• by Adam Buckman , Featured Columnist, August 12, 2025

A new sci-fi horror series from FX posits that only 100 years from now, the world will be sectioned off into huge geographical sections each commanded by a giant corporation.

The show depicts a world in the year 2120 in which great exploratory space ships are capable of traveling 100s of millions of miles from Earth to collect specimens of intergalactic life forms and bring them to Earth for study.

One thing the planet did not consider seriously enough: What if one of these ships carrying all sorts of exotic creatures from deep space became disabled and crash-landed into the center of a future mega-city?

This is what occurs in Episode One of “Alien: Earth,” a sensational thriller that starts Tuesday night on FX and Hulu.

In the show, the future civilization of the year 2120 will see its first-ever, self-made tech trillionaire -- a young guy with daring ideas that few others understand, much less believe as he does that his visions can become reality.

The man (actually he appears little older than a boy) is named Boy Kavalier (Samuel Blenkin, above photo). He is CEO of Prodigy Corporation and thus the “CEO” of the region of Earth known as Prodigy.

He is seen reading a version of Peter Pan and has a fondness for the 1951 animated Disney movie version of Alice in Wonderland. 

Continuing the “Peter Pan” theme, one of the show’s major characters is a teen-aged girl named Wendy, who in the stories of J.M. Barrie is Peter Pan’s sister.

In the show, at least one of Boy Kavalier’s dream projects has become real. He has devised a way to save dying children and give them immortality by transforming their diseased bodies into brand-new “hybrid” humans defined on the show as “synthetic beings downloaded with human consciousness.” “Wendy” is one of them.

On the planet Earth of 2120, the hybrids exist alongside cyborgs, “cybernetically enhanced human beings”; synths, which are “artificial intelligence human beings”; and regular humans. Boy Kavalier is one of the latter.

The race for immortality is positioned as the main animating force in the society of 2120. “Which technology prevails will determine what corporation rules the universe,” says some explanatory, on-screen text at the outset of the show.

These paragraphs give a very general outline of what this show is about. But they do not come close to describing the experience of watching this show.

Created by Noah Hawley, “Alien: Earth” is described as loosely based on the “Alien” franchise that started with the feature film “Alien” in 1979. 

The special effects with which the world of 2120 has been created in “Alien: Earth” is breathtaking. 

The quality of design and execution is so high that throughout Episode One, which I previewed on Monday, there were no moments where I became distracted by fakery. 

Instead, I was transported into a future world that seemed all too real. The show seems like a situation in which its production team were handed all the money in the world and they shrewdly spent all of it.

“Alien Earth” premieres Tuesday night starting 8 p.m. Eastern on both FX and Hulu.