The Xenomorph is spending this summer on Earth, and humanity will be hard-pressed to make it out alive. Today, FX and Hulu unveiled the first proper trailer for Alien: Earth, the new Alien prequel series from the mind of Noah Hawley. Hawley already has one successful television revival of a popular movie under his belt with Fargo; can he pull off a similar trick with Alien: Earth?
Time will tell. For now, we can finally watch our first footage from the television show and start to get a sense of what it's about and how it will feel. Check it out, then we'll discuss:
Wendy is a new kind of synthetic being in Alien: Earth
This trailer gives us a ton of new information about Alien: Earth, as well as better looks at some things we already knew. The show takes place in the year 2120, two years before the original 1979 movie starring Sigourney Weaver. A ship carrying dangerous cargo crash lands in Prodigy City, a gorgeous futuristic city that no doubt has some serious societal issues, thanks to the fact that Earth is ruled by five megacorporations.
The dangerous cargo being carried by that ship is five deadly alien beings, harvested from the darkest corners of the galaxy. Obviously, one of them is a Xenomorph. In this trailer, we see each phase of the alien's development, so there will be eggs, there will be spidery embyro-implanting facehuggers, and of course, there will be the monstrous, chitinous creature we all know and love. I'm very curious about the other four creatures; we get very brief flashes of a few of them. One seems to be some kind of jellyfish? I'm intrigued!
This trailer also tells us more about Wendy and her team, who will be going into Prodigy City to recover the ship's cargo. Wendy (Sydney Chandler) is a synthetic hybrid, the first of her kind. It looks like the original Wendy was a young girl dying of a disease, who had her consciousness transplanted into a synthetic body. We knew Wendy is a hybrid, but I was surprised by the trailer's revelation that the rest of her team is, too.
We also get plenty of other glimpses at different characters, including Timothy Olyphant's Kirsh and the tech mogul Boy Kavalier, played by Black Mirror's Samuel Blenkin. Kavalier is the one sending Wendy and her teammates on this dangerous mission in the show, but it seems like he may also have been the father of the original Wendy. There are going to be some complicated emotions in the mix.
In addition to Chandler, Olyphant and Blenkin, Alien: Earth stars Alex Lawther (Hermit), Babou Ceesay (Morrow), Adrian Edmondson (Atom Eins), David Rysdahl (Arthur Sylvia), Essie Davis (Dame Sylvia), Lily Newmark (Nibs), Erana James (Curly), Adarsh Gourav (Slightly), Jonathan Ajayi (Smee), Kit Young (Tootles), Diêm Camille (Siberian), Moe Bar-El (Rashidi), and Sandra Yi Sencindiver as Yutani.
Alien: Earth's first season will run for eight episodes. The first two episodes premiere Tuesday, August 12 at 8:00 p.m. ET on Hulu and 8:00 p.m. ET/PT on FX, with new episodes slated to follow weekly.
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