is a reporter focusing on film, TV, and pop culture. Before The Verge, he wrote about comic books, labor, race, and more at io9 and Gizmodo for almost five years.
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.
(L-R): Kit Young as Tootles, Sydney Chandler as Wendy, Alex Lawther as Hermit, Jonathan Ajayi as Smee, Erana James as Curly. CR: Patrick Brown/FX Image: FX
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.
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