Seventeen years ago, Noah Hawley became a father during the Great Recession. If you look at everything he’s written since having children—including the TV series Fargo and Legion—Hawley says it all revolves around the same question every parent faces: “How are we supposed to raise these people in the world that we're living in?”
Hawley’s new series, Alien: Earth, which premieres August 12 on Hulu and FX, explores this question even more directly than his previous work. Set two years before the original Alien in 2120, it imagines a future where the race for immortality has led to three competing technologies: synths (AI minds in synthetic bodies), cyborgs (humans with cybernetic enhancements), and hybrids (human minds downloaded into synthetic bodies).
When a deep space research vessel, the USCSS Maginot, crashes into Earth carrying five captured alien species, a megacorporation called Prodigy sends six hybrids to investigate. The first-ever hybrid, Wendy, played by Sydney Chandler, was a terminally ill child before she was selected for the immortality experiment, just like the rest of Prodigy’s hybrids, all six of whom wake up in super-strong, super-fast, synthetic adult bodies that will never age.
“It's a very biological process through which we grow up,” Hawley tells WIRED, “and so the idea that you're going to take these prepubescent children and put them in adult bodies… How are they going to become adults?”
While Alien: Earth is rife with the creature horror and body horror that made its predecessors a cultural phenomenon, Hawley also wanted to introduce “moral horror” via the hybrid characters. “We’re often asked in our lives to make these impossible choices—choices that would be impossible for an adult,” he says. “But to put a child in those positions is really awful,” especially in a future where every aspect of life on Earth—from continents and cities down to the hybrids’ bodies and memories—is owned by a handful of ruthless corporations.
In 2025, we already have runaway income inequality, a push for “startup cities” free from federal laws, a two-company race to build the first brain-computer interface, and the first warning signs of unregulated AI. In Alien: Earth, Hawley asks what kind of world our children will inherit in 2120 if we continue down the same roads.
New Company Towns Will Be “Wetter” and “Tiered”
In Hawley’s vision of the future, Earth’s nation-states have been replaced by corporate territories: North and South America are owned by Weyland-Yutani; Europe by Threshold; North Africa and the Middle East by Dynamic; Russia by Lynch; and East Asia, Australia, Greenland, and Iceland by the relatively new upstart, Prodigy, which manufactures synths in addition to soft drinks.
Like the company towns for industrial workers of the 19th century, where housing, schools, stores, and other amenities were owned by an employer, much of Alien: Earth is set in the Prodigy “corporate city” of New Siam, which was based on, and filmed on location in, Bangkok.