Alien: Earth renewed for Season 2, which is a great opportunity to make up for the disappointing end of Season 1
Alien: Earth, the FX prequel series about an alien from Alien (plus a bunch more different kinds of aliens) crash-landing on terra firma, has been picked up for a second season, per Variety. That's good news for two reasons: I enjoyed the first season (except for one part) and the final episode didn't really do much except set up a second season (that's the part).
The series started out great. It gave the stale and yet seemingly never-ending Alien saga something it really needed: a kick in the butt. Instead of just one Alien, it gave us a bunch of different types of aliens, including a weird eyeball creature that is both horrifying and yet kinda cuddly? Instead of a single android, standard for Alien movies, it also featured a cyborg and several synthetic people with human minds transplanted into them.
And instead of a xenomorph slowly picking off people one by one from the shadows, this big alien boi was just right out there in broad daylight, mass-murdering entire groups of people in mere seconds like a buzzsaw. Alien: Earth was pretty silly, but I liked the anything goes approach of throwing everything at the wall and seeing what slithers.
But as the first season concluded it ran into problems. In a movie you can gruesomely whittle down the cast to just one or two survivors, but on a show that plans on more seasons? You can't really do that. You've got Timothy Olyphant with bleach blond eyebrows—you're telling me you're gonna kill him off in Season 1? In this economy? No way. So, encounters between foes that would end in a conclusive death in a movie would instead end with both characters walking away, even when it didn't make a lick of sense. I think they call that "plot armor."
Alien: Earth was also hampered by the fact that it's a prequel. In the show, the xenomorph eventually escapes the facility and is loose on the island. Uh-oh! Is the earth doomed? Well, no: Earth can't be doomed because the film Alien hasn't happened yet. So, the escaped xenomorph winds right back inside the facility again in the next episode. Things can't really escalate properly when you're constrained by an established timeline.
As for the final episode of Season 1, it was just straight-up disappointing. I actually had to check that it was in fact the final episode of the season, that's how surprised I was at how little was concluded. "Wait, that's it? That's the ending?" It was as if Hercule Poirot had gathered all his suspects in one room and then decided he was gonna make everyone wait a year (or more) to reveal the killer. In other words: booooo.
So, it's good that the show will continue and hopefully it's got enough gas for a fun second season. And when the second season ends, let's try to actually write a proper ending for it this time, eh?
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