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Alien: Earth is a new series releasing on FX and Hulu. It’s the first ever TV series in the long running film franchise. The show is helmed by Noah Hawley, who’s known for writing the Fargo and Legion series.
There’s seven films in the official Alien canon, which does not include the Alien v Predator movies, but we’ll come back to that.
The original Alien came out in 1979 and is set in the year 2122. The sequels, which includes Aliens, Alien 3, and Alien Resurrection all continue the plot thread from that original movie with Ellen Ripley being the central character.
In 2004 and 2007, we got two entries in the spin off series, Alien vs Predator. These combined the Alien and Predator franchises and also gave an origin story for the Xenomorph species from Alien. If they were canon to the Alien timeline, they would be the earliest stories, because they’re set in 2004.
BUT… In 2012, the Alien franchise was kind of rebooted with two prequel movies that ignored what had been established in AVP and created a new origin for the Xenomorphs. This was Prometheus and Alien Covenant.
The most recent movie, Alien Romulus went ahead and stuck itself right in the middle of this big timeline. After the original Alien, but before the original sequels.
So, where does Alien Earth fit in?
Alien Earth will take place two years before the original Alien, in 2120. Just to be clear that’s after Prometheus and Covenant, but before everything else.
Noah Hawley has said that the plot will be a parallel storyline to the rest of the franchise, not directly tied to any specific character or plot point. He’s also said that he’s mostly taking inspiration from the original movie, so we’ll focus on that to get a bit of context. Spoiler alert!
Alien follows a group of future blue collar workers, basically “space truckers”. The 7 person crew is operating a ship called the Nostromo, hauling resources back to Earth from a mining colony. They get a distress signal from a nearby planet and investigate.
One of their crew members comes back on the ship with a creature attached to his face that fans now call a facehugger.
A little while later, a new creature bursts out of the man’s chest. The creature grows rapidly, soon becoming…
a full size Xenomorph. It takes out the crew one by one despite their best efforts to destroy it. It's also revealed that those efforts have been sabotaged by one of their crew, who is actually a synthetic – an artificial intelligence intended to look human.
He was placed on the ship by the Weyland-Yutani corporation to protect the company’s interests at all times, which in this case, is bringing the Xenomorph back for research at the crew’s expense. By the end, Ripley is the last woman standing and she manages to defeat the Xenomorph by ejecting it into space.
Alien is an incredibly important movie in the history of sci-fi horror. And the horror in the movie comes from multiple directions. The obvious one is the creature itself, the movie’s monster. But there’s a lot of subtext going on as well.
The Alien’s purpose in attacking humans is not to eat them, like many other movie monsters. It’s to reproduce. The Facehugger comes from an egg.
When it attaches to its first victim, it impregnates him with an alien embryo. He then dies when he’s forced to give birth to the creature. So a lot of that subconscious fear comes from this particular kind of assault, and it’s no coincidence that the writers chose the first victim to be a man.
Another fear is in the development of Artificial Intelligence. One of the crew members isn’t even human, but this is kept hidden from them. When he’s revealed as a synthetic, it’s a gut punch because the characters and audience realize there’s been TWO monsters all along.
And that secret monster is born out of another prominent fear. The synthetic represents the interests of the mega corporation, Weyland-Yutani. The power this company wields and the lengths it will go to for financial gain, including the sacrifice of 6 people, is yet another element of horror.
With Alien Earth, being a “parallel story” I think it’s more important to understand the concepts of Alien - the themes, the underlying horror, rather than any specific plot points. I haven’t seen the show as of the time of writing, but we do know the premise and can start to see how it will expand on the core ideas of the world of Alien.
The story revolves around a ship that has been on a deep space mission collecting samples of alien life. It has now crashed back on Earth and we’ll follow our main character Wendy, as her and her team go to research the ship.
Wendy is a synthetic hybrid. She’s had a human consciousness transferred into a synthetic body. So the show is clearly looking to further explore the nature of our relationship with artificial intelligence. Wendy works for a massive company known as Prodigy, so I’m sure we’ll continue to see commentary about the nature of mega corporations and their power in society.
And we all know that the ship is going to have Xenomorphs on it or it wouldn’t be an Alien show, but the Xenomorph we all know and love is not the ONLY creature aboard the ship. Noah Hawley mentioned that since the franchise has been going so long, it’s lost a lot of the horror of discovering the biological process of this creature, which was core to the original. Every step in its reproductive cycle is a kind of awful revelation.
So, he wanted to bring in new creatures that would allow audiences to have the same kind of discovery, not knowing what these new organisms will do next.
Another thing that’s interesting to consider is the structure of a horror movie when applied to TV. Alien, like other horror movies, depicts the ongoing demise of its characters. How do you apply that to an 8 hour series? You can’t sustain the same kind of tension that a movie does for that long, it just doesn’t work. Noah Hawley’s solution is to focus primarily on characters. To make a dramatic story first, one that would be engaging even if there were no monsters.
Now one thing that might be difficult for fans to grasp about the premise is the setting. In the official Alien canon, Xenomorphs have not yet made it to Earth. Alien Resurrection’s plot revolved around the characters stopping that from happening. In Aliens, Ripley struggles to get anyone to believe that the Xenomorph exists.
With all that in mind, it’s a little odd to think Xenomorphs have already made it to Earth even before Ripley will encounter them in deep space aboard the Nostromo. It’s also odd to think there might be other creatures that rival the danger of the Xenomorph, since the entire series has positioned the Xenomorph as a perfect organism, the most dangerous creature of all time.
But… if Alien V Predator, ended up being canon somehow, then Xenomorphs technically would have been on Earth even earlier. It might be tempting to suspect this for a couple different reasons. Both the Alien and Predator franchises have recently seen a resurgence with Alien Romulus and Prey being well received by audiences.
Fede Alvarez, director of Romulus, has said on a couple occasions that he’d love to work with Dan Trachtenberg, who directed Prey. It’s also been confirmed that Alvarez is working on a sequel to Romulus. Meanwhile Trachtenberg is directing another Predator movie set to release in August, Badlands. And low and behold, who is one of the main characters in this movie?
A Weyland-Yutani synthetic. With all of this AND the idea that there’s mysterious other creatures on that ship in Alien Earth, do we think there might be any Predators featured in the show? Personally, based on what I’ve read about Noah Hawley, it seems like he really wants to do his own thing without having to be beholden to other movies and properties, so I doubt it, but it would be fun to be wrong!
Let me know if you’re excited for Alien Earth! I’d love to hear your thoughts on it!
Almost done with ep.1
Boy oh boy am I loving it. It looks SO GOOD. Feel like I’m watching a movie.