In the wake of its title announcement, we dig into what we know about Noah Hawley’s upcoming FX TV series, Alien: Earth.
If you’ve seen Fargo or Legion, you’ll know that showrunner Noah Hawley makes darn good telly. Which is just as well, because with the recently-titled FX series Alien: Earth, he’s wading into a franchise that is thick with 45 year-old lore, and is littered with divisive prequels and at least one director left disillusioned with the experience of making a sequel (specifically, Alien 3’s David Fincher).
As the writer, director and showrunner of the first ever show based in the Alien universe, Hawley therefore has some clod-hopping shoes to fill – not to mention an executive producer, Ridley Scott, who almost certainly won’t mince his words if the resulting series isn’t up to scratch.
So what is Alien: Earth about? Where does it fit in with the rest of the series? Will it actually have any, you know, aliens in it? There’s a lot that we don’t currently know, but some details have gradually seeped out of the production. So here goes…
Alien: Earth is set before the events of 1979’s Alien
The title gives it away somewhat: Alien: Earth is set on good old terra firma. And thanks to an earlier synopsis which came out in June, we’ve learned that it’s set 30 years before the events of Ridley Scott’s Alien. That sci-fi horror classic took place in 2122, meaning Alien: Earth will be set in 2092.
Interestingly, this places it right around the events of Prometheus, which, after a brief prologue set millennia ago, took place in 2089 before jumping ahead to 2093. This might suggest that Alien: Earth will feed into the events of Prometheus somehow, but some of Hawley’s comments from earlier this year imply that he’s about to jettison the prequel’s events entirely.
In January, Hawley told The Hollywood Reporter that he’d talked to Ridley Scott about his idea for the show, and said that the idea of the xenomorph being “a bioweapon created half an hour ago [was] inherently less useful to me.” He also said he was less interested in the ‘Apple store’ look of Prometheus and its 2017 successor Alien: Covenant, and that he preferred the “retro-futuristic technology” of 1979’s Alien.
Read more: Alien | What does Noah Hawley’s upcoming series mean for Prometheus and Alien: Covenant?
Anyone who’s seen Prometheus and Alien: Covenant will probably recall that much of their plot was about rogue android David (Michael Fassbender) tinkering with a DNA-altering substance and either inventing the xenomorph or at least re-creating his own version of it through his harebrained experiments. Taken at face value, it sounds as though that whole idea will either be dropped or pushed deep into the background in Hawley’s series.
Which leads us to…
The plot is about the earlier years of Weyland-Yutani
In April, some new plot and setting details were published, revealing that the series will “deal with the emergence of the story’s infamous Weyland-Yutani Corporation and the race between corporations to create new android life.”
A quick look at Xenopedia reminds us that Weyland-Yutani was formed in 2099, with the Japanese Yutani Corporation taking over Weyland following the gooey events of Prometheus, which likely hammered the latter’s stock prices somewhat. It’s currently unclear whether Alien: Earth will alter history and have Weyland-Yutani formed earlier, or whether its events will take place at one of those corporations before they merged.
As for all the talk of android life, this could potentially be further evidence that Alien: Earth will ignore Ridley Scott’s prequels, given that androids like Fassbender’s David were far from new in Prometheus. One thing Hawley has mentioned in interviews, though, is that Alien: Earth will partly be about artificial intelligence trying to destroy humanity or at least plotting against us (more on this later).
“It’s the story of humanity trapped between its primordial parasitic past and its AI future, and they’re both trying to kill us,” Hawley said earlier this year. “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 therefore sounds as though, in the Alien: Earth version of events, Weyland-Yutani will create some form of synthetic human that will quickly turn against its makers – not unlike David in the prequels. But note too that Hawley mentions our ‘primordial parasitic past’. Could this be a hint that, even with Alien: Earth being set before the crew of the Nostromo landed on LV-426 in Alien, the xenomorph will somehow make an appearance?
We may have an answer to that already.
A familiar (toothsome) face will make an appearance
On the 16th July, images began to emerge from Alien: Earth’s wrap party. Although largely obscured by a happy cast and crew, there’s a poster in several of those photos which shows an industrial-looking sci-fi corridor with a tiny silhouette in the distance. With its domed head and pipe-like growths sprouting from behind its shoulders, it’s unmistakably a xenomorph:
Now, this could just be a bit of artwork mocked up for the event and not intended to illustrate events in the series itself. But calling your show Alien: Earth if it doesn’t have an alien in it seems a bit misleading – and besides, there have been signs for a while that the xenomorph will figure in its plot somehow.
In 2022, FX boss John Landgraf said to Deadline: “Ripley won’t be a part of it or any of the other characters of Alien other than the alien itself.”
Leaked concept art, also from 2022, shows a ship crashed into a futuristic-looking city of gleaming skyscrapers, alien eggs dotted around what looks like a factory or power plant, and a xenomorph seemingly floating in space.
Hawley has previously said that Alien films tend to be about confined spaces, and that he liked the idea of a story where the threat escapes somehow. The suggestion being that a Weyland-Yutani ship crashes into a city and the xenomorphs aboard then start spreading out among the surrounding population.
The obvious question becomes: if the show’s set on Earth, and before the events of Alien, how can a xenomorph show up in the series? One possible retro-fit is that Weyland-Yutani had already encountered the species elsewhere on its travels, but greedy for more specimens, sent the Nostromo to LV-426 when it discovered the warning signal emanating from the Engineers’ derelict ship.
As you may have gathered, there’s a lot we don’t know about where Alien: Earth’s story might go. But one thing we do know is…
Alien: Earth has a cracking cast
Let’s get the names out of the way first, as you’ll probably have read them elsewhere in any case: Sydney Chandler (Don’t Worry, Darling) takes the lead, joined by the likes of Alex Lawther (The End Of The F***ing World), Essie Davis (The Babadook), Timothy Olyphant (Fargo, loads of other stuff), Kit Young (Shadow And Bone) and Adrian Edmondson (The Young Ones, Bottom). The latter’s particularly fascinating, given Edmondson previously appeared in the Star Wars universe (he showed up as Captain Peavey in The Last Jedi); it’ll be interesting to see what role he has in the Alien franchise.
Going by the casting announcements that emerged in 2023, it sounds as though Alien: Earth will be told at least partly from the perspective of those synthetic humans. Sydney Chandler is said to be playing Wendy, “a woman who has the body of an adult and the consciousness of a child”, which sure sounds like an android to us. Olyphant also plays an android; he’s reportedly named Kirsh, “Wendy’s synth mentor and trainer.”
One bit of leaked artwork from 2022 purported to show a character named Wendy, and in the image she’s a depicted as a diminutive figure wielding two swords. Judging by her stance, it looks as though she’s about to defend herself from a xenomorph leaping down from a pine tree. Perhaps this is the sort of scenario Olyphant’s mentor character trained her for.
The Wendy name is one of what will likely be several allusions to Peter Pan dotted about in the series. Alien: Earth’s earlier title was said to be Alien: Neverland, another JM Barrie reference. The Alien franchise is no stranger to literary allusions (Alien and Aliens all draw from Joseph Conrad’s novel, Nostromo), and Ridley Scott’s prequels were loosely modelled on John Milton’s Paradise Lost. How Peter Pan will figure in Alien: Earth remains to be seen.
What it all points to, though, is an extrapolation of the themes that have echoed through the movie franchise for decades now. Humans and artificial intelligence; birth and death; animal aggression and corporate greed. For the first time, Hawley’s series will also deliver on the promise that went infamously unfulfilled by Alien 3’s teaser trailer back in the early 1990s. The xenomorph is about to land on Earth. Game over? Quite possibly.
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