The gloriously horrific monsters are classic nightmare fuel in this incredibly confident new take on Ridley Scott’s movie franchise. We haven’t seen a trail of bodies like this in yearsIt’s usually a bad sign if you’re wondering what the heck is going on in a drama when you’re two episodes in, but there is an exception: you can happily ride on if you sense that, although you don’t know what it’s doing, the show definitely does. Such is the bristling, bewildering, overpoweringly confident aura of Alien: Earth, a new TV take on cinema’s greatest sci-fi horror franchise by writer-director Noah Hawley of Fargo fame.We are in the year 2120, just the right setting for a show that plays on our fears that our grandchildren and great-grandchildren are going to live in hell. Simple green-on-black text, styled like a computer readout from the 80s, informs us that, in this broken future, corporations have taken over the universe, and which one achieves total domination will be determined by which of three technologies wins a “race for immortality”: cyborgs (enhanced humans), synths (wholly artificial beings) or hybrids (synthetic bodies with human consciousnesses implanted). Continue reading...