‘Alien: Earth’ Stays True To Intention Of The Franchise: Humanity Versus Technology

FX’s Alien: Earth — Pictured: Sydney Chandler as Wendy. CR: Patrick Brown/FX

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“In the show, it’s can humanity itself survive? Which leads to the natural follow-up question — do we deserve to survive? Can we rise as a species?”

This is Noah Hawley talking about the new series Alien: Earth.

In the 8-episode sci-fi drama inspired by the film franchise, the Earth is governed by five corporations: Prodigy, Weyland-Yutani, Lynch, Dynamic and Threshold. In this corporate era, cyborgs and synthetics exist alongside humans. Prodigy CEO changes the game when he unlocks a new technological advancement known as “hybrids.” The first hybrid prototype named “Wendy” marks a new dawn in the race for immortality.

The series stars Sydney Chandler, Alex Lawther, Timothy Olyphant, Babou Ceesay, and Samuel Blenkin. Hawley created Alien:Earth and serves as executive producer on the series.

Given the reins of the franchise, Hawley explains that his creative process started with an examination of his personal situation. “I’m raising kids in this world in which the technology we’ve created, the jury’s out on whether that’s going to turn on us. When they asked me if I had any ideas for [this]

, I thought, ‘well, that’s what [the original movie] Alien is about. It’s about primordial monsters of our past that are trying to kill [the main character played by Sigourney [Weaver].’ And then the A.I. future we realize is also trying to kill her. So humanity is trapped between the A.I. future and the monsters of the past. Once I started with this idea of bringing children into this story — the human minds transferred into synthetic bodies, — then the Peter Pan analogy came pretty quickly after that.”

Going deeper, he says, “If my job is to render the emotional experience of watching Alien into a new delivery system, which is this television show, then one of the critical feelings is the discovery of the life cycle of the Xenomorph. I mean, it’s really four monsters in one, and each step is worse than the last, right? So, there’s this discovery process that after seven movies, we can’t get back. But, if I introduce new creatures and you don’t know how they reproduce or what they eat, then you feel that dread every time they’re on screen, or they’re not visible but you know they’re out there, you’re not sure what’s going to happen next.”

He says that for him ‘it was function over form,’ as in ‘what function do [the monsters] need to provide in the story?‘

“Then I just tried to gross myself out as much as possible as I went through the process,” Hawley admits.

Another element that Hawley felt is important in telling this story is the use of youngsters to really drive the narrative, which he reveals brings the aforementioned ‘Peter Pan’ quality to the series.

“The best way to explore is to look at the adult human world through the eyes of a child. Because children [are] bad liars. They don’t know how to pretend they’re not scared. They don’t take for granted some of the things that adults take for granted. And so going in through Wendy’s point of view and the other Lost Boys really allowed her to have the sort of pure decency at heart that could then confront the complacency [of] the evils of the adult world.”

Chandler, who portrays Wendy, discusses how she fashioned playing a child’s consciousness in an adult body, saying, “Wendy is very much a blank page. I feel like Noah was able to create a very layered, grounded character. But I would have this image of two magnets kind of pressing up against each other — the mind, which is known, and this body, which is unknown — and you just can’t get them to touch. It’s kind of like what’s in the middle—what’s that void, is what she’s seeking.”

Hawley concludes that, “What I want the audience to take away from [this series] really is my ambition for this genre to be bigger than just entertainment, for it to be a fun show, with all the action and horror we have. But I think science fiction has a responsibility to really look at the issues that we’re wrestling with and try to envision a future in which we can solve them. And so, my hope is that people ride the roller coaster episode to episode, but come out of it still thinking about the show and talking about the show afterwards.”

‘Alien: Earth, premieres two episodes on August 12^th at 8/7c on FX and on Hulu domestically, and on Disney+ internationally on August 13^th. Subsequently, a new episode will be released every Tuesday.