Alien Worlds review

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Alien Worlds is, as the name implies, a speculative exploration on how life might evolve on other planets. This marks the welcome return of speculative biology documentaries, long after the era of The Future is Wild and Dragons: A Fantasy Made Real. Other documentaries based on this premise, Alien Planet and Extraterrestrial, also stem from the 2000’s, making this series in particular quite nostalgic. But is it a return to form?

Overall, Alien Worlds is a step up from its predecessors in a myriad of ways. The CGI is obviously fantasic, and the scenes where real life science is used to explain the principles behind the creative decisions are much more engaging, showing people interacting with animals or equipment instead of simply talking on a grey room. The array of experts is much wider too, from biologists to astrophysicists to a Hadza honey gatherer. As we will soon see, I think the actual alien concepts are pretty creative as well.

But the series does have quite a few problems. For one thing, unlike its predecessors where most of the screentime was devoted to the fictional worlds being explored, the vast majority of the series is given to the infodump. In fact, the alien worlds themselves seldomly make up more than 40% of the run time in some episodes, the most irritating example being episode 3 where one infodump scene is followed by another in the span of a few minutes. To make matters worst, there’s several instances of repeated animation, which normally wouldn’t be a problem but when you get to see a world for a few moments at a time it becomes impossible to fully immerse in it. Again, the most outrageous example is episode 3, where there are a barely minimum of six animated sequences, which if not for the immense infodumps would be on constant loop.

Budget is the obvious culprit here, the unfortunate price to pay for a concept that might seem risqué from a production standpoint. Its a shame it came to this however, because the worlds genuinely are creative and they should be explored further.

I feel like a 7/10 is a fair judgement here.

Now, unto the alien worlds themselves.

Atlas

The first episode already reveals a deeply creative premise. Most alien biology projects have at least one sky world with a highly dense atmosphere and a high gravity world where everything is stout. Alien Worlds goes “por que no los dos”, giving us a world where high gravity resulted in a dense atmosphere, making the world where you wouldn’t be able to get up the one dominated by flying organisms capable of exploiting the almost liquid-like air.

“Plants” fill the atmosphere with seeds, serving as phytoplantkon for the aptly named skygrazers. Filling the usual skywhale archetype, they do a decent enough job of being alien organisms that just coincidently happen to resemble tetrapods, combining sea turtle and slug like features with six wings. They spend most of their lives on the wing, landing only to give birth and dying in the process, the adults seemingly incapable of launching back into the air. Personally I find this a bit unnecessary, since while there are animals in which the mother dies when giving birth it just seems odd given that these things have many predators as we will see.

One of said predators is an unnamed flying organism that baloons itself with bacteria-produced gases, then deflates and swoops on its prey like a peregrine falcon. They remind me of Extraterrestrial‘s Stalkers, but they are a pretty creative design that’s honestly hard to describe, though I suppose “hawk tick with nightmare mouth” suffices.

The final organism shown is the “boneless scavenger” a nightmarish blob of penile appendages that swallows anything it comes across, such as young skygrazers that still haven’t launched. Basically like a land starfish, except not cute in the slightest. In a twist, the episode ends with an implied mass extinction (in a high gravity planet, asteroid impacts are a more common occurrence), meaning that these abominations will outlive the flying organisms, hopefully diversifying into less grotesque forms in the future.

Janus

The tidal locked world was a concept previously explored in Extraterrestrial, but I think its done better here, where both the light and dark ides of the planet are explored. This episode only really has three species, the pentapods and the unnamed “bugs” they eat, but it makes up for the sheer dedication to the pentapod’s biology.

The pentapod is essentially a terrestrial echinoderm, having a five fold symmetry but being active and agile, a combination that its pretty rarely explored (bilateral organisms are the norm in pretty much all speculative evolution projects to this day) and thus a breath of fresh air. Pentapods constitute a single species that has spread throught the entire planet; when they breed, their larvae are scattered by the wind, thus they are just as likely to end up in the dark side as well as in the light side, and thus they develop as suited.

In the light side they are elegant and skittish, sticking to the shadows and probing holes with their tentacles. We see one feeding on “bugs”, only for the tables to be turned and the “bugs” swarm and kill it.

In the dark side they are instead stocky and wooly. They feed on bioluminescent bugs that feed on microorganisms in thermal vents, and absorb their prey’s bioluminescence to lure them into their mouths.

The ones stuck in the twilight zone are boring and just eat leaves.

Eden

Episode 3 was my least favourite due to the aforementioned repeated animation and infodump, which is a shame because it shows a very vibrant world. The titular Eden orbits twin stars, and as such has a higher amount of energy, allowing for a more complex environment. In theory anyway, since we only see three species if you don’t count the “plants”. Damn budget.

The first species are the grazers, my favourite design in the whole series. They are the pinnacle alien “animal”: superficially resembling rabbits, they are already very weird once you zoom in (moth-like antenna instead of ears, jawless mouth that opens vertically), they get even weirder when you get into their reproductive biology. They reproduce by dettaching their gonads, which move around like worms until they find another one; then they fuse into a porous womb that then ejects tentacles and holds on to the “tree” canopy, where it gestates the fetuses during the winter months. Chef’s kiss.

The predators – seen in the cover – are by contrast by least favourite deisgn. They’re basically just lemurs with extra arms. For a series with so much infodump you’d assume they’d throw in something about convergent evolution, but not even that.

The “fungus” is alright. The main food source for the grazers, it inevitably infects them, destroying their fear instincts and allowing the predators to feed on them, only to in turn infect the predators and sprout from their corpses. Basically just an extra Cordiceps, eh.

Terra

This final episode deals with sapient life. In a dying world, a sapient species achieved singularity and lives as brains in tubes (shown as ominous shades within opaque glass, pretty neat), everything operated by A.I.. Their world’s sun goes berserk, so they decided to leave their world and colonise an ice planet. That’s it.

I do enjoy this episode on two principles. One is just seeing the application of technologies like the Dyson Sphere, which almost never gets seen onscreen. The second is the end message, which I won’t spoil but is very sweet and inspiring.

Final Thoughts

Apparently a second season is in the works. Fix the aforementioned issues and this becomes a true beacon of hope.