Hugin & Munin Journal

A swarm without a face is hard to fight. It has no throne room, final duel or villainous speech before the last battle. It moves through bodies, signals, appetite, reproduction or shared thought. Killing one creature may change almost nothing because the thing making decisions—or simply continuing—exists elsewhere. Stories often solve this difficulty by giving the swarm a queen. Sometimes she is literal: the egg-laying Alien Queen at the centre of a nest. Sometimes she is a central intelligence such as the Borg Queen, an Overmind, a brain bug or a master signal. Whatever her form, she performs similar narrative work. The swarm receives a face, a voice, a woundable body and somewhere for intention and blame to gather. This is dramatically useful. It is also a retreat from what makes the collective strange. A genuinely distributed enemy may have no king to kill, no tyrant to overthrow and no single mind whose defeat repairs the world. The queen makes the swarm resemble a monarchy...

The Alien franchise has always worked through contrast. Its futures are cold, industrial and procedural; its horror is wet, physical and intimate. The original film did not frighten only because of the creature. The Nostromo had ranks, routines, machinery and material limits, so every violation entered a world solid enough to resist it. Alien: Earth understands that surface exceptionally well. It knows the weight of retro-futurist controls, the sterility of corporate laboratories and the unease produced by artificial people who are never as emotionally simple as their makers expect. It also brings several promising ideas into the franchise: child minds housed in synthetic bodies, a wider alien ecology and a planet where corporations exercise powers once associated with states. The problem is not a shortage of ambition. It is that the season’s ideas, institutions and character decisions do not consistently reinforce one another. Scenes often look as though they belong in Alien be...