Upcoming TV series Alien: Earth has a brief new trailer that has some almost subliminal images buried in it – including what we’re fairly sure is a sheep.
Showrunner Noah Hawley and his collaborators aren’t in a rush to show us too much of the upcoming spin-off series Alien: Earth, coming to FX in 2025. In September, the first teaser trailer emerged – a 15-second piece of footage in which we saw our blue planet reflected in the shiny head of a xenomorph.
Then, at last week’s D23 Brazil live event, a few brief shots from Alien: Earth appeared in a trailer for Disney’s wider slate of offerings coming in 2025 and beyond. As you can see in this compilation of those shots, the six seconds’ footage largely consists of that same shot of Earth reflected in the alien’s head.
Another Alien: Earth teaser trailer dropped today (20th November). And guess what? The shiny-headed xenomorph’s back again! Disney are getting really good mileage out of this one VFX shot.
There are, however, some intriguing new details to be gleaned from this latest 30-second promo. Before we get carried away, here is that piece of Alien: Earth marketing:
Back already? Good.
You may have already noticed one nerdy detail right away: the promo tells us that Alien: Earth will be set in 2120. That’s just two years before the events of Alien. It’s been known for some time that Alien: Earth is yet another prequel, but the year 2120 places it so close to the date when the Nostromo paid an ill-fated visit to LV-423 that the series could dovetail with the first film’s events at some point.
It’s a rather different date from earlier reports we’d read, which said that Alien: Earth would take place some 30 years before Alien – so nearer the year 2090, which was roughly when Ridley Scott’s Prometheus and Alien: Covenant were set. (For those particularly keen on their dates, recent franchise entry Alien: Romulus took place in 2142.)
The really telling parts of the teaser trailer come after the xenomorph rears its head – and it’s here that YouTube’s playback speed function comes in handy. Slow the footage down, and what initially looks like a jumble of CRT television static is revealed to be a set of almost subliminal images. Among the key ones we’ve found so far are:
A xenomorph egg opening in typically unnerving fashion.
What appears to be a facehugger moving its digits about inside an egg, or perhaps one of those clear pouches we recently saw in Alien: Romulus.
The face of a screaming young man with what could be a xenomorph looming up behind him.
A woman, viewed in profile, with what appears to be a facehugger inches away from her nose.
…and perhaps most intriguingly, what we’re fairly sure is the eye of a sheep.
What could it mean? The heavy implication is that Weyland Yutani’s up to some early experiments. Retrofitting franchise lore somewhat, Alien: Earth will clearly have the corporation recover some xenomorph specimens a couple of years before Ripley and her crew aboard the Nostromo did.
As a September synopsis revealed, “a mysterious space vessel crash-lands on Earth,” and “members of a recovery crew search for survivors among the wreckage.” In the process, they “encounter predatory life forms more terrifying than they could ever have imagined.”
We’ve heard in the past that Weyland Yutani will feature in the series. The shot of the sheep could imply that the company manages to capture a xenomorph in one of its forms and subsequently embarks on some sort of cloning program (this being a potential reference to Dolly the sheep).
The Alien franchise has had brushes of the ovine variety in the past. Back when New Zealand-born filmmaker Vincent Ward was still directing Alien 3 (he was eventually fired), the script he was working on featured a bizarre sheep-xenomorph hybrid. The fluffy abomination was never realised on-screen, but the finished film (directed by David Fincher) still played around with the idea that the alien took certain traits from whatever creature it sprang from; the xeno in Alien was “Kane’s son” to quote a famous science officer, and so it was humanoid. The critter in Alien 3 emerged from either a dog or an ox depending on which cut you watch, and so the resulting beast was stealthy and ran about on all fours.
Noah Hawley has noted this himself in interviews, and has already suggested that he’s going to lightly tinker with the alien’s design somewhat. “What was really fun for me was to really engage with the creature, bring some of my own thoughts to the design while not touching the silhouette, because that’s sacrosanct,” Hawley said in September, adding that, “whatever the host is informs what the final creature is. I just wanted to play around a little bit to make it as scary as it should be.”
Could at least one of the monsters in Alien: Earth be related to a sheep? The teaser certainly hints that a woolly jumper will feature in some capacity. In space, no one can hear you bleat.
Alien: Earth will appear on Disney+ in the summer of 2025.
