'Alien: Earth' is one of the best shows of the year: NPR

FXS new series Alien: earth Starts with a scene that is known to all fans of the famous science fiction horror film franchise franchise company: a crew with a dysfunctional, exhausting worker who wake up from an extensive hibernation in a spacious spaceship.

In this case it is 2120 – two years before Ridley Scott's classic film from 1979 Foreigner And about 60 years before the time in James Cameron's continuation of 1986 Aliens. The USCSS Maginot crew works for Weyland-Yutani, the same company that has conducted everything in these earlier films.

And it becomes obvious that showrunner Noah Hawley – who also mastered FXS TV adaptation of Fargo – has developed a program that is at least partially a loving recall of the best elements of the original two films, especially among the best elements Foreigner.

The area in which the Maginot crew gathered is similar to the dining room, in which a foreign Xenomorph exploded in the first film from John Hurts Breast. And the worn -out futuristic appearance of the spaceship in Alien: earth Corresponds well with the vision of the 1970s of the future, which is presented in Scott's film.

It turned out that the Maginot crew was a 65-year-old mission for Weyland-Yutani-one of five companies that lead the earth a variety of terrible strangers from the deep space. And if your ship inevitably crashes malfunctions and you crash in an area of another company called Prodigy, the creepy extraterrestrials get out of their cages and screaming begins.

All companies strive to offer vital services through various technologies. There are cyborgs – people with artificial parts – alongside synthesizers who are completely artificial people, like Ian Holm's character Ash from the original Foreigner Film.

Prodigy is checked by a young trillionaire, the young cavalier (Samuel Blenkin), who like a cross between a barefoot -mark Zuckerberg and Dr. Frankenstein behaves. And its company has developed the technology to create a third form – hybrid – by using human consciousness in superior, synthetic bodies. They start to bring sick children to adult bodies – young heads can better manage the transition – and creates a small squad of physically superior hybrid characters with their minds of inexperienced young people. These hybrids do not age and theoretically do not die.

It is a large stew different plot lines that offers Hawley a lot of space to play. One of the backbone ideas of the Foreigner Especially early on, the franchise revolves around the concept of humanity, which undresses through its own arrogance and ambition – so sure that it can use and control the natural forces that ultimately get to destroy everything. (Sounds worrying like the conversations that we live in real life about artificial intelligence.)

Here Hawley brings these ideas together in an interesting way: When the maginot plunges into an area of the earth controlled by miracle cure, the hybrid children are sent in to correction the creatures that were originally captured by the ship crew. Aliens from nature and creations of human technology meet in a volatile situation.

The children are managed and looked after by a synthetic person named Kirsh, who is played by Timothy Olyphant with creepy precision. In the Foreigner Franchise, the artificial people often bring creepy contempt for their human masters, and Olyphant delivers a particularly strange treatise on the nature of humanity.

“They used to be food … they built tools and used them to conquer nature. They said they were no longer eating.

Um, yes. Looks like Kirsh, with his spiky blond hair and its distant manner that has inherited a bit of this human arrogance mentioned above.

All of this adds up to one of the best television programs of the year. I saw the first two Foreigner Cinemas in the cinemas decades ago, enthusiastic about the tension and tension that Scott and Cameron cultivated in their work. Hawley is reminiscent of the same feelings that extended over eight bombastic episodes, such as the characters – and the spectators – more about these aliens and all their terrible ways to fall down.

And many of the classic topics of the franchise met: a modern world that is corrupt by the use of average people. The question of whether technological progress is used or should replace them. The way in which fatal threats can reveal the core of a person – are they smart, imaginative or persistent enough to stay alive, even if the universe throws its worst?

Since the Foreigner Franchise includes a lot of stories. Why, for example, we didn't see hybrid people Foreigner Films before? And why did people have early Foreigner Point films as if they have never heard of the Xenomorphs when Hawley's series shows that they ended up on Earth years before the first film's events?

The Science Fiction -Geek hopes that these are questions that Hawley can answer in the following seasons Alien: earthThat manages the happy performance of offering a story that feels new, building on the past and offers many tempting opportunities for the future.