Set two years before the events of 1979’s Alien, the Weyland-Yutani Corporation-owned deep space exploration vessel Maginot suffers a series of catastrophic events during its voyage back to Earth.
Hurtling off its intended course on Earth, the Maginot crashes into a tower in Prodigy City, New Siam, a region administered by the Prodigy Corporation, a rival of Weyland-Yutani.
As Prodigy’s rescue forces scramble to save the injured and evacuate survivors at the crash site, Prodigy CEO Boy Kavalier (Samuel Blenkin) sends in a separate team to investigate and lay claim to the contents of the Maginot.
Led by the Synth android Kirsh (Timothy Olyphant), the team consisting of Hybrids Wendy (Sydney Chandler), Slightly (Adarsh Gourav), Curly (Erana James), Nibs (Lily Newark), Tootles (Kit Young) and Smee (Jonathan Ajayi) soon find themselves face to face with the variety of dangerous cargo aboard the Maginot.
Bursting out from new chest
Adding Alien: Earth (AE) into his already impressive body of work that includes Fargo and Legion, Noah Hawley’s latest television project is a breath of fresh air for an old franchise that has stayed mostly rigid in creativity for decades. As good as last year’s Alien: Romulus was, AE is simply better.
Hawley shakes up the Alien-verse in several different ways as he both adapts and breaks the typical Alien narrative and tradition into a serialised television format.
Rather than another story involving Xenomorphs causing carnage on a spaceship, the AE showrunner introduces several different locations for the series’s big story involving rival mega-corporations and humans playing god with science going terribly wrong.
AE’s story begins in space, shifts to a tower, moves to an island, pays homage to the original Alien with a flashback episode in space and goes back to the island before ending on a cliffhanger rather than the usual tradition of ending on a heroine narration after surviving an ordeal with the series’ iconic Xenomorph aliens.
On that note, for the longest time, the Alien franchise – at least in film – have kept the Xenomorph breed as the only aliens in space, before Ridley Scott introduced the Engineer race in the two 2010s films.
Hawley’s series introduces several more hostile alien breeds, which adds to the worldbuilding and grows the Alien universe in a more healthy way compared to what Scott attempted to do.
Deviating from norm
All that said, the biggest introduction by Hawley are the Cyborgs and Hybrids, with great importance being placed on how they move the story forwards. Explained in the first episode’s opening, cyborgs are cybernetically-enhanced humans, while hybrids are the result of transferring one person’s mind into a Synthetic android body.
Though both are old science fiction tropes that have long existed in media, they are new to the Alien franchise, which up to this point only featured Synthetics. These androids, or Synths, were always mindless robots that operated on the orders of their owners without fail.
But, what happens when it is a human with robotic enhancements, or robots with the minds of humans?
Much of AE is focused on both and the conflict that emerges between them, their “creators”, benefactors or against each other. Like how Fede Alvarez’s Romulus moved away from Scott’s themes involving mankind questioning where they came from, Hawley’s series does it in a much more concentrated, deliberate way to the point that the Xenomorph and other aliens appear as after thoughts.
This narrative goal is aided by how AE’s heroine is a Hybrid. Played fantastically by Chandler, Wendy – and the other Hybrids – is the result of a child’s mind being placed into an adult, android body.
Hawley explores how the character is forced to quickly “grow up” as she and her friends grapple with being the “children”, properties and captives of Kavalier and his corporation, along with the situation involving murderous aliens.
Taking this season’s cliffhanger ending into account, Hawley has nonetheless perfectly set up what would be a great start for a second season, which at the time of writing has not been confirmed.
The downside is the second season will likely come in two to three years, as Hawley is notorious for taking his time in between seasons.
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