Alien: Earth Is About to Mess With Franchise Canon in Ways That Will Divide Fans

Alien: Earth is about to bring the Alien franchise to TV screens and streaming, but it also seems like the series is about to make some big changes to the canon. There have been rumblings that Alien: Earth could be taking a controversial approach to the franchise lore ever since it was first announced; in fact, many eyebrows were raised when original Alien (1979) movie director Ridley Scott outright stated that the TV series would “never be as good as the first one.” Alien: Earth creator Noah Hawley has made it his signature to take popular IPs and put very unique longform spins on them (see: Fargo, Legion), so getting a straightforward Alien sci-fi/horror story never really felt like it was in the cards.

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However, the latest feature on Alien: Earth has some big red flags for those who consider themselves franchise lore purists. And the executives behind the show are getting out in front of it to let fans know that will be the case here.

New details about Alien: Earth reveal that the version of Earth we’ll be introduced to will be one that reflects a lot of the current problems we’re facing in real life. The environment will be getting even more severe, while wealth, power, and control will rest in the hands of a few megacorporations. Obviously, these are hot-button socio-political issues that Hawley is tapping into – and the showrunner is not subtle when discussing the correlation between real-world and sci-fi.

“All I tried to do,” Hawley told Variety, “is think one or two steps ahead. Is it realistic to think that billionaires are going to be trillionaires? The planet is heating up, and the seas are going to rise — it’s going to be a hot, wet planet that we live on.” 

The Franchise Lore About Synthetics Will Be Changed In A Major Way

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The most controversial tweak to Alien lore Hawley is making is the place that androids known as “synthetics” occupy in the lore. Alien films have always posited that the future includes synthetics as aids to humanity on things like deep-space voyages. However, those synthetics were always in service (or had been in service) of the Weyland-Yutani corporation; Alien: Earth will be introducing rival megacorporations on Earth, and Noah Hawley is stepping into that pocket of lore to also introduce rival forms of post-human evolution. That will include Kirsh (Timothy Olyphant), a “cyborg working to remake humanity in his image.” The entire series will be centered around Wendy (Sydney Chandler), who will be the first “hybrid,” i.e., a young girl’s consciousness placed into an older synthetic body.

Alien: Earth Doesn’t Fit Neatly Into the Timeline

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The most explosive revelation of this latest feature about Alien: Earth is that the show “abandons plot elements introduced in Scott’s prequels and exists in parallel to [Alien:] Romulus.”

That’s a lot to decipher: Alien: Earth is set in the year 2120, two years before the events of the original Alien; Romulus picks up events in 2142, so the “parallel” nature of the projects is something fans should probably keep in mind while they watch. More importantly, the mention that this series could reject the events of Ridley Scott’s Prometheus and Alien: Covenant is going to stir a lot of debate. Those two films were infamously off-center in terms of being direct prequels, instead spiraling off into larger ideas of creatism and introducing elements like the black goo mutagen, which became the core root of the xenomorph species and all the horrific variations Scott and co. have since introduced. There’s a lot of room for Hawley to use a story about xenomorphs coming to Earth to easily retcon the species’ origin, while ignoring any lore about the Engineer race and that crashed ship on LV-426, to refocus on the Weyland-Yutani corporation secretly looking for any and every new source of xenomorph DNA in the cosmos, after first encountering them on Earth in Hawley’s series.

“There’s surprisingly little mythology across seven movies,” Hawley said, teasing his changes. “It was great to not have to jerry-rig a mythology into what’s existing, but to just start again.”

At the very least, it sounds like Alien fans are in for more disjointed mythology – which they are sure to love.

“Everything doesn’t have to fit together the way you expect from Marvel,” FX Entertainment president Gina Balian stated. “Fans don’t expect that in this universe. It doesn’t have the same pressure.” 

We’ll see about that when Alien: Earth premieres on FX-Hulu on August 12th.