Alien: Earth Showcases the Dangerous Quest for Immortality

FX and Hulu’s Alien: Earth is just about ready to show up. The prequel series has a premiere date of August 12, 2025, and the streaming services have shared one last trailer (along with a more complete synopsis) ahead of that date. The footage is exactly what fans of the franchise will want and expect; it’s eerie, it’s methodical, and it builds big, oppressive dread. There are some tantalizingly spiritual, meditative moments, even, with that almost existential vibe to the proceedings, before Hawley breaks into the more traditional sci-fi/horror beats: strange alien ships gliding through the void, corpses piled in shadowy passageways, a faceless human covered in gore sprinting through halls, and, then, in the distance, the unmistakable, stylized shoulder and tail of a xenomorph skulking just outside of the light.

The series’s showrunner, Noah Hawley, has already noted that the tone and mythology of Alien: Earth will hew closer to 1979’s Alien, Ridley Scott’s original in the series, than to previous prequels Prometheus (2012) or Alien: Covenant, and that’s what’s on display here.

The eight-episode series is set in 2120 (two years before the events of Alien) in a near-future world where corporations have a firm grip on the world’s imagination and power. Humanity is eager to find the one key that could allow for eternal life, maybe even immortality.

Hybrids and New Threats to Humanity

In Alien: Earth, on Earth, 2120 is not really the domain of governments but that of five huge mega-corporations: Prodigy, Weyland-Yutani, Lynch, Dynamic, and Threshold. In the show’s timeline, 2120 is the Corporate Era. Humanity has long since learned to modify itself into machines. Cyborgs, humans with artificial and biological parts, operate alongside synthetics, humanoid robots designed with artificial intelligence. But humans are about to get a run for their hard-earned money.

The teenage Founder and CEO of one of those mega-corporations, Prodigy, has been a genius in the making since he was a child. He’s developed a new technology, hybrids, humanoid robots that are endowed with actual human consciousness.

The first of these prototypes is a cyborg called “Wendy,” the beautiful and mysterious star of the show. Wendy, played by Sydney Chandler, has “the body of an adult and the consciousness of a child.”

Timothy Olyphant is Kirsh, Wendy’s synthetic trainer and mentor. Alex Lawther is CJ, a soldier. Samuel Blenkin is Boy Kavalier, a calculating CEO. Essie Davis is Dame Silvia. Adarsh Gourav is Slightly. Kit Young is Tootles. David Rysdahl is Arthur. Babou Ceesay is Morrow. Jonathan Ajayi is Smee. Erana James is Curly. Lily Newmark is Nibs. Diem Camille is Siberian. Adrian Edmondson is Atom Eins.

Before the trailer, there was a teaser, which was its little bonanza of excitement. FX and Hulu had sprung it on fans in January when they dropped the teaser on the NFL’s AFC Championship game. This first video was a point-of-view shot from the perspective of a xenomorph speeding down a corridor of a spaceship that was at some point on a crash course to Earth. No context is given, but it’s fun.

Last month, they released the first trailer that, again, had a few of these callbacks to the old Alien movies as well as a bigger reveal of the story. The trailer opens with Wendy’s creation in the year 2120 on Neverland Research Island. When a mysterious alien spacecraft crashes on the nearby island, Wendy offers to go out and see what she can find. It would have been a scientific opportunity, except that, upon entering the spacecraft, what she finds is not a discovery but pure carnage. The ship was carrying five unknown and dead alien life forms, the only survivors from the crash that were, we know, still terrifying beyond comprehension. True to Alien form, those corpses are then taken into the lab to see what research can be extracted.

The worst, it turns out, is yet to come, as a Weyland-Yutani spaceship would come to crash-land on Prodigy City, and in the immediate aftermath of the crash, Wendy and other hybrids will encounter unknown alien organisms, creatures far deadlier and terrifying than anyone on Earth could have anticipated.

Check out the full trailer for Alien: Earth below.