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.
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
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