[COLUMN] The Relative Novelty of Alien: Earth | by Darren Mooney

Note: This piece contains some broad context spoilers for the first two episodes of Alien: Earth, which are streaming on Disney+ now. Nothing too heavy or plot-specific, but bigger aspects of the series. The show is very good, so feel free to bookmark this and come back if you want to watch it blind. In space, nobody can hear you spoil.

One of the more interesting and compelling aspects of Noah Hawley’s Alien: Earth is its relative newness.

Of course, the streaming series is very obviously and very heavily indebted to the Alien franchise in general and to Ridley Scott’s Alien in particular. It is packed with recognizable characters and concepts. The iconic xenomorph once again skulks the corridors of a doomed Weyland-Yutani cargo ship. The production design lovingly evokes the aesthetics of the original film, from the hypersleep pods to the MUTHR chamber to the breakfast table. It is recognizably an Alien show.

It helps that Hawley has always had a keen interest in the pop culture of the 1970s. The second season of Fargo was set in 1979. Although it was not always clear exactly when his superhero series Legion was set, the show embraced a sort of retro-futurist science-fiction aesthetic that felt anchored in the 1970s. As such, it’s no surprise that Alien: Earth feels much closer to the texture of the original 1979 Alien film than Fede Álvarez’s just-as-loving Alien: Romulus.

However, the big surprise of Alien: Earth is not the familiarity. By now, audiences expect their franchise media to be scrupulously faithful to what came before, recycling familiar elements in recognizable configurations, often as prequels or preludes. As delightful as it is to see production design choices like the analogue tablet used by Yutani (Sandra Yi Sencindiver), there is nothing unusual or radical in that.

The beauty of Alien: Earth is the extent to which Hawley pushes the boundary of the franchise outwards. Hawley doesn’t just recycle familiar elements of lore and continuity, he aggressively adds to them with a confidence and enthusiasm that is strangely endearing. Hawley is not content to serve his audience reheated leftovers of a nearly-fifty-year-old science-fiction horror classic. If he is going to construct an Alien television show, he is going to make it his own.

After all, there is a particular tension within the horror genre when it comes to the nostalgic impulses of contemporary pop culture. These nostalgic franchises and brands are designed to make the audience feel comfortable by serving them something that they already know. However, the appeal of horror is its ability to unsettle and discomfort the audience, to catch them off guard and to present them with something that they have to react to in real time.

When Alien came out in 1979, nobody knew what a xenomorph was. When the face hugger attached itself to Kane’s (John Hurt) face, nobody in that cinema knew what the end result would be. Audiences at the time were just as shocked when the monster burst from Kane’s chest as any of his crewmates. The film holds back on showing the audience the final creature, because it understands that the viewer at the time had no real idea what the final form of this monster should look like.

There were lots of other surprises as well. When Ash (Ian Holm) suddenly began acting psychotically, the audience had no expectation that he could be an android. When he started gushing a milky white fluid rather than blood, there was no way for the viewer at the time to understand that Ash had secretly been a synthetic the whole time. As audiences watched Alien for the first time, there were no rules. The rules were being codified in the moment. That was part of the thrill.

The Alien franchise has struggled to recapture that primal horror. Ridley Scott himself has acknowledged some frustration with the familiarity of the xenomorph, which could easily be reduced to just another generic movie monster in films like AvP: Alien vs. Predator. Scott opined that, working on his prequel Prometheus, “I thought [the original creature] was definitely cooked, with an orange in his mouth.”

The subsequent Alien films all tried to find something new and uncanny in the iconic monster. James Camerons’ Aliens invented the matriarchal Alien Queen and came up with the idea of Bishop (Lance Henriksen) as a sympathetic synthetic. Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s Alien Resurrection imagined the Newborn, a human-xenomorph hybrid. Álvarez did something similar in Alien: Romulus. Ridley Scott’s prequels focused on the Engineers and on David (Michael Fassbender).

While some of these approaches worked better than others, they all felt like they were coloring within the lines. The Alien Queen just looks like a bigger xenomorph and offers one answer (contradicting a deleted scene from Alien) about where the xenomorph eggs come from. The various hybrids are all riffing on a familiar design, understandably reluctant to veer too far from H.R. Giger’s classic original concept.

Part of what is so exciting about Alien: Earth is that Hawley aggressively expands the franchise’s scope. Everything from the feature films is still part of this world, but there is also more. The show’s opening text re-establishes familiar concepts like Weyland-Yutani and the synthetics. But it situates them in a larger context. There are other mega-corporations and other branches of post-humanity. Synthetics are just one evolutionary branch, alongside human-machine cyborgs and hybrids.

After all, between Ash, Bishop, Cal (Winona Ryder), David, Walter (also Fassbender) and Andy (David Jonsson), synthetics are well-covered ground. Hawley finds a fresh angle by focusing primarily on hybrids, the attempts to place a human consciousness inside a synthetic body, effectively granting human beings a sort of immortality. It’s a concept that makes sense within the established Alien franchise, but which has never been explored in any of the films.

While Weyland-Yutani are part of this world, with a crashed Weyland-Yutani freighter effectively motivating the plot, Alien: Earth spends more time focusing on their rival corporation Prodigy. Not only does this allow Hawley greater freedom to dance between the raindrops of established continuity – given Prodigy is not mentioned in any of the films, Hawley can do whatever he likes with them – but it also makes the Alien universe seem bigger rather than smaller.

This carries over to the aliens themselves. When salvage teams arrive at the downed freighter, they discover that Weyland-Yutani has been gathering all manner of exotic creatures from across the cosmos. There are familiar elements there – the xenomorph, the eggs, the face hugger. However, there are other exotic monsters. There is a tiny leech that feeds on its victims until it grows to the size of a tumor. There is a tentacled eye monster that seeks to implant itself in its victim’s skull.

These creatures fit comfortably within the larger aesthetics of the Alien franchise. Most obviously, they are overtly sexual nightmares. The leech first appears in a form that evokes a flaccid penis. The tentacled beast is very literally a “one-eyed monster.” However, they are also novel. The first time that they appear, the viewer doesn’t understand the “rules” of how they operate, just as viewers in 1979 didn’t understand how the xenomorph operated.

None of this is to suggest that these creatures are as compelling or as interesting or as good as the xenomorph. The xenomorph remains one of the greatest creature designs in the history of cinema and has endured for a reason. However, these weird little alien beasts provide a hint of the uncanny that the xenomorph embodied in its first appearance, before the audience – if not the characters – understood the logic underpinning its lifecycle and behavior.

There is a refreshing ambition to all of this. Hawley is taking ownership of the franchise, acting as an author rather than as a museum curator. “Imagine,” Hawley boasted in press for the series, “if there were five movies about the White Walkers, and I went and made Game of Thrones.” This is a bold statement – it is, perhaps, even hubristic – but it speaks to a confidence and an assuredness that is lacking from so much modern franchise media. It recalls Tony Gilroy’s approach to Andor.

So much modern franchise media is built around providing audiences with reminders of things that they know and love. This tends to turn these properties into mausoleums, suggesting that the farthest boundaries of these universes were set in stone years or even decades ago. While it can be fun to watch creators play with those toys, there is a real limit to what can be done with them if they aren’t allowed to get dirty or to introduce new ideas into the mix.

Alien: Earth feels new and exciting in a way that these sorts of franchises are rarely allowed to be. It’s a show that gives the audience everything that they might want or expect from an Alien property, but dares to have its own ideas and extrapolations from the lore as established decades earlier. It’s proof that there is life in the old monster yet.