Might be TTH: Alien: Earth, episode 1 and 2

Those of you who've followed my work here for any length of time know that I'm a Ridley Scott fan... to a point. I think his first three films (The Duellists, Alien, Blade Runner (the director's cut; no voiceover, ends in the elevator)) are as fine a contribution to the history of cinema as anyone's. Indeed, I still consider Blade Runner to be the finest SF film ever made and one of the greatest films period. Its influence is rampant across my own fiction work. And not far behind in that SF film and film ranking is Alien, which demonstrated that you didn't need lasers or robots or heroic prophecies to make a solid story in the near future. You just needed regular people in extraordinary circumstances, which is the root of a lot of good fiction. Noah Hawley's new series, Alien: Earth unfortunately evades that premise entirely in its first couple episodes. Whether that's just a different take or a significant flaw in the overall story is open for question.

The problem that a lot of creators have struggled with within the constraints of the Alien "franchise" is how to keep drawing people back to the perceived threat of the xenomorphs once they've been "solved" in this or that film. James Cameron produced (and directed) what is probably the greatest sequel ever made with Aliens, when he took the horror film and turned it into an action film without sacrificing story or character. That's because he recognized that what Scott did is create approachable and memorable characters against- again -the backdrop of extraordinary circumstances. (Shakespeare alert!) That's exactly what most creators have failed to do since, instead relying on a new alien gimmick, rather than a story about the moving things on screen that the audience can actually relate and connect to (Full disclosure: When I saw Alien at the age of 7, I was rooting for the creature, but I was like that (far more enthralled by Darth Vader than whiny Luke Skywalker, etc.))

On the one hand, Noah Hawley recognized that his series likely wouldn't be a hit if the story was about the creatures and people just having to figure out the "villain of the week" gimmick like a police procedural or any of a number of mostly DC comics throughout the ages. Instead, he inserted a broader plot that examines the question of why both humanity and the xenomorph's reactions to each other are so foreign. I'm not sure if it's going to work, but it was at least a decent effort so far. The main premise is the competition between the five major corporations that rule the planet Earth to produce a new form of "immortality", be it synthetic (like the androids from the film franchise), cyborg (a single prominent character in the first two episodes), or hybrid (human consciousness transmitted into a synth.) The latter are the creation of the "world's youngest trillionaire", as if this were something to aspire to for all the current tech bro followers of Elmo Musk. They're also the central focus of the plot. I believe the idea is that, since they inherently have human consciousness (and, supposedly, conscience), they'll be the most interesting to follow and most relatable to the audience. Since all of the hybrids are created from terminally ill children, Hawley chose to cloak this whole aspect of the plot in the regrettable Lost Boys trope from Peter Pan, which has been so done to death that not even supposed immortality can rescue it. It's also an interesting insight into current world circumstances, in that it allows a company owned by Disney (Hulu) to produce a show that also uses Disney properties as central themes of the story in the form of that film, as well as Ice Age. Something something corporations ruling the world and all that. I mean, the whole premise of the xenomorph reproduction process is parasitic, so this should come as an easy turn for a company like Disney...

Hawley has done good work in the production process by borrowing extensive elements from the original film. Given that this is technically a prequel (le sigh), most of the technology on the Weyland-Yutani ship retrieving the specimens is drawn from the original film, from the text sounds to the light panels of Mother, the ship's AI. That's interesting for a bit but it eventually veers from homage to near-mockery. And I'm fine with cross-time technologies, in that their space travel is vastly more advanced than ours but their Internet and communications aren't. That's just a fact of SF only being able to predict so much (people still using pay phones in Neuromancer, etc.) But said advanced space travel also completely ignores the laws of physics when a ship crash lands on Earth under some measure of thrust and somehow doesn't create the mile-wide crater that one would expect. When there are obvious ways to defuse these kinds of glaring plot points (and when you have Disney money to do it with), it does leave you wondering. But those are details.

The main problem with the premise of the superhumans (whether synth, cyborg, or hybrid) engaging with the vastly physically superior aliens is that, well, we lose that whole "regular humans in extraordinary circumstances" element. We do have the hybrids being impaired by the immature emotional responses to events, which is similar to Blade Runner's replicants having difficulty dealing with their own existence. But that was interesting because the entire focus of the film was the question of what it means to be human. This is not that. Instead, it's about what it means to be more than human, which isn't quite as exciting in a genuine Marvel vs DC heroic fantasy comparison. On top of that, there are not yet any genuinely compelling characters to propel the story (in true adventure comic fashion.) In truth, the most interesting people are Morrow (Babou Ceesay), a Weyland-Yutani cyborg determined to serve the company, and Kersh (Tim Olyphant), a Prodigy synthetic determined to be as icy and distant as possible in every circumstance. The most notable thing about Morrow is how much of a fanatic he is to serve the mission (retrieve and protect the specimens, akin to Ash from the original film) but also how utterly inhuman he is when the definition of cyborg is a cybernetically-enhanced human. Again, are we attempting to hearken to the Blade Runner conflict of the inhuman human and the human inhumans? If so, why do we need aliens?

The visuals have been good. I'm finding the architecture to be very Mega City One, which would be an interesting reach if that was their intention, given the far different structure of that society to this one. And, of course, when our gang of hybrids set out to encounter the xenomorphs, the staging shifts into a very familiar "superheroes setting out on a mission" approach which again raises the question of just which aspect of (non)humanity are we focusing on here? Both? Neither? Episode two also branches into high action a la Aliens to Alien. But it also bends distinctly into John Carpenter's The Thing territory with the amount of blood unleashed by the primary alien and some of the other specimens brought back. It's not just the cool tentacles and the disturbing parasites (and not even Face Huggers.) It's the sheer torrent of blood. The original creature was a stalker. People mostly died offscreen. The creatures in Aliens were soldiers, but still mostly did the dirty work off-camera, presumably because people had to be at least partially alive to propagate the bugs. Hawley has taken a very different horror angle in this show, going from the eerieness of The Haunting to something like Friday the 13th, which is vastly less interesting to me from a storytelling angle. I have bloody scenes in my Dystopia work, too, but it's generally meant to be detail, not a starring role. I'm also not entirely certain what the relevance of the 18th-century French party was nor the baseball angle. Is this our sign of actual humans, in that they have hobbies and distractions where the synths and the cyborgs don't? I'm also questioning the choice of credits music, going from Black Sabbath's "Mob Rules" to Tool's "Stinkfist", neither of which seem to have relevance to what's happening onscreen, except in the broadest sense.

So, yeah, overall I'm kinda lukewarm on the whole thing. It's not awful, but it's not exactly compelling, either. Again, watching Ceesay and Olyphant perform means I'll probably continue to see if they can take it somewhere interesting, but it's certainly not in The Wire/Breaking Bad/Game of Thrones (seasons 1-5) territory of something that must be seen or even a "you really should watch this" effort like Andor. I know that's a tall ask, so I'm certainly willing to give it a couple more episodes to see if it can at least aspire to get there.

Slimy, green book

There's something to be said for a TV series that opens with Jackie Robinson splattering what is nominally Great Cthulhu with a baseball bat. Even if I wasn't already interested in things Lovecraft, that opening scene of Lovecraft Country would've been enough to stop me from channel surfing and to take a moment to see just where this thing might go. It's based on the novel of the same name, about a young, Black man and his family and their encounters on the road in Jim Crow America and how the horrors of bigotry are often just as awful, if not worse, than facing down an interdimensional demon.

For those that don't know, it's worth mentioning up front that H. P. Lovecraft was an unrepentant racist. Many of his more famous creations are rooted in his opinions of people not like him and, quite often, Black people, such as Nyarlathotep, often known as The Black Man or Shub-Niggurath, the Black Goat of the Woods, and so on. You'd like to think that it's akin to things like the antisemitism of Wagner, except that HPL's racism is actually embodied in his work. It wasn't a universal theme in his output, but it was there. So it was singularly appropriate for author, Matt Ruff, to take those not-so-subtle themes and turn the spotlight on them and still get to engage shoggoths and demon hounds while he was at it. I haven't read the book, but from what I've heard from people who have, the first episode of the HBO series, released last night, stayed in lockstep with Ruff's vision.

In some respects, the overall premise isn't that different from Green Book, except that the Black people in this show actually have agency. They do get some help from a woman in a silver car (Does she start it with a silver key...?) but otherwise they're encountering and mostly solving their own problems. That agency is driven by familial and emotional concerns, which also means that they're real people; not itinerant adventurers who want to motor halfway across the country to look into weird things in backwoods Massachusetts. 

Jonathan Majors does some compelling work as Atticus "Tic" Freeman. I remember him from Last Black Man in San Francisco, but little else. I also like Jurnee Smollett's turn as Letitia Lewis, especially when it becomes apparent that she's not particularly attached to anyone or anything, but mostly just takes advantage of people for the couple days that she needs before she moves on. That's not exactly a sympathetic character but, again, it's a real character, as I'm sure that most of us know someone(s) like that. She's not malicious about it. An unwillingness to be tied down or forced into societal roles is often seen as a trait to be admired and it's a continuation of theme, given the number of forced roles that Black people in this country often still have to adopt. But there's emotional impact from that kind of behavior and it's something to build a real story upon.

It says something, too, that it's basically a relief when the monsters show up to rescue Tic, Tish, and George from the police. (This is where I always remember the line from Fletch: "Oh. Thank God. The... police.") The show builds tension nicely from the restaurant to the World's Slowest Car Chase scene and continues it into the woods and the running chase/battle from there. Again, tribute to the writers and producers for picking up Ruff's themes so well. "They only come out at night" is a phrase that could've been applied to sundown towns, where the real monsters were the cops and the local klansmen (Sometimes a two-fer! Those who burn crosses are the same who work forces, yo.) The gore might be a little OTT for a mythos rooted mostly in eerieness and dread, but doing a more active take on HPL's ominous darkness isn't a bad thing. That's what you'll get if you play Arkham Horror and end up walking around with a double-barreled sawed-off and nightgaunts all over the streets.

That's not the only deviation from the mythos, though. Rather than using one of the classic HPL towns (Arkham, Innsmouth, Kingsport, Dunwich, etc.), the writers decided to suggest it was a misread of a letter from Tic's father and the town they're looking for is actually "Ardham." This is kind of clever, in that the characters are already aware of HPL's fiction (and racism) and it would end up being kind of trite if Arkham really existed. This way, it can basically exist, but it's actually some other village in the hinterlands of New England. This draws the audience in with the characters as we're all living out our fantasies of being investigators of the power of the Old Ones. On that topic, we delve into a true nerd moment here in the fight scene, as it's implied that the beasts in the forest are shoggoths, which Atticus refers to as "blobs with eyes and teeth." He's right but, with maybe one exception, that's not what those things were. They reminded me much more of the hounds of Tindalos, except they didn't come out of the angles in the walls. (Go on. Wiki it up. I'll wait.) Shoggoths are also usually translucent, which these things weren't. But that's sticking to canon which many, many other authors after HPL didn't and, if they're taking liberties, more (ancient) power to them.

There were some smart little details elsewhere in the episode, as well, like the Denmark Vesey bar. Vesey was a former slave who was executed for supposedly planning a slave revolt in Charleston, SC. Also, we see Tic reading A Princess of Mars, the first in the Barsoom/John Carter series, which is a story about an Earth man going to a new world where he is the outsider among several races of Martians separated by the color of their skins. He is occasionally mistaken for being one of the white apes of Barsoom; the only truly savage species of humanoid on the planet...

So, I think this has promise and I'm interested to see where it goes. Next week's episode is entitled "Whitey's on the Moon". I'll be back then.