Netflix’s ‘Alien Worlds’: Fantastical British Mini Series Blending Facts With Fiction

Alien Worlds was released this week on Netflix
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, and is already within the Top 10 shows of the streaming platform this weekend in the U.K. This four-part miniseries imagines life on unreachable planets, following a similar style to BBC’s nature docuseries such as Blue Planet.

In the last two decades, astronomers have discovered thousands of planets outside our solar system. Which of these planets could hold alien life? And what would these aliens look like? This is what Alien Worlds endeavors to imagine. Blending scientific facts with fiction, the creators of this new British series have produced a very intriguing and informative docufiction about our own blue planet and the possibility of life beyond our solar system, with brilliant CGI animation.

Narrated by British actress Sophie Okonedo, the four parts of the Alien Worlds series focuses on four different planets: Atlas, Janus, Eden, and Terra. All four planets are an example of what scientists call exoplanets. They are planets that resemble the Earth but that are outside our solar system. Using what we know on Earth and the rules that govern life on our planet, they imagine what life could be like in these distant exoplanets, the Earth-like planets in other solar systems.

In the first episode, on the planet Atlas, they thus imagine creatures called “sky grazers.” The atmosphere is so dense on this planet that these creatures are always flying, and never set foot on the ground. On Janus, in the second episode, “pentapods” roam the planet, in a similar fashion to ants on our planets. The third episode imagines the food chain between plants, herbivores and carnivores on a planet called Eden. And finally, in the fourth episode, the series discusses the possibility of extraterrestrial intelligent life on a planet with a similar name to ours, Terra.

What is most disconcerting about this series is the way that the narrator describes the imagined life on these four planets as if they were real. The narration continues just as any docuseries on the BBC observing animal life on our planet. However here, all the creatures are fictional. It is all hypothesis. But the narration blurs that distinction, making this series more confusing than anything else.

While the worlds created by animation is fantastical, and at times feels a little far-fetched, with some creatures looking very creepy, what becomes most interesting in the four episodes are the sections on our own planet Earth.

Alien Worlds shows the breath of knowledge scientists have accumulated about our planet, as each episode follows some of the research on Earth’s ecosystem and astrophysics. Episode One, for example, introduces us to the work of astrophysicist Didier Queloz, who found the first exoplanet in the 1990s.

It is astrophysicist Adam Frank, at the beginning of episode four, who explains in a nutshell why alien life can only be imagined for the time being. He explains convincingly the reasons why intelligent extraterrestrial life has not been found yet. As he throws a bucket into the Atlantic Ocean, hauling it back to find nothing but water in it, Frank illustrates how difficult it is for scientists to find civilization in the possible “10 billion trillion planets” that could sustain life on them.

This is an entertaining and very informative science fiction show. Some of the alien life invented might remind you of great science fiction works such as Star Trek if you’re familiar with the franchise. The last episode, for example, reminded me of both the networking system described in the film The Matrix, and the alien group in the Star Trek franchise named the Borgs, the cybernetic organisms linked in a hive mind, which they call “the Collective.”

Alien Worlds is on Netflix since December 2.