New details continue to emerge about Noah Hawley’s upcoming Alien series on FX/Hulu. Recently, Hawley dropped quite a juicy reveal about how his series fits in with the overall saga. Or in this case, Ridley Scott’s Alien prequels, Prometheus and Alien: Covenant. According to Hawley, the origin story of the Xenomorphs as explained in Scott’s prequels will not be a part of his Alien series. Those films revealed that the creatures were an engineered organism, created by combining the mutagenic black goo created by the ancient aliens called the Engineers, and homicidal android, David (Michael Fassbender). Hawley is sticking with the theory from 1979’s Alien, about the creatures having evolved independently over millions of years. Here’s what we learned, via The Hollywood Reporter:
Ridley and I have talked about this–and many, many elements of the show. For me, and for a lot of people, this ‘perfect life form’–as it was described in the first film–is the product of millions of years of evolution that created this creature that may have existed for a million years out there in space. The idea that, on some level, it was a bioweapon created half an hour ago, that’s just inherently less useful to me.
What makes this extra interesting is that Ridley Scott is an executive producer on Hawley’s Alien series… a show that is now contradicting the story of his own two prequel films. Hawley also mentioned that his series would stick to the retro-futuristic tech of the first two Alien films. This is in opposition to the far slicker (and more advanced) tech displayed in Prometheus and Covenant. In short, he considers Alien and Aliens as “canon,” and not so much so with anything that came after that.
This would make the Alien series very similar to its late ’70s sister in the iconic horror pantheon, Halloween. Currently, that long-running franchise has four separate continuities, all stemming from the first film’s narrative. With this reveal about the Alien series on FX, it looks like we’ll have four as well. Alien and Aliens, leading into Alien 3 and Resurrection is the first. Then, the Alien vs. Predator prequels. After that, Ridley Scott’s own prequels, both of which contradict AvP. And now, the Hawley series, which ignores all the prequels, and acknowledges only Alien and Aliens as future canon. Who knew the Xenomorph and Michael Myers would have such similar trajectories?!
We will continue to wait patiently until Hawley’s Aliens series is on our screens.
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