One of the Greatest Science-Fiction Franchises Is Finally Getting a TV Show. It's Not Quite What It Seems.

One of the most perfect things about the original Alien is its fiendish simplicity. Driven in part by technical limitations, the movie largely confines its glistening monster to the shadows, and keeps the reasons for its existence similarly obscured. Driven purely by the instinct to drive and reproduce, the xenomorph—a designation the creature didn't even acquire until the second movie in the series—is both a perfect killing machine and the ultimate plot device. It not only requires no explanation but allows none, because the alien's very nature means that no one who might be in a position to pass on information about it survives to do so.

Simplicity, however, is not really Noah Hawley's thing. His FX series Fargo was five seasons of elevated fanfiction, riffing on the collected works of Joel and Ethan Coen without tapping into the deeper ideas that inform their best films. The Coens wrestled with the nature of evil; Hawley wrestled with the Coens. But Alien has proven over the decades to be the most malleable of franchises, in part because there's so little to be faithful to: a nigh-unstoppable monster, a villainous corporation, and an ass-kicking heroine are the only core requirements, along with the presence of a synthetic humanoid with questionable motives.

The conceptual leap in Hawley's new series Alien: Earth is to combine the latter two. Wendy (Sydney Chandler) is an athletic brunette with a keen survival instinct, hell-bent on protecting those she loves, especially her brother CJ (Alex Lawther), from pressing threats. But she's also a new kind of life form, the human consciousness of a dying child transplanted into a synthetic adult body, courtesy of the Prodigy corporation. In nearly every previous Alien film, the sinister corporation has been Weyland-Yutani, the indistinct but apparently all-powerful company that time and again puts the chance of profiting from the alien's existence above the lives of the humans they sent to capture it. (The one Alien movie to omit Weyland-Yutani is the Joss Whedon–penned Alien: Resurrection , whose special edition reveals that the company has been bought out by Walmart .) In Hawley's series, though, Weyland-Yutani is just one of five massive companies that have carved up every uninhabitable inch of the universe—including the moon and Mars—and now, by the year 2120, rule where governments used to.

The newest of these is Prodigy, the brainchild of one Boy Kavalier (Samuel Blenkin), who is also the world's youngest trillionaire. The “boy genius,” as he is sometimes called, is no longer a boy, but he has the lanky amorality of a tech titan who's convinced that styling himself like a perpetual child obviates him of the need to play by grown-up rules. He gets a juvenile kick out of placing his bare, grimy feet on a conference table during a high-stakes business meeting, and he flits from one thought to the next with the abruptness of a bored toddler. (He also, as the series makes clear long before it makes it explicit, has severe ADHD.)

Never one to understate a point, Hawley gives his boy genius a Peter Pan complex and on obsession with Peter Pan himself. Before Wendy has undergone her consciousness transplant—indeed, before she has even chosen the name to represent her new self—Boy Kavalier shows her footage from the 1953 Disney movie, and he names the other children who subsequently underwent the procedure after other characters from JM Barrie's story: Slightly (Adarsh Gourav), Tootles (Kit Young), Nibs (Lily Newmark), Curly (Erana James), and Smee (Jonathan Ajayi). (There aren't quite enough Lost Boys to accommodate Hawley's extended metaphor.)

It's a bit peculiar that a twentysomething man would use a 167-year-old movie to explain his latest invention to children half his age, but the series as a whole indulgences in what might be called reverse nostalgia. Nearly a century in the future, its characters grow up watching the 2002 animated movie Ice Age and still collect signed Reggie Jackson balls from the 1977 World Series. Given that it's set in a period nearly as far from Mr. October's heyday as 2025 is from the beginning of professional baseball, one has to wonder if so little of note has happened between now and 2120 that children are still conversing in popular culture from before their grandparents were born, but it does underline that, for the first time, the series is taking place in a reality tangibly connected to our own.

Hawley starts Alien: Earth in the most familiar of territories: aboard a spaceship, where the crew of a deep-space research mission is about to make a horrible discovery—guess which—about the alien species they've been sent to collect. (The timeline puts us only two years before the first Alien 's space voyage, which gives the show license to recreate the interior of the Nostromo with uncanny accuracy.) The Maginot 's cargo includes the classic xenomorph, with its slimy carapace and nested sets of jaws, but also a host of new critters, some more well-defined than others. There's one species that looks like a carnivorous plant, one like a basketball-sized mosquito, and another that's both a creepy-crawly bug and a pulsating mass of goo. (Even by the end of the eight-episode season, you get the sense that the show is leaving some of their evolutions to be filled in later as demand requires.) The scariest, and by far the most ingenious, is “the eye,” which looks like a roving eyeball stuck on top of a fast-moving octopus, and has the ability to control its prey's body after it sucks the life out of it.

The Maginot ’s crew is dispensed with in short order—so short, in fact, that you might wonder why the show brought in actors like Fargo ’s Richa Moorjani just to have them fed to the lions before the series is 10 minutes old, and you should keep wondering. But it's all to the end of crash-landing that Weyland-Yutani ship in Prodigy-controlled territory—right into an occupied skyscraper, in fact—which sets in motion two parallel operations: a search-and-rescue mission led by Wendy's brother, who works as a medic in Prodigy's private army, and a retrieval mission featuring Wendy and her fellow hybrids, led by Boy Kavalier's synthetic enforcer, Kirsh (a white-blond Timothy Olyphant, who seems to have told his hair stylist to give him the Rutger Hauer). The series' opening titles, in familiar flickering green-on-black type , inform us of a three-way “race for immortality” between the makers of android synthetics like Kirsh; enhanced cyborgs like Morrow (Babou Ceesay), the Weyland-Yutani enforcer who emerges as the only survivor of the spaceship crash; and “hybrids” like Wendy et al., who combine the best of both. The winner, we're told, will determine no less than “which corporation rules the universe.”