Like George Lucas’ Star Wars, James Gunn’s Superman, and many other great sci-fi stories before it, Alien: Earth begins with some opening text. However, this neon-green message isn’t meant to introduce the show’s central characters: It’s more about redefining the world they inhabit. In just a few sentences, the new FX series completely changes the parameters of the Alien franchise, introducing new conflicts and science fiction tropes to a story that was already brimming with them. In the process, it may even change our understanding of the original 1979 Alien and the many sequels and spin-offs that followed.
As Alien: Earth begins, showrunner Noah Hawley (Legion) establishes the central conflict at the heart of his series. It’s not a battle between aliens and humans, but one between competing corporations. The text reads:
In the future, the race for immortality will come in 3 guises:
Cybernetically enhanced humans: Cyborgs
Artificially intelligent beings: Synths
And synthetic beings downloaded with human consciousness: Hybrids
One more sentence follows:
Which technology prevails will determine what corporation rules the universe
That one blob of text has a massive impact on the Alien franchise, but to understand why, we’ll have to dig a little deeper and watch a tiny bit further into the episode…
Babou Ceesay plays Morrow, a new type of character called a Cyborg introduced to the franchise in Alien: Earth
The show’s opening scene provides a small amount of context. As the passengers of a research spacecraft owned by the evil Weyland-Yutani corporation come out of cryostasis, they gather in the ship’s dining quarters and chat casually.
“That’s Weyland-Yutani, that’s who we work for, and they control North and South America,” one character explains to another in a bit of helpful exposition. The second character nods and replies: “And the Moon, right?” “No, that’s Dynamic. Yutani has Mars and Saturn,” a third shipmate interjects.
Suddenly, the rest of the crew is invested, rattling off useful backstory like a dystopian Greek chorus.
“There’s four companies. They govern the entire globe.”
“Don’t forget the new one: Prodigy.”
“It’s synths, AI, started by a kid. Youngest trillionaire ever.”
So, to recap, in the year 2120, when Alien: Earth takes place, there are five major companies that control both Earth and space, and are competing for power. That competition is defined by the race to cure death, either by making humans immortal by upgrading them with technology (cyborgs), replacing them with robots (synthetics), or putting human brains into synthetic bodies (hybrids). That’s all easy enough to follow, but what’s interesting is the way it subtly changes the entire franchise.
“Youngest trillionaire ever.”
The Alien movies (and comics and novels and so forth) have always been the story of one predatory company: Weyland-Yutani. (In the prequel film Prometheus, that was just a pre-merger Weyland, but the point still stands.) Weyland-Yutani’s claim to fame is creating and mass-producing synthetics, though it makes computers and spaceships as well. The company is also pure evil, and it’s hell-bent on capturing a Xenomorph so it can develop new weapons, no matter how many human lives must be sacrificed in the process.
Throughout most of the Alien movies, Weyland-Yutani is pretty much unrivaled. Other companies are generally smaller and less powerful, like Hyperdyne, which started making its own synthetics (including Ash from 1979’s Alien) after WY’s patent expired; or Seegson, which developed faster-than-light space-travel technology, but never posed much of a threat.
Alien: Earth quickly establishes that this is no longer the case. Weyland-Yutani is just one of several companies vying for world domination (and space domination, too). The show’s opening moments also reveal that synthetics are just one type of technology in development. We’ll likely learn more about both hybrids and cyborgs (neither of which have ever appeared before in the Alien movies) as the series goes on.
That said, given that we already know how the next several hundred years of this story play out, it seems safe to assume Weyland-Yutani and its synthetics will ultimately emerge victorious. But getting to watch these companies duke it out is an exciting change to our understanding of the Alien franchise and the evil corporation at its center.
