It is one thing to see a tentacled-eyeball alien that consists of even more eyeballs launch out of a cat’s skull, but it is much worse to listen to. When you are squeamish (as I am), people often tell you to cope with that unfortunate fact of life by covering your eyes or looking down (a strategy that left me staring at the ground for a solid 25 minutes of Alex Garland’s Warfare earlier this year). Unfortunately, averting my gaze does very little when it comes to the violence — of which there is plenty — in Alien: Earth, because Alien: Earth is far worse to listen to than it is to look at. And it’s already pretty gnarly to look at.
Meticulous sound design has been inherent to the Alien franchise since its inception: The clicking jaw and sharp talons enrich the nightmarish qualities of the Xenomorph. Would that hulking beast be as scary if we couldn’t hear the drip-drop of its drool as it hovers over its victims? (Yes, but the wetness does enhance the experience, somehow.) Alien: Earth, however, has to up the ante. All of those slurps and clacks and growls and squishes are amplified and enhanced in Noah Hawley’s new FX series to delicious, nightmarish results.
Just as the cast of human (or human-shaped) characters now expands beyond the doomed employees of omnipresent tech company Weyland-Yutani that stands as the corrupted center of the Alien franchise, Alien: Earth features an expanded menagerie of horrible creatures that go squish. The first episode of the show sees the research vessel Maginot — a Weyland-Yutani ship — overrun by Xenomorphs and crashing into a skyscraper in Prodigy (a rival tech company) territory. The corporate intrigue runs below the goopy surface of the show. Most of what the first three episodes deal with is the gory aftermath of this crash. It’s not just that a spaceship has crashed into a building but that all the bugs and critters are now running amok in an otherwise residential space — wreaking havoc on civilians, soldiers, and scientists alike.
The show splits its narrative between two rescue parties: that of Wendy (Sydney Chandler) and her Lost Boys, a group of hybrids who have synthetic bodies but human minds, and the Prodigy Security forces led by Hermit (Alex Lawther). Wendy and the Lost Boys are there to rescue the specimens (e.g., everything that has the capacity to kill in a disgusting and horrible way), and the Prodigy forces are there for human life. The latter group is mostly made up of lambs being led to slaughter: We watch a number of Hermit’s team get picked off one by one, getting impaled, stung, shredded, and drained of all the blood in their bodies. Not once, but twice we’ve seen a creature dragging itself along by its forearms (or front legs), its back half decimated. That these aliens can reduce the human body to sludge is nothing new for the Alien franchise, but Alien: Earth makes certain that we know what this sounds like on both spaceship tile and carpeting alike. When Hermit tries to evacuate an 18th-century-themed costume party, he’s rebuffed by its host. Not long after, we hear what’s left of the man before we see him: a half-torso escaping through a puddle of its own organs. Everything squelches and bursts — it is all meticulously awful.
The violence, however, is nothing compared to the overall creature effects with the show’s new cast of extraterrestrial terrors. The aforementioned eyeball alien buries itself deep into its prey before popping out and skittering along the floor like the world’s loudest spider. There are little bugs that worm their way into any orifice of a body and suck out all the blood, emerging from the body with a pulsating sac of plasma that smacks the ground as it chirps and slithers away. There are dripping cocoons with curious tentacles that click and squish as they crane their necks (or bodies?) to explore. In episode three, a tadpolelike specimen from a facehugger is plopped into a tank with a lung. The little critter swims for a few seconds before disappearing into a crevice with a bloody slurp. It sounds disgusting — as though a vacuum was trying to suck up soup.
The enhanced sound design — relentless and crackling — keeps Alien: Earth from descending into a televised lore dump. Nearly every scene is punctuated by something that sounds terrible — skittering, breaking, or squishing. What Hawley’s show manages to prove with its punishingly wet sounds is how organic its world is. These sounds are terrible because they’re familiar. Maybe we don’t know associate these sounds with, say, a Xenomorph ripping someone limb from limb, but we’ve all heard one (or several) unpleasant wet noises only to be faced with a reality we don’t want to face. But not all sound is bad sound: Wendy finds Hermit stuck to a wall after the Xenomorph grabs him. She tears away at the sticky dried resin restraining him, the resulting sound reminiscent of cracking sticks or crinkly plastic, before the Xenomorph comes back. For a second, the alien appears in the doorway as the two rise to their feet, and then it does something strange — it retreats. The siblings pause, taking in the silence. Where did it go? Once the quiet breaks, the horrors begin again.
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