Anyone who has been to a movie recently knows that keeping people quiet to watch something together can be a struggle. Now make that number almost 7,000 people, and what happens is pure captivation as the crowd in Hall H at San Diego Comic-Con were wowed by the first episode of Alien: Earth, which comes to FX on August 12.
The episode starts in a very familiar way for Alien fans before doing a complete 180 into something totally different. Almost instantly, it’s clear that creator Noah Hawley both knows what you want from an Alien show and that he has to give you something new. That something new primarily centers on Wendy, played by Sydney Chandler. In the first episode, we see she’s actually a child who had her consciousness transported into a superior robot body resembling an adult. It’s one of the new innovations at Prodigy, one of several companies at the center of Alien: Earth as they battle a war to monetize immortality.
Not what you expected from an Alien show, right? After a few twists and turns, Wendy and several other similar beings decide they want to help investigate a mysterious (and potentially lucrative) crash by a Weyland-Yutani ship in the middle of the city. That ship houses several creatures on it, including some new ones that will creep and crawl their way into your nightmares, just as they do a few soldiers near the end of the episode.
We’ll have more specifics on the episode when we get closer to release, but it played like gangbusters to the near 7,000-person Hall H at Comic-Con. They “ooh’d,” they “aah’d,” and they made it seem like this Alien: Earth show might be something special.
Because the episode was so long, there wasn’t a lot of time to actually talk about the show on the panel. Mostly, the attending cast, which included Sydney Chandler, Timothy Olyphant, Alex Lawther, Samuel Blenkin, and Babou Ceesay, talked about how excited they are to be part of the Alien franchise. But showrunner and creator Noah Hawley did explain a bit about how this show will be different, just on a macro scale, from an Alien movie.
“It’s an 8-hour story this year, and each hour has to build and have its horror elements, but my feeling is it really has to work as a drama, and then all the genre elements can be built on top of that,” he said. “An Alien movie is a two-hour survival story, and a television show has to be more than that. It has to be a character journey that’s thematically rich and that you really start to worry that I might kill some of these people. And I might.”
“The thing that’s really quite special and I think you guys are going to enjoy is that by the time you get to the third or fourth episode, the things that wake you up in the middle of the night and you’re thinking about the next day are just scenes between two people,” Olyphant added. “They’re so riveting. In addition to all the thrills and the scares. the drama and character study is so phenomenal.”
We’ll see it all on August 12 when Alien: Earth comes to FX.
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