Alien Meets Interstellar In Netflix's 8-Part Lovecraftian Sci-Fi Series

Published Nov 3, 2026, 2:02 AM EST

Cathal Gunning has been writing about movies, television, culture, and politics online and in print since 2017. He worked as a Senior Editor in Adbusters Media Foundation from 2018-2019 and wrote for WhatCulture in early 2020. He has been a Senior Features Writer for ScreenRant since 2020.

While a blend of Alien and Interstellar might sound tough to pull off, one Netflix series managed this mix admirably. The scope and scale of a sci-fi story can often end up defining its tone. Even though both Ridley Scott’s Alien and Blade Runner are technically dystopian thrillers where major characters are revealed to be uncannily human-like robots during the narrative, the two movies could not feel more different.

The sprawling cityscape of Blade Runner makes Scott’s adaptation of the seminal Philip K. Dick novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep feel massive and overwhelming. The movie’s setting is a dark, anonymous, rain-drenched city, one that calls to mind the lonely post-human setting of author William Gibson’s iconic cyberpunk novel Neuromancer. In stark contrast, Alien takes place almost entirely on the Nostromo, and the claustrophobic setting makes the movie feel more like a slasher set in space than an immersive, futuristic saga like Blade Runner.

Blade Runner offers viewers an absorbing city to get lost in, while Alien offers the audience a setting so small that it leaves nowhere to hide. Right in between these two extremes is director Christopher Nolan’s 2014 blockbuster Interstellar. While the stakes of its story are existential, the setting is fairly small, with much of the movie taking place on a lone spaceship. Netflix’s underrated sci-fi series The Silent Sea managed to take the high stakes of Interstellar’s story and reintroduce some of the claustrophobic horror of Alien to the mix.

The Silent Sea Mixes Sci-Fi Mystery and Horror On The Moon

Released in 2021, The Silent Sea follows a crew of astronauts to the Moon’s Sea of Tranquility. The group is trying to retrieve the samples that were left behind at Balhae Station, an abandoned research facility five years earlier, since a dried up earth needs access to water by any means. Of course, the sister of the lead researcher, Doctor Song Ji-an, was one of the researchers who mysteriously disappeared from Balhae Station, so the mission is more than a little personal.

Across The Silent Sea’s eight episodes, the mystery of what happened at Balhae Station, and why the government covered it up and sent another crew to the abandoned site, comes to light. While the basic setup might remind viewers of shows like Stargate and Firefly, thanks to the tight-knit spaceship crews and their high-risk missions, The Silent Sea instead starts out feeling like Interstellar and gradually grows more similar to Alien.

Initially, viewers and Doctor Song Ji-an alike are worried about the Earth’s desertification, so the biggest concern is ensuring that the crew obtains the all-important samples from the abandoned site. At this stage, The Silent Sea still feels like The Martian, Gravity, or even the real-life storyline of Apollo 13. It is only when the crew learns the truth about Balhae Station that things take a turn into another genre.

Netflix’s The Silent Sea Is One Of Many Recent Hit Space Exploration Shows

Much like The Descent is a survival thriller about a caving mishap until suddenly it isn’t anymore, The Silent Sea has a few big twists that radically change the show’s genre and tone. Fortunately, unlike HBO’s similarly ambitious sci-fi series Westworld, these twists never feel jarring or explained.

Instead, the further the crew explore the eerie empty research facility, the clearer it becomes that viewers are watching a body horror/creature feature, rather than just a space exploration story. This was a great choice on the part of the creators, since there was a deluge of similar space exploration shows arriving around the same era.

The Silent Sea needed to stand out in a crowded marketplace, as Apple TV’s alternate history series For All Mankind and its spinoff show Star City, the Star Wars spinoff Andor, and Netflix’s ambitious sci-fi anthology Love, Death, & Robots all explored similar settings. Luckily, The Silent Sea’s blend of Alien's claustrophobic horror and Interstellar’s stakes makes the show a must-watch.