut up, and then froths in its own acidic blood. If there’s any hatred for Elon Bezos Zuckerberg, it’s reserved for the moment when Dolly the Sheep skullfucks his brain and declares a new project to fly everyone to Mars in the final episode which I’ve not seen yet.
   Yes, there’s illegal experimentation on a sheep. This plunders the original movie. How? The door into the chamber with the sheep is a metal iris door. That’s from Ridley’s movie. Here, it’s smaller. Skullfucker Octoball size.
   With four episodes to go, it’s hard to say who the Skullfucker Octoball will go after. Not the alien. It doesn’t have eyes with notable sockets. Also, I think it will be hard for the Octoball’s CGI skullfuckery tentacles to cope with alien blood.
   The dumb money is on taking over Elon Zuckertrillionaire. And then being slightly less evil than Elon Zuckervillain. That’s bound to be a bit of a letdown. Will the killer plant/animal escape into the jungle to start a new life? What about those alien eggs? They gonna hatch?
   I left out a few characters. Instead of Ash, or Bishop, or Rook, or any of the rest of the android photocopies over-populating the franchise, there’s Kirsh. He’s excessively blond. If you call that an Easter Egg, it’s an Easter Egg that opened its outer hatch and face-hugged the audience with all the subtlety of no subtlety.
   Not an ALIEN reference. A BLADE RUNNER one. I’ve seen ALIEN movies you people wouldn’t believe. (Run, Charlize, run!) So what is new here? I’m struggling with that one. Maybe in the final episode there won’t be an ominous trailer for what could only be a much-diluted sequel. Also running eight episodes.
   There’s a lot rehashed in this show, and I don’t feel like rehashing episodes to let you know every single detail that was rehashed from a franchise. Yes, there is some plot engineering. Morrow scrubs the spaceship of all records. This will force the company to send another spaceship to the general location to pick up fresh samples.
   And that is where the movie comes in. In space, no one can hear you scream. I imagine there’s a section of the audience on this planet, screaming away with hatred. For reasons unknown to me, I find the show strangely watchable on an episode-by-episode basis.
   With half the show to go, I’m expecting it to crash and burn like the spaceship that hit the skyscraper. I can’t lie to you about the show’s chances of satisfying fans of the movie. (Whether ALIEN or BLADE RUNNER.) But you have my sympathies.