Noah Hawley’s Alien: Earth has been a long time coming. The Fargo showrunner’s Alien spinoff series was announced in December of 2020, and now, four and a half years later, it’s finally taking shape. So far, all we’ve known is that it is set two years before the events of the first Alien film and will follow a xenomorph invasion on Earth. But of course, the crew of the Nostromo knew nothing about the alien threat that eventually found them, so if there was an invasion on Earth, it was clearly kept hush-hush.
Now, in the first trailer for the series, premiering August 12 on FX on Hulu, we get our first look at the team defending Earth from a number of different monsters: children transplanted into superpowered synthetic beings. Check out the trailer below.
In the trailer, we see a young girl about to undergo an experimental procedure. “You're gonna be the first person to transition from a human body to a synthetic,” we hear a man say. “Because I'm special,” the girl replies. “That's right. You're very, very special.” Her new body is played by Syndey Chandler, and in a casting announcement from 2023 we learned her name is Wendy, a “character with the body of an adult, but the brain and consciousness of a child.”
It seems like Wendy — and her fellow young-minded synthetic Hybrids — are Earth’s first line of defense against an oncoming threat. “It's like a zoo, but the animals got out,” one character says. “This ship collected five different life forms from the darkest corners of the universe. Monsters,” a man warns. But this doesn’t sway Wendy. “We can do it,” she says. “We're fast. We're strong. We don't break.”
This new technology turns what used to be children into essentially supersoldiers, the Alien equivalent of a superhero team to defend the Earth. Unfortunately, they’re a bit more interested in coloring than the superheroes we’re used to, but that’s just what makes them interesting. These characters aren’t just new to the Alien franchise, they’re new to the superhero genre as a whole.
Alien: Earth may be the first terrestrial Alien movie, but that doesn’t mean that the retrofuturistic technology needs to be changed at all. We’re about to see a whole new side to what’s possible.
