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The minute you hear that there's a new TV spinoff of the Alien movie franchise, you think you know what to expect.

Facehuggers, chest bursters, dark metal corridors, lots of space mucus, etc.

And to be fair, alien Earth has plenty of all that stuff.

But as the title suggests, the series brings the alien

to our planet, along with a host of other creepy-crawley off-world species, and has them

tangled with humans, human cyborgs, synthetics, and something new. It all comes from the

idiosyncratic mind of Noah Hawley, who made the series Legion and Fargo, two shows we kind of loved around here. I'm Glenn Weldon, and we're talking about Alien Earth. This is Pop Culture Happy Hour from NPR. Joining me today is filmmaker, Pop Culture Critic and I Heart Radio producer Joelle Monique. Juel, welcome back. Hi, Glenn. Thanks for having me back. Of course, and also with us as writer Chris always has a bit clemock, hey Chris? Hey, Glenn, you know, Joel and I were talking before we got going, and we think we'd like to discuss the bonus situation before we go any further. There we go. It's a pull. That's a deep pull. There are lots of characters and storylines on alien Earth, but here's the basics.

It's the year 2120. Earth is divided between five corporations. A spaceship belonging to one of

those corporations, Wayland Utani, you've heard of them, crashes into territory belonging to another

corporation called Prodigy. That's a big deal, because the ship was collecting alien specimens that are now

running or crawling or oozing free, specimens including but not limited to the xenomorph species

we first met in Ridley Scott's original alien movie. Prodigy is led by a smug and smarmy boy

genius named Boy Cavalier, played by Samuel Blinken, who sends a team to retrieve

the monsters, but these aren't just any soldiers. They're the next step in human evolution.

Humans who've had their consciousness uploaded to artificial bodies. They're called hybrids.

And the thing is, their consciousnesses originally belonged to a bunch of kids, because only

children's brains are fluid

enough to survive the transfer process. What could possibly go wrong? They are led by Wendy,

played by Sidney Chandler. Timothy Oliphon is on hand as a synthetic, which is to say an

android named Kirsch, who oversees the hybrids for prodigy, and there's a cyborg named Morrow,

...