Ep. 77 - 'Alien: Earth' Is a Bold, Exciting Direction for the Franchise (with Matt Goldberg)

Decoding TV

David Chen

Tv & Film, Unknown, Netflix, Tv, Television, Streaming, Recap, Hulu, Fx, Hbo, Max

4.6 • 2K Ratings

🗓️ 13 August 2025

⏱️ 60 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

In this episode of the Decoding TV podcast, David and Matt Goldberg discuss what we think of the Alien franchise is at this point in popular culture. Then, we review and recap the first two episodes of Alien: Earth on FX/Hulu.

What did we think of the bold new premise for the show? Does it look like they spent $250 million to bring this to life? (Yes). What did we make of the fact that the show splits its attention between two major plotlines? And what about all the information that’s revealed about the main characters in the first two episodes? Listen to hear us discuss all these questions and more.

Be sure to check out Matt’s written review for Decoding TV.

Homework for next week:

Alien: Earth Episode 3 (FX/Hulu)

Shownotes:

01:30 - What we think of the state of the Alien franchise
15:00 - Alien: Earth
Episode 1 - Neverland
Episode 2 - Mr. October

Links:

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Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	Hello everyone and welcome to Decoding TV, a podcast about television.
0:04.9	I'm David Chen and Patrick Kleppick is away on vacation this week,
0:09.5	but he will be back for next week's episode of the podcast.
0:12.7	I'm really looking forward to him catching up with Alien Earth.
0:15.1	I know he's been really excited about this one.
0:18.1	But we have a very able replacement for him today. Matt Goldberg is the author of
0:24.1	the commentary track newsletter. You can also read his writing over at my newsletter, Decoding Everything.com,
0:29.4	and he's also writing weekly recaps and reviews of Alien Earth for Decoding TV. Subscribe at
0:36.4	decodingTV.com for free, Matt Goldberg. Thanks for chatting
0:40.4	with me today. Always a pleasure. What we're going to do today, we usually have a little TV news
0:46.0	segment at the top of the show. We're not going to do that because we have a lot of alien to cover.
0:50.0	We've got two hours of Alien Earth. But first, what we're going to do is talk about where we feel the alien franchise is right now. Then we're going to play the trailer for Alien Earth, and then we're going to get into the TV show. So we're going to, we're starting by talking about, like, all the alien films that have come out recently and where we think Alien stands, the popular imagination. There will be some minor spoilers for Alien Romulus, which just came out.
1:13.0	I do want to let people know about that.
1:14.5	But otherwise, we'll talk about the Alien films, and then we're going to get to Alien Earth.
1:19.3	So let's get into it.
1:21.0	Alien Earth takes place in 2120, which is two years before the initial Ridley Scott Alien film,
1:26.3	but about 20 to 30 years after the events
1:29.3	of Prometheus and Alien Covenant. We of course also recently saw the release of Alien Romulus,
1:35.7	which takes place 20 years after the events of the first Ridley Scott Alien film. You talked a little
1:41.1	bit about this in your recap of the first couple Alien Earth episodes over at DeCoenix TV.com, which I'd strongly recommend people to check out.
1:49.3	But what do you think of where the Alien series is these days?
1:52.6	When you think of Alien, what are the word cloud associations that come to mind for you?
	...

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