In Alien: Earth, a techbro wunderkind controls 20 percent of the world’s continental land mass, and he likes to play God in a secret lab located on a remote island. That’s where the trillionaire has engineered a new pathway to human immortality, and given a group of dying children a second chance at life. But the island is also a kind of prison that the young trillionaire’s employees cannot easily escape. And while most of the lab’s previous test subjects have been human, the latest batch is a collection of dangerous, intelligent creatures from a distant planet.
Though Alien: Earth plays with many of the ideas that have defined the franchise since it began with Ridley Scott’s Alien, it does so with a novel cheekiness that almost makes it feel like a comedy. The show’s most prominent nefarious corporation is run by a manchild called Boy Kavalier (Samuel Blinken) who has named his new human/machine hybrids like Wendy (Sydney Chandler) and Slightly (Adarsh Gourav) after Peter Pan characters.
Alien: Earth gets silly in moments, but it’s also a pointed horror that’s meant to feel somewhat plausible given the current state of the real world. As showrunner Noah Hawley told me ahead of the show’s season 1 finale “I live on the planet Earth in 2025… the world of Alien doesn’t seem that alien to me.”
When I recently spoke with Hawley, he told me that the show’s occasionally absurd energy was his way of illustrating the dark comedy that has always been present in Alien’s story. He likened the larger franchise’s depiction of people working for megacorporations to Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, and said that he wanted his series to feel like it was exploring some of those same ideas from a new perspective. Even though this first season takes the franchise in a wildly different direction, it was important to Hawley that Alien: Earth still feels like classic Alien. And now that the season has wrapped, Hawley’s ready to explore a whole new world of ideas.
What made you want to tell a new Alien story that’s so much more focused on synthetic beings than aliens?
Noah Hawley: That focus helped address a narrative sustainability problem. With the creatures themselves being predators, stories like this can end up being forced into a predator / prey dynamic, which doesn’t leave you a lot of room for longform narratives because your characters are either running or fighting, or both. To sustain itself, the show needed to be about something larger and fit the monsters into that larger story.
When I looked back at Ridley Scott’s original film, what was interesting to me was this moment about three quarters of the way through where the monster is out and chasing Sigourney Weaver, and she realizes that Ian Holm is an android who is also trying to kill her. You realize that humanity is basically running away from nature, and then running in the other direction from the technology that’s been created in this future. They’re both trying to kill Ripley, and I thought “well, that seems familiar to me.”
I live on the planet Earth in 2025. I see the storms are getting worse. I see the natural world is becoming really uncontrollable and that we’re leaping before we look in terms of AI and technology creation, and how that impacts society. So, the world of Alien doesn’t seem that alien to me.
After Alien: Romulus, this series is the second time recently that we’ve seen the franchise really centering younger characters. You’ve got the hybrids, who are really just kids living in adult bodies, but Boy Kavalier (Samuel Blenkin) is also a kind of child whose whole identity is wrapped up in the idea of his being a boy genius. Why did you want kids’ perspectives to be at the forefront here?
Hawley: There’s a certain amount of guilelessness with children. They have to learn how to be cynical, how to hate, and how to be members of society. My daughter became a vegetarian when she was nine years old and decided that she wouldn’t eat anything with a face. To me, that meant that she looked around at the animals of the world, and said “why are we better than them? Why do we get to eat them?”
I liked the idea that, because we’re coming into the show from Wendy’s point of view, she doesn’t look at these creatures as immoral. They’re animals, and they didn’t ask to be here. They’re just doing what animals do, and we’re projecting some sort of evilness onto them that they don’t actually have. Now, that’s a child’s point of view, and the reality is that these aliens are very dangerous animals. However much you want to go “we’re not better than them” one of us has to survive.
Image: FX
Boy Kavalier is also a kind of child whose whole identity is wrapped up in the idea of his being a boy genius. Were you trying to explore that childlike kind of guilelessness through a different lens with him?
Hawley: Yeah. The term “disruptor,” is so overused now, but it initially meant taking a functioning status quo and causing as much chaos as you can to create an opportunity to gain market share. That works out very well for some people and really horrible for other people who might have been part of the existing status quo.
Weyland-Yutani is an empire that is in its third or fourth generation, but here comes Boy Kavalier, who was 15 years old like eight years ago, and to him, there’s no such thing as consequences. He’s just like “let’s break as many things as we can and get rich while we do it, and the world will be better when I’m done with it. But, of course, a lot of eggs get broken in the process.
Wendy’s relationship with the xenomorphs is so fascinating. We can see part of how they’re coming to understand one another, but we’re not privy to most of what they’re actually saying to one another. In your mind, how is Wendy’s relationships with the xenomorphs evolving?
Hawley: I think that it’s like learning a language without a guidebook. There’s a certain trial and error to it. For the xenomorph, there’s also a certain degree of imprinting on Wendy that has occurred because, in some ways, she was present at its birth. It’s sort of how we don’t know what we look like when we’re first born. With human babies and their mothers, there’s no distinction of self — it’s just this sense of “we.”
With Wendy and the xenomorph, I think there’s a lot of good will that’s engendered from the very beginning. But once the creature becomes an adult, I wanted people wondering “is it really control-able? Is it really going to listen to Wendy fully?” It’s a bit like being friends with a hurricane. You can’t really control where it goes or what it does. Once the mayhem starts, I don’t necessarily know how easy it will be to say “ok, stop killing now.”
This kept coming to me as I was watching Slightly’s connection with Morrow (Babou Ceesay) developing, but, with the hybrid characters, were you at all thinking about how children have been increasingly thrust into adult spheres online here in the real world?
Hawley: I don’t know literally whether I thought “well, Morrow is like an online predator who’s pretending to be a child,” but what I did know was that, in order to expand Alien from short from storytelling to longform, we needed to expand the kinds of horror that we were engaging with. One of those horrors is a kind of moral horror at the things that people do to each other. It’s Paul Reiser[‘s character, Burke] in Aliens trying to impregnate Ripley (Weaver) and Newt (Carrie Henn) with the chestburster and then sneak them back onto Earth. It’s a disgusting thing and at a certain point you’re like “that may be more monstrous than the creature, which is an animal, just killing people.”
What Morrow asks Slightly to do — make a choice about which person is going to die —
would be a horrifying thing to ask of an adult. But he’s asking that of a child, and there’s a real moral horror to that. Watching this poor kid wrestle with this thing that no adult should have to wrestle with really deepens the horror of the show.Because then, all the cause and effect of what the monsters do, and the grossness of what unfolds is tied to a deeper moral repulsion.
The season finale is definitely open ended, but it kind of feels like you could have come to a close here. Were you steeling yourself for this being a one and done?
Hawley: The strange nature of television is that ultimately in a series, you’re trying to tell a story with a beginning, middle, and an end. But each season also has to have those three components, and each episode does as well. There’s this sort of fractal way of looking at things where an individual episode is actually just a full season that’s been reduced in scale. I never looked at it as if I was hedging my bets and ending the story here.
This season is kind of like the rites of passage we have for our children whether it’s a quincinera or a bar mitzvah that mark the end of one phase of life and the beginning of another. And the finale is the completion of a thought. It takes the hybrids from being children in synthetic bodies to whatever they are becoming next, and it unleashes the aliens out into the wild.
Looking forward, what more might you be interested in exploring about this world should the series get renewed for a second season?
Hawley: I definitely want to explore more of the geopolitics of this world and the larger power struggles that are going on. When season 1 ends, some dynamics have shifted. Some people are up, others are down, and that affects the fates of all of our characters.
But I’m also interested in exploring more of the technology, also, the real danger that comes from leaping before you look. And, obviously, when you deal with an Alien story, you’re dealing with levels of containment. So, what happens if you lose that first level of containment and move to the second? How does that change things?
