‘Alien: Earth’ Is a Creepy, Crawly Wonder

It may be true that in space no one can hear you scream. But on Alien: Earth (FX on Hulu, August 12) we are privy to every screech, squish, and thud—sometimes agonizingly so. Noah Hawley ’s series extension of the Alien franchise —the first of its kind—is a grim, gory, and intermittently fascinating transposing of the usual format. We are no longer lost in space, instead considering a bloody mess in our own backyard.

The series takes place in 2120, when the planet has given up trying to sustain democracy and ceded control over to a handful of megacorporations. Pretty much everyone around the globe is subject to at least one of these sinister entities, toiling under impossible contracts or—in the case of our young heroes—manufactured by them. Sydney Chandler , moony eyed and Amé