Déjà vu is not typically considered a bad omen, but in the new series Alien: Earth, it’s a sure sign that doom is coming.
The eight-episode show, debuting August 12 on FX, is set shortly before the events of Ridley Scott’s 1979 film, Alien. Showrunner Noah Hawley aims to reconnect with that classic thriller while taking his story in some never-before-seen directions. The series is one of FX’s most ambitious gambles to date, and Hawley has long-term plans for multiple seasons, but to ease fans into something new, he knew he had to kick it off with something familiar.
“This show starts as the first movie starts,” he tells Vanity Fair for this exclusive inside the series, which has kept most details under wraps until now. “It’s a deep space vessel. It’s the cryosleep, and the waking up. It’s the Altman-esque overlapping dialogue. It’s breakfast, they’re smoking, they’re eating—because we need the authenticity. When you translate a movie to television, the first buy-in is, ‘Did they understand what Alien is atmospherically?’”
This time around, we meet an entirely different crew hurtling through space. But these futuristic travelers still have late-1970s haircuts, even though they’re living in the early part of the 22nd century. (Fashion is cyclical, right?) They’re aboard a ship called the Maginot, a state-of-the-art scientific research vessel—more high-end than the original film’s Nostromo, which was basically a long-haul cargo ship. The look of the dining area is virtually the same, and so is the sense of dread it evokes. Alien aficionados will know that something bad is about to burst forth, in one way or another.
Hawley has shown himself to be an expert at mimicking a preexisting style while steering an IP-based story to surprising places. He’s best known for FX’s Fargo, tapping into the dark side of “Minnesota nice” that was first explored by the Coen brothers in their 1996 snowbound noir. With Alien: Earth, he’s doing the same with Scott’s sci-fi classic and James Cameron’s equally adored 1986 sequel, Aliens. The follow-ups to those films—a mixed bag of Alien reboots, prequels, and spin-offs—are proof of how fraught an undertaking this can be.
If Alien: Earth is a hit, Hawley sees a day, perhaps several seasons down the road, when this show might even merge with its source material. “I don’t yet know, in terms of the series from beginning to end, how much time is going to pass or where we’re going to end up,” he says. “But I do know that at a certain point, the Weyland-Yutani Corporation is going to divert the Nostromo to that planet.”
You know the one: LV-426, a moon where there’s a derelict ship, a field of egg sacs, the Facehuggers that hatch from them, and the relentless manhunting Xenomorph who in turn hatches from the unfortunate crew that’s sent to check it out. For decades now, Alien obsessives have debated whether the space truckers’ corporate overlords back on Earth knew what they were sending their employees to retrieve. “We have the opportunity to maybe see what was happening on the other side of that phone call,” Hawley says.
Alien: Earth begins shortly before the events of Alien chronology, when the Maginot is on the final approach for its return to Earth. Things fall apart, of course, and the vessel ends up crash-landing in the heart of a densely populated metropolis. There will be survivors—but not necessarily human ones. Alien: Earth promises Xenomorphs, of course; those parasitic, exoskeletal monstrosities originally designed for the 1979 film by nightmare artist H.R. Giger. But the Maginot is fully stocked with a vast menagerie of other specimens too, each of them lethal and horrific in their own ways.
These aren’t spoilers: This is the setup. The crash of the Maginot sets the stage for what’s to come, creating an accident that could spiral into an extinction-level event for human beings. Imagine unstoppable apex predators running amok in a busy downtown, with the bloodshed radiating exponentially as the creatures reproduce rapidly and feast on a veritable all-you-can-eat buffet of Homo sapiens.
But once again, that fight-or-flight premise is what fans expect from this franchise. The first twist of Alien: Earth is that the potential saviors of humanity aren’t exactly human either.
The Lost Boys
It would be easy enough for Hawley to set up a humans-versus-aliens free-for-all, with our home world as the bloody prize. But Hawley uses this crisis to speculate about what “humanity” even means in a future where people evolve alongside the machines they’ve created.
The Alien franchise has always featured human-looking androids known as Synthetics, such as Ian Holm’s Ash in the first film, Lance Henriksen’s Bishop in Aliens, Michael Fassbender’s David in 2012’s Prometheus, and David Jonsson’s Andy in last year’s Alien: Romulus. These milky-blooded robots are present in Alien: Earth as well, but the series also introduces some variations. There are also Cyborgs, humans augmented by machinery, and Hybrids—artificially made bodies containing a consciousness uploaded from the body of an actual human being.
These Hybrids are only in the prototype phase as Alien: Earth begins. They’re the brainchild of Boy Kavalier (Samuel Blenkin of Peaky Blinders and Mickey 17), the brazen young leader of the Prodigy Corporation, a global rival to Weyland-Yutani.
The minds of the first Hybrids are taken from children who volunteered to be test subjects because their human bodies had terminal diseases. Kavalier nicknames this group the “Lost Boys,” although they’re a mix of genders, and brands them with new names taken from the fantasy characters of J.M. Barrie’s Peter Pan. “He’s like, ‘These bodies that I put these children in are my property. They’re an immortality product that I’m developing, and so I retain naming rights,’” Hawley says.
The showrunner felt the Lost Boys could become yet another thread back to the original films, particularly Aliens. “I had this Peter Pan idea, and I thought, Well, where in the first two movies is any of this?” he says. “In James Cameron’s movie, you have Newt, who’s an actual child, and then you have Bill Paxton’s character, who’s arguably the most childish character in the history of movies: ‘Game over, man!’” he says. “You have this confluence of this adult acting like a child, and this child acting wiser than all of the adults. And I thought, Oh, that’s in there.”
The wise child of Alien: Earth is the first of these experiments, who naturally becomes the group’s leader: Wendy. She’s played by Sydney Chandler, the 29-year-old daughter of actor Kyle Chandler, who previously appeared as Violet in 2022’s Don’t Worry Darling. Once frail and suffering, Wendy agrees to discard her old form and be transferred into an artificial body that has to look grown-up because it can’t age. It’s also virtually superhuman, vastly stronger and more durable than even the healthiest natural person.
The Lost Boys became the central figures around which Alien: Earth orbits because Hawley wanted heroes who were truly innocent and uncorrupted. He also thought that they would be especially sensitive if they knew what it was like to be weak before they become strong.
“There’s a nobility to children, and especially children who have been sick, and a wisdom and a sense of being beyond their years,” he says.
But there’s a darker side to those who aren’t grown up, as Barrie himself noted in his famous closing line to Peter Pan: “and thus it will go on, so long as children are gay and innocent and heartless.” That last word says a lot.
“I thought it was interesting to bring these very clear-minded children into a complex moral universe that’s basically built around the sins of capitalism, and this trillionaire who’s basically still a child himself.”
The Prodigy Corporation
The Peter Pan of this scenario remains Kavalier, the unspeakably wealthy young man who doesn’t necessarily have pure altruism in mind. His experiments are not just aimed at saving the lives of sick children—they’re proof of concept for a vessel he can inhabit when he himself gets older.
Boy Kavalier’s name itself does little to obscure how Hawley regards the character—and other über-wealthy figures who use their vast fortunes to manipulate the world. “There’s something obviously mythical about this man-child, and he’s also a symbol of a type of titan that we have developed in our modern world,” Hawley says. “And, yeah, there was just something about that name that I liked.”
Kavalier is not much of a caregiver himself, so those duties fall to a mother-and-father figure in Prodigy’s employ: a human woman named Dame Sylvia (played by Essie Davis, who was Lady Crane in Game of Thrones) and the android Kirsh (Timothy Olyphant, of Justified and Deadwood). “Her mother figure is saying, ‘The most important thing you can do is stay human on the inside.’ Kirsh is saying, ‘Well, that’s just stupid. You’re so much more than human. You have the capacity to basically see past what any human has ever seen and live forever. Why would your goal be to stay human?’”
Is Olyphant’s character a villain? “One of the really interesting elements in an Alien movie is there’s always a Synthetic character, and you’re never sure: Are they good or bad?” Hawley says. “It goes both ways. And we have a deep suspicion of artificial intelligence.”
That particular plotline felt surprisingly prescient once filming began. “Obviously, when I started writing the show, there was no ChatGPT,” Hawley says. “In the last 18 months, it’s become the issue of our moment. I think we’re all trying to figure out: Can you trust it? Can you talk to it? Why is it lying to me?”
Hawley cites a recent real-life news story that he feels illustrates why Kirsh may be a flawed guardian for Wendy and the other Lost Boys. “I don’t know if you saw that piece in [The New York] Times about people who are in spiritual or mental crises who are talking to ChatGPT. There was the one guy who’s like, ‘Is this all a simulation?’ and ChatGPT basically said yes. It just tells you what you want to hear. So if you’re going through a crisis, it’s probably not who you should be talking to.”
Dame Sylvia takes a warmer approach, but human beings aren’t always models of generosity and kindness either. “They’re both trying to guide [Wendy] toward adulthood,” Hawley says. “As she learns how terrible people can be to each other, she’s going to say, ‘Well, why would I want to be human if that’s what being human is?’”
Hawley sets up a number of dualities like this in the story. Two others are the hard-liner Atom Eins (played by Adrian Edmondson, the Star Destroyer captain from The Last Jedi), who is the fixer and first lieutenant for Boy Kavalier, and the technician Arthur Sylvia (David Rysdahl, the hapless husband on Fargo, season five), the husband of Dame who starts to have misgivings about the Hybrid program he has helped create.
“David Rysdahl is maybe the most human person I know,” Hawley says. “He’s so accessible and kind, and he is, in many ways, the moral conscience of this exercise. He’s the one who will always raise his hand and go, ‘This is not just science, this is people.’”
Boy Kavlier doesn’t always see it that way, but he has Edmondson’s character to get his hands dirty. “Atom, as Boy Kavalier’s right-hand adviser and enforcer, is a much more impenetrable character, who is basically there in that corporate mindset: ‘There is no morality, there’s just what the boss wants,’” Hawley says.
Just like AI, the humans Kavalier surrounds himself with tend to tell him exactly what he wants to hear.
The Maginot and Weyland-Yutani
While it explores the meaning of being human, Alien: Earth is also about the destructive nature of an arms race for new technology.
Kavalier’s company’s principal adversary is Weyland-Yutani, a familiar corporation from Alien lore. “I thought about 1900, when you had Tesla and Edison and Westinghouse, and they were all battling to see who was going to control electricity,” Hawley says. “So I thought, What if this is a moment like that, where you basically have this battle between these corporations for the future?”
Previous films in the franchise, such as 2004’s dubiously received Alien vs. Predator and 2012’s Prometheus, have featured characters who are early scions of the Weyland family. In Alien: Earth, fans will meet another trillionaire power broker from that dynasty’s partner, known now only by her last name. “We’ve never seen the Yutani side of the Weyland-Yutani Corporation,” Hawley says.
Yutani (Sandra Yi Sencindiver, who played the stealthy adviser to the queen in Apple TV’s sci-fi show Foundation) controls an old-money fortune along with about a fifth of the planet’s industry. “The Yutani side is a matriarchal corporation,” Hawley says. “Her grandmother ran the company, and then her mother ran it, and somewhere there was a merger with Weyland. Now Yutani is trying to navigate being the second name in the corporation, holding on to power and managing the geopolitics on a planet where there’s five corporations that control everything. In the end, they all just want to be a monopoly.”
Long ago, Yutani’s grandmother sent the Maginot on its hunting and gathering mission to deep space, and she considers the creatures they’ve harvested to be a kind of family heirloom. They’re also the key to wealth-generating biological innovation, which is why Prodigy wants them too.
The crew of the Maginot has not aged at all during their trip due to hypersleep chambers that put them in stasis on the ship. Characters like Cyborg security officer Morrow (played by Babou Ceesay, of the British crime series Wolfe) must grapple with the world moving on without them after surviving the crash. As Hawley says, “He’s a man coming back to a planet in which everyone he knows is dead, and he feels like somebody took his life’s work. He spent 65 years getting these creatures, and now the Prodigy Corporation is just going to take them?”
Prodigy’s Tactical Search Team
Finally, this is where the Lost Boys cross paths with the Xenomorphs. The tactical team Prodigy sends into the wreckage includes a medical officer named Hermit (Alex Lawther, best known as the Rebel manifesto writer Karis Nemik in Andor). He happens to be the brother of the ailing little girl Wendy once was.
The best-laid plans go oft astray, even for a highly trained team like this, when intergalactic creepy-crawlies are factored into the equation. Ordinary mortal soldiers are not equipped for such fights, as Alien films have proven time and again.
“Those first two movies are very much class stories [about] space truckers and grunts. Alien is very much about how the common man is just a pawn in the larger corporate story,” Hawley says. “They have very little control over their own lives. They go where they’re sent. They do what they’re told. That’s a very Alien idea. If we weren’t telling the story of those kinds of people, we wouldn’t be telling Alien.”
Hermit is an outcast, compared to the soldiers of fortune on the team like Siberian (Diêm Camille, The Wheel of Time) and Rashidi (Moe Bar-El, Dune: Part Two ) who want to get in and get out as quickly as possible. “A guy like that makes other soldiers nervous because, as a medic, he’s the last one to touch someone before they die,” Hawley says. “There can be a little superstition about, ‘Keep this guy away from me.’”
But the supercharged Hybrids of a group like the Lost Boys might stand a greater chance. Wendy is determined to try, if only to save the brother who is one of the last remnants of her human past. Hermit, however, has no idea that this Hybrid is his lost kid sister.
“Part of being chosen for this medical experiment was the parents had to basically give these kids away without ever seeing them again,” Hawley says. “Her brother was told that she died. But now that she’s part computer herself, she can interact with the network, and she spies on her brother.”
That’s how she knows he’s among Prodigy’s rescue and salvage team. But even Wendy and the other Lost Boys may underestimate the threat aboard that ship.
The name Maginot itself has symbolic meaning. It’s taken from the Maginot Line, a border of entrenched mini-fortresses built by France after World War I to stave off any future invasions from Germany. The line was seen as a bulwark against Hitler as he rose to power, but it was made irrelevant by the advancing technology of tanks and airplanes. It ended as a symbol of misguided faith.
“The Maginot Line is the hubris of infallibility,” Hawley says. “It seemed like a good name for the ship. It definitely has a meaning of ‘famous last words.’”
The post ‘Alien: Earth’ Exclusive: In FX’s Haunting Series, Everyone Can Hear You Scream appeared first on Vanity Fair.
