ALIEN: EARTH SEASON TWO IS IN THE WORKS

ALIEN: EARTH (2025) is now filming its second season. New cast members include comedienne-singer Tracey Ullman, former Bronn actor Jerome Flynn, Sam Spruell of Fargo and Peter Dinklage, the humorless fool who considers himself the official spokesperson of all people under a certain height. 

Set in the year 2120 – two years before the events of the very first Alien film – Alien: Earth was not my kind of show. Most of what I disliked about the streaming series could have been negated just by instead setting it after the events of Aliens. 

REASON ONE: Setting the story before Alien (1979) devalues Ellen Ripley and her crew. Alien: Covenant already made it so they are no longer even the first Earthlings to encounter Xenomorphs and find remains of Engineers/ Space Jockeys.

      Alien: Earth compounded that by further cementing it into the canon AND made Ripley and company look like inept losers who couldn’t even handle one Xenomorph years after corporations like Weyland-Yutani had successfully captured MULTIPLE alien species – including Xenomorphs – from around the universe and brought them to Earth.   

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REASON TWO: If, as I would have preferred, they had set Alien: Earth AFTER the second movie, Aliens (1986) it would have explained how Weyland-Yutani somehow had advanced space travel technology which – as the show states over and over – enabled them to reach the darkest corners of the universe and not only catalogue but capture specimens of what they called some of the deadliest species in existence.

      Also, since the events of Aliens would have supported Ripley’s claims about hostile life-forms on LV-426 it would have motivated the corporation to scour the universe for other alien species that their bio-weapons division could exploit. It is wildly out of place the way Alien: Earth depicts human technology being able to travel the entire universe, explore it well enough to capture and bring back LIVING species before the limited space tech available in the first Alien movie.   

REASON THREE: The synths and hybrids in Alien: Earth are so much more powerful and capable even than Bishop in Aliens that once again we see that setting the streaming series after that second Alien film would have explained the more advanced technology.

REASON FOUR: Setting Alien: Earth before the events of 2122 (in Alien) needlessly limits what can happen in the streaming series. Season One had to keep all of the alien species confined in a compound on an island. Season Two will also be limited in where the aliens can go.

      After all, if the Xenomorphs or any of the other deadly creatures made it off the island and attacked cities it would have made them somewhat known. That would have prevented the Weyland-Yutani executives from simply dismissing Ripley’s claims of her crew’s fate as they did in Aliens (1986).

      Instead, Alien: Earth lacks any tension regarding potential breakouts by the outer space creatures in captivity. IF, instead, the series was set AFTER Aliens, almost anything could happen. Xenomorphs or some of the other extraterrestrial menaces could even overrun parts of the Earth while humans struggle to contain them. Now THAT would genuinely take the franchise where no big or small screen projects ever did before. But we know in advance that can’t happen in the 2120s.

P.S. One last complaint about how recent productions have devalued Ellen Ripley – Alien: Romulus established that Ripley didn’t even succeed in killing the alien which wiped out her crew. Instead, it just hibernated until being discovered again. So much for Ellen’s badass cred.