Michael Fassbender's Alien Android Finds His Match In Hulu's 8-Part Sci-Fi Series

Ridley Scott’s unfinished Alien prequel trilogy was a point of polarization for the fan base. Whereas everyone can agree that Alien and Aliens are masterpieces, and everyone can agree the Alien vs. Predator movies are garbage, there are wildly differing opinions on Prometheus and Alien: Covenant. There’s the camp that doesn’t think Alien needed a prequel, and that explaining the xenomorphs’ origins lessens their impact as a cinematic terror. It’s much scarier to imagine that this bloodthirsty killing machine is just out there in the cosmos, looking for lifeforms to eviscerate, than it is to learn that they were specifically engineered to be humanity’s worst enemy.

But there’s also the camp that thinks those movies are underappreciated gems. Prometheus pulled the James Cameron trick of switching genres — where Aliens switched from horror to action, Prometheus goes all-in on heavy, existential, epic sci-fi, with Biblical allegories galore — but not everyone wanted to see a big, pseudo-religious sci-fi epic; they just wanted to see gore, body horror, and action spectacle. Prometheus delivers that, too, but only in small doses (there’s an abortion scene that’s almost as horrifying as the chestburster from the 1979 original).

With Alien: Covenant, Scott reluctantly went back to the safer, more predictable haunted-house-in-space formula, while continuing his prequel storylines and larger worldbuilding. The movie doesn’t really come together as a whole, but it has some really terrifying isolated sequences that make it worthwhile, and it ends on a truly chilling cliffhanger. And that brings us to the best part of those Alien prequels: Michael Fassbender’s evil android, David.

David Is One Of Alien's Greatest Characters

Along with Ripley, Newt, Hicks, and Alien: Romulus’ Andy, David is one of the greatest characters in the Alien franchise. He’s a complexly written philosophical exploration of the upsides and downsides of artificial intelligence, brought to life with haunting precision by one of the world’s finest actors.

Androids who turn out to have a dark ulterior motive have been a common trope in the Alien franchise since the very beginning, when Ian Holm’s Ash was ready and willing to harvest his crewmates to serve the almighty company. But Fassbender took that archetype to another level. We’d seen a pure evil android in Ash, and a benevolent android in Lance Henriksen’s Bishop, but David is pitched somewhere in the middle. He’s not an outright sociopath — there is a tiny sliver of humanity and reason in there somewhere — but his prime directives take him down a dark path.

Fassbender plays the part perfectly. Whenever David is trying to figure someone out, Fassbender has this uncanny ability to make his eyes look vacant and ambiguous, so they can’t figure him out as he’s trying to figure them out. It’s very impressive, and his performance only got more impressive in Covenant, where he played a mirror image of himself as the much kinder android Walter.

Alien: Earth's Kirsh Would've Sussed Out David In 20 Minutes

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Scott never got to finish his Alien prequel trilogy (at least not yet), but David had emerged as the mastermind by the end of Covenant. He’d tricked his crewmates into thinking he was their friend, Walter, so he could get them into cryostasis and continue his xenomorph experiments unimpeded. But since then, an even smarter android has joined the sprawling ensemble of the Alien universe. Alien: Earth brought the Alien franchise to the small screen — and, as its title suggests, finally brought it to Earth — with an eight-episode first season on Hulu.

The show was a bit hit-and-miss, but Timothy Olyphant was the clear standout as Alien’s latest android character, Kirsh. Kirsh is shown to be so cunning — so many steps ahead of everyone else — that I bet he would’ve clocked David’s nefarious intentions within 20 minutes of Prometheus.