It sounds as though Noah Hawley’s Alien TV series will render the events of Prometheus and Alien: Covenant non-canon. We look at what it all could mean.
NB: The following contains spoilers for Prometheus and Alien: Covenant.
Here’s a tense scenario: as the showrunner of an upcoming TV show, you have to tell Ridley Scott – seldom one to mince his words – that the story you have planned will essentially jettison two of his movies.
What would Scott say? What would he do? Should you wear a fire-retardant suit? A crash helmet perhaps?
Incredibly, it sounds as though the multi-talented writer-director (and singer) Noah Hawley did exactly this in recent months, and somehow lived to tell the tale.
The upcoming TV show in question is Hawley’s hotly-anticipated Alien series, set in the universe Scott first established in 1979. Featuring the likes of Essie Davis and Timothy Olyphant among its ensemble cast, it’s said to be set on Earth, and its events will take place before the original Alien. Filming was originally due to begin in 2022 before the pandemic and then a series of strikes saw production delayed until this year. The finished series is expected to air in 2025.
If you’re thinking, “Wait, another Alien prequel? Didn’t we already have two of those?” then rest assured that Hawley – who writes and directs the future series – has also thought of this.
Those earlier prequels were, of course, Ridley Scott’s own Prometheus (2012) and Alien: Covenant (2017), which dealt with the origins of the mysterious, ossified pilot discovered in its U-shaped craft in Alien, and its connections to the deadly xenomorph.
That pilot, Scott’s films revealed, belonged to a species of statuesque, bald-Elvis beings called the Engineers, and the xenomorph – or less evolved ancestors of it – were a kind of bio-weapon, generated using a sort of gene-altering black goo.
In a new interview with The Hollywood Reporter, Hawley revealed that he’d sat down with Ridley Scott – who’s executive producer on the series – and spoken about his misgivings about these ret-conned origins introduced in Prometheus and its immediate sequel, and how they didn’t fit with his interpretation of the titular Alien.
“Ridley and I have talked about this – and many, many elements of the show,” Hawley told the outlet. “For me, and for a lot of people, this ‘perfect life form’ – as it was described in [Alien] – is the product of millions of years of evolution that created this creature that may have existed for a million years out there in space. The idea that, on some level, it was a bioweapon created half an hour ago, that’s just inherently less useful to me.”
Hawley then added that he didn’t have much time for the ‘Apple store’ (his words) aesthetic of Scott’s 21st century prequels, either, and that he instead wanted to return to the retro-futuristic look of Alien and Aliens.
“…when you look at those first two movies, you have this retro-futuristic technology. You have giant computer monitors, these weird keyboards … You have to make a choice. Am I doing that? Because in the prequels, Ridley made the technology thousands of years more advanced than the technology of Alien, which is supposed to take place in those movies’ future. There’s something about that that doesn’t really compute for me.”
In a quite casual way, Hawley is indicating something major here: that, in essence, everything set up in Prometheus and Alien: Covenant is about to be rendered non-canon, or at the very least politely ignored by the showrunner’s own prequel series.
Hawley’s reference to ‘a bio-weapon created half an hour ago’ is almost certainly a nod to the events of Alien: Covenant, in which something remarkably close to the xenomorph we saw in Alien and Aliens was created by the rogue android David (Michael Fassbender) in his Gothic underground lair on a storm-lashed planet.
The same film also suggested that the xenomorph was partly born from the body of Elizabeth Shaw (Noomi Rapace), the protagonist last seen in Prometheus.
Alien: Covenant ended on a cliffhanger, with David having taken control of the good ship Covenant and hurtling towards the planet Origae-6. In cold storage: dozens of xenomorph embryos, which David presumably intended to unleash on Origae-6’s human colonists. Due to the gloomy box office returns that greeted Alien: Covenant, plans for another sequel – which would potentially connect events directly back to those of 1979’s Alien – never happened.
Among the questions we may never see answered are:
If the Engineers created life on Earth, why were they suddenly going to try to destroy it again?
Why did David kill the Engineers on that planet, dubbed Paradise?
Where did the black goo come from?
What was that strange green crystal we saw in Prometheus?
Is the Deacon – the strange critter seen at the end of Prometheus – still running around on LV-223, or has it died of starvation?
If what Hawley describes comes to pass, it’s likely we’ll never know what David would have done on Origae-6, or how any of what we saw in Scott’s prequels would have connected to the crashed Juggernaut in Alien. Given the mixed reception to those films, it’s unlikely that there’ll be too many tears shed over that storytelling decision.
But all the same, there’s a curious part of us that can’t help but feel a hint of disappointment that Scott’s films – which, uneven as they were, had their moments of both technical ingenuity and blood-curdling horror – are now vanishingly unlikely to get a pay-off in any form.
It’s equally surprising that Scott, having jealously guarded the Alien franchise for the best part of a decade – he was reportedly instrumental in ensuring that Neill Blomkamp’s Alien 5 didn’t happen – has now relaxed a little, and allowed his version of Alien history to be blasted out of an airlock. That he’s now allowing other filmmakers into his playground – Fede Alvarez’s movie, Alien: Romulus is out this summer – certainly suggests that he’s happier to step back and take on a hands-off producer role.
There’s also the strong possibility that Hawley has a concept in mind that genuinely impressed Scott, and offers such a promising new direction for the 45 year-old franchise that it’s worth choosing in favour of the one Prometheus began haphazardly sketching out in 2012. That Scott didn’t scream at Hawley until the latter went into a terror-induced coma suggests that it must have been a pretty positive meeting.
Certainly, Hawley’s pitch to The Hollywood Reporter sounds convincing:
“The thing with Alien is that it’s not just a great monster movie,” he said. “It’s the story of humanity trapped between its primordial parasitic past and its AI future, and they’re both trying to kill us. So, there’s nowhere to go. It’s really a story of does humanity deserve to survive? Does humanity’s arrogance in thinking that we’re no longer food and its arrogance in creating these AI beings who we think will do what we tell them – but ultimately might lose their mind – is there a way out?”
It could be argued that Prometheus and Alien: Covenant still explored those same ideas, with their doomed human characters trapped between the scheming antics of Fassbender’s David on one hand and the parasitic terror of Scott’s assorted monsters on the other.
The drawback of those movies, though, was that they served to demystify and over-explain so much of what felt uncharted and disturbingly, well, alien in the original Alien movies. Nor did they manage to conjure up a particularly compelling group of human protagonists for those monsters to impregnate and/or devour – something the TV series can, we hope, also fix.
If Hawley’s series can inject a new sense of mystery and otherworldliness to the Alien, then maybe it will once again establish the creature as one of cinema’s most terrifying antagonists. As strange as it is to think that two of Scott’s three films in the franchise could be jettisoned, maybe it’s a sacrifice that is ultimately worth making.
