All You Need to Know About Alien: Earth

Have you been missing some thrill in life lately? It seems to you that flaky plotlines and reboots are no longer serving the very thing they are supposed? Entertain? How about you put faith in aliens?

Alien: Earth is dark, intense, and strangely emotional and it might just be the coolest sci-fi series of the year. Created by Noah Hawley creator of Fargo and Legion fame, it’s the first time the iconic Alien franchise comes to television. But don’t worry, even if you’ve never seen a single Alien movie before, this one stands on its own.

The show is set in the year 2120, and the world has changed in all the worst ways. Mega-corporations now control just about everything, and one of them is a shady tech giant called Prodigy who thinks it’s found the key to immortality. The synopsis? Transfer the minds of dying children into synthetic, adult robot bodies. Sounds dystopian? It is. And it only gets stranger from there.

Our main character is Wendy, a 12-year-old girl with a terminal illness who becomes the first of these hybrid beings. Her brain is copied into a perfect adult replica, and she wakes up with new powers, a new body, and a whole lot of questions. She's part child, part machine, and fully caught in something much bigger than herself.

She’s soon joined by a squad of other hybrid kids, umm... also in adult bodies and all of them are raised on a private island where their tech-billionaire creator reads them Peter Pan stories over loudspeakers. Yes, really.

But how can you leave aliens out of this conversation!

When a rival corporation’s spaceship crashes into one of Prodigy’s towers, a dangerous cargo gets released, one with deadly alien creatures that fans of the franchise will instantly recognise. For everyone else: they’re terrifying, sharp-toothed nightmares that kill on sight. What follows is a mix batch of survival horror, corporate thriller, and coming-of-age tragedy and it’s unlike anything else on TV right now.

One of the show’s biggest surprises is Adarsh Gourav — the breakout star of The White Tiger — who plays a hybrid named Slightly. His character, originally a boy from Mumbai, brings warmth, humour, and depth to a role that could’ve easily been one-note. Adarsh's performance is subtle but memorable, and it’s clear he’s bringing Indian storytelling sensibility to a global production.

But Alien: Earth isn’t just about jump scares or sci-fi jargon. It revolves around the ethical messes we create in the name of progress. Can we really live forever? Should we? What happens when children are turned into machines? And what does it mean to be human, anyway? Heavy questions, but Hawley handles them with just the right balance of drama and spectacle.

Adarsh Gourav at the premiere of Alien Earth recentlyIMDB

Visually, the show is stunning thanks to all the futuristic labs, neon-lit cities, and of course the aliens that look like they came straight from a designer's nightmare. The tension builds slowly, but when things go wrong, they go very, very wrong.

For first-time Alien viewers, there’s no need to watch the original films to enjoy this one. Alien: Earth acts as a prequel, set before any of the movies take place. It gives just enough background to keep things interesting, while creating its own self-contained story.

With only eight episodes in its first season, Alien: Earth is a quick but gripping watch. It's streaming weekly on JioCinema in India with new episodes dropping every Tuesday until late September.

So whether you're a longtime sci-fi lover or just someone looking for something bold and different, this series is worth diving into. Just don’t get too attached to any of the characters, you never know what’s lurking around the corner.