‘Alien: Earth’ showcases the series' true villain — Humanity

When tackling a story that spans far longer than a two-hour film, the characters can experience a more in-depth journey while on the small screen. The Xenomorph aspect of the Alien franchise has always been a surefire success for all involved. Therefore, Hawley needed to create characters that the audience would connect with, as well as a need to introduce a more central villain lurking in the shadows who isn’t the perfect organism.

“So the challenges are, for me, let’s take the monsters out of it for a minute and think about what the show? Where’s the drama that we’re investing in week to week? I’m not worried about the monsters. When we put the monsters in, that’s the money-back guarantee, right? So we had to create this human drama in which you have a lot of human monsters as well and explore a lot of issues about the world that we’re living in, just projected into the future.”

— Noah Hawley on adapting the world for Alien: Earth

Don’t worry, there’s plenty of Xenomorph carnage in Alien: Earth, but the real antagonist of the series is corporate tyranny. There’s no government in this version of Earth, just five corporate entities that call the shots and own their territories that make up the planet. In a real-life climate that’s becoming increasingly more controlled by corporations by the day, it’s an extra chilling choice.

“Noah was able to take a lot of what was seated in those films, a lot of the thematic ideas that were in those films. But by literally bringing this story to Earth, and the way that many of those films referenced going to one day, it suddenly opened up the landscape, literally, and gave him an opportunity to really delve deeply into things one can’t accomplish in a two-hour film.”

— David W. Zucker on the plus side of bringing this story in a serialized format

The two main companies featured in Alien: Earth are Prodigy and Weyland-Yutani. The two compete in the race for immortality through technological advancements, including synthetics, cyborgs, and now hybrids. Prodigy is behind the invention of hybrids, which are synthetic bodies that contain human consciousness. The real kicker is that the human test subjects for this procedure are terminally ill children, adding more to the corporate greed that has always plagued projects involved in the Alien franchise.

Since Alien: Earth is composed of meaty one-hour episodes, it serves as the perfect backdrop to explore how corporations have taken over the world, with only one goal in mind: profit. The series explores this notion, showcasing how everything the companies own, including their employees, is a mere tool for financial gain, an expendable piece of property.

The first two episodes of FX‘s Alien: Earth are available to stream on Hulu in the U.S and Disney+ in Canada.