There's plenty to like in Noah Hawley's prequel/reboot/spin-off to the Alien franchise, not least the terrific leading performances from Sydney Chandler, Timothy Olyphant, and Babou Ceesay. But as good as they are, they can't save this first season (eight episodes in total) from its poor pacing and frustratingly incoherent tone.

The story takes place some years before the first Alien film, which itself is a can of worms the franchise has already toyed with before. Where the original trilogy was a relatively consistent and tragically poignant story of capitalist greed ruining the lives of everything it touches, the mythology has long since run wild to the point that nothing matters. Like Star Wars, everything circles right back around to Ripley and the same three plot devices.

Here, we begin with another Weyland-Yutani ship returning from a long voyage into the unknown. They're hauling Xenomorphs back to Earth for study, which immediately eats away at the terror of the original films. It's not enough that everyone already knew about the aliens; they've already been on Earth all this time.

Speaking of which, Earth is a Blade Runner -style dystopia, controlled by three major megacorporations, thinly disguised in their satire. One, Prodigy Corporation, is run by a manchild called Boy Kavalier (Samuel Blenkin), who is on the verge of creating Hybrids – androids with human consciousness. For that, he needs dying children, signed away by their parents with the vague promise of eternal life.

One of these kids is Wendy (Chandler), who watches the animated Disney classic Peter Pan as she says goodbye to her dying original self. All the other kids are named in the same way, leading to a tiresome Lost Boys trope with adults playing children to justify the numerous bad choices the narrative needs to spin. It's not quite an Idiot Plot, but it flirts with one.

Wendy's guide, Kirsh (Olyphant) is a synth; a genuine robot like Ian Holm in the original Alien. Olyphant plays him with a bemused detachment, like he knows just how far beyond he is compared to his masters. It's a fantastic performance, especially when Olyphant chews the scenery as an exasparated step-father to Wendy. Sadly, he gets very little to do beyond that, and we don't even get the patented Olyphant "I'm a little tea pot" pose he makes before things turn ugly.

Like most things this season, it's all setup for something. In the past, that kind of a long game would work because another season would follow just a year later. Today, where it takes years to get another a couple of episodes to any show, it just feels like poor planning.

Elsewhere, Babou Ceesay is easily the MVP of the season as Morrow, another synth with a hopeless devotion to Weyland-Yutani, who may or may not be a friend or something even more dangerous. Ceesay plays the part so that we're always guessing, and he's so fascinating and magnetic that it almost makes the season worthwhile just to see what he does.

Sadly, the pacing leads to a series that starts and stops like a failing engine. The episodes range from 45 to 90 minutes in length, yet some have material for barely half of that, while others stuff too much into them. There's a great single movie in here, somewhere, but not an entire season.

Alien: Earth also falls into the frustrating pattern of not picking a tone. At times, it almost flirts with a Paul Verhoeven level of bloody slapstick, where every character is an idiot and deservedly gets brutalized in the most horrific ways possible. But then, without warning, it turns deadly serious, riffing on transhumanism and the visceral cost of capitalism as it stomps on the faces of poor workers trying to survive.

Visually, Hawley treads close to Ridley Scott's original classic, often to the point of risking its own identity. The first half hour, in particular, is a weird revisit to the first film, which proves baffling as a callback. It wants the audience to remember a completely different crew, while simultaneously playing up how nothing will go as you expect.

Luckily, later episodes work far better. There's a tremendous sequence early on involving a shipwreck in the middle of a dense megalopolis that I wish we could have seen in cinemas. It has a sense of scale we've never before seen from this franchise, and there's a palpable sense of dread in witnessing devastation on this scale from the ground level.

If only the rest of the series could live up to that. The Alien stories are at their best when they focus on the fate of the working class stuck in the machinations of inhumane corporations. Introducing superhumans into the mix diminishes that impact, because our heroes now come with endless plot armor. It leads to every scene with the Xenomorphs and other cosmic terrors (which there are plenty) to feel redundant. We know nobody is in danger, so it's all just spinning plates until the next episode.

There are grand ideas worth exploring in Alien: Earth, and they're carried by a cast I want to follow into another season. I might not like how this first foray into Hawley's world turned out, but that doesn't mean it isn't worth another go. It just means it needs to figure out what kind of a version of Alien it wants to be, and I hope to be there when that happens.