{"id":266980,"date":"2025-09-30T16:48:14","date_gmt":"2025-09-30T16:48:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/266980\/"},"modified":"2025-09-30T16:48:14","modified_gmt":"2025-09-30T16:48:14","slug":"alien-earths-showrunner-wanted-it-to-be-a-dark-reflection-of-our-world","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/266980\/","title":{"rendered":"Alien: Earth\u2019s showrunner wanted it to be a dark reflection of our world"},"content":{"rendered":"

In Alien: Earth<\/a>, a techbro wunderkind controls 20 percent of the world\u2019s continental land mass, and he likes to play God in a secret lab located on a remote island. That\u2019s where the trillionaire has engineered a new pathway to human immortality, and given a group of dying children a second chance at life. But the island is also a kind of prison that the young trillionaire\u2019s employees cannot easily escape. And while most of the lab\u2019s previous test subjects have been human, the latest batch is a collection of dangerous, intelligent creatures from a distant planet.<\/p>\n

Though Alien: Earth plays with many of the ideas that have defined the franchise since it began with Ridley Scott\u2019s Alien, it does so with a novel cheekiness that almost makes it feel like a comedy. The show\u2019s most prominent nefarious corporation is run by a manchild called Boy Kavalier (Samuel Blinken) who has named his new human\/machine hybrids like Wendy (Sydney Chandler) and Slightly (Adarsh Gourav) after Peter Pan characters.<\/p>\n

Alien: Earth gets silly in moments, but it\u2019s also a pointed horror that\u2019s meant to feel somewhat plausible given the current state of the real world. As showrunner Noah Hawley told me ahead of the show\u2019s season 1 finale \u201cI live on the planet Earth in 2025… the world of Alien doesn\u2019t seem that alien to me.\u201d<\/p>\n

When I recently spoke with Hawley, he told me that the show\u2019s occasionally absurd energy was his way of illustrating the dark comedy that has always been present in Alien\u2019s story. He likened the larger franchise\u2019s depiction of people working for megacorporations to Samuel Beckett\u2019s Waiting for Godot, and said that he wanted his series to feel like it was exploring some of those same ideas from a new perspective. Even though this first season takes the franchise in a wildly different direction, it was important to Hawley that Alien: Earth still feels like classic Alien<\/a>. And now that the season has wrapped, Hawley\u2019s ready to explore a whole new world of ideas.<\/p>\n

\"Two<\/a><\/p>\n

(L-R): Kit Young as Tootles, Sydney Chandler as Wendy, Alex Lawther as Hermit, Jonathan Ajayi as Smee, Erana James as Curly. CR: Patrick Brown\/FX Image: FX<\/p>\n

What made you want to tell a new Alien story that\u2019s so much more focused on synthetic beings than aliens? <\/strong><\/p>\n

Noah Hawley<\/strong>: That focus helped address a narrative sustainability problem. With the creatures themselves being predators, stories like this can end up being forced into a predator \/ prey dynamic, which doesn\u2019t leave you a lot of room for longform narratives because your characters are either running or fighting, or both. To sustain itself, the show needed to be about something larger and fit the monsters into that larger story.<\/p>\n

When I looked back at Ridley Scott\u2019s original film, what was interesting to me was this moment about three quarters of the way through where the monster is out and chasing Sigourney Weaver, and she realizes that Ian Holm is an android who is also trying to kill her. You realize that humanity is basically running away from nature, and then running in the other direction from the technology that\u2019s been created in this future. They\u2019re both trying to kill Ripley, and I thought \u201cwell, that seems familiar to me.\u201d<\/p>\n

I live on the planet Earth in 2025. I see the storms are getting worse. I see the natural world is becoming really uncontrollable and that we\u2019re leaping before we look in terms of AI and technology creation, and how that impacts society. So, the world of Alien doesn\u2019t seem that alien to me.<\/p>\n

After <\/strong>Alien: Romulus<\/strong><\/a>, this series is the second time recently that we\u2019ve seen the franchise really centering younger characters. You\u2019ve got the hybrids, who are really just kids living in adult bodies, but Boy Kavalier (Samuel Blenkin) is also a kind of child whose whole identity is wrapped up in the idea of his being a boy genius. Why did you want kids\u2019 perspectives to be at the forefront here?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Hawley<\/strong>: There\u2019s a certain amount of guilelessness with children. They have to learn how to be cynical, how to hate, and how to be members of society. My daughter became a vegetarian when she was nine years old and decided that she wouldn\u2019t eat anything with a face. To me, that meant that she looked around at the animals of the world, and said \u201cwhy are we better than them? Why do we get to eat them?\u201d<\/p>\n

I liked the idea that, because we\u2019re coming into the show from Wendy\u2019s point of view, she doesn\u2019t look at these creatures as immoral. They\u2019re animals, and they didn\u2019t ask to be here. They\u2019re just doing what animals do, and we\u2019re projecting some sort of evilness onto them that they don\u2019t actually have. Now, that\u2019s a child\u2019s point of view, and the reality is that these aliens are very dangerous animals. However much you want to go \u201cwe\u2019re not better than them\u201d one of us has to survive.<\/p>\n

\"A<\/a><\/p>\n

Image: FX<\/p>\n

Boy Kavalier is also a kind of child whose whole identity is wrapped up in the idea of his being a boy genius. Were you trying to explore that childlike kind of guilelessness through a different lens with him?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Hawley<\/strong>: Yeah. The term \u201cdisruptor,\u201d is so overused now, but it initially meant taking a functioning status quo and causing as much chaos as you can to create an opportunity to gain market share. That works out very well for some people and really horrible for other people who might have been part of the existing status quo.<\/p>\n

Weyland-Yutani is an empire that is in its third or fourth generation, but here comes Boy Kavalier, who was 15 years old like eight years ago, and to him, there\u2019s no such thing as consequences. He\u2019s just like \u201clet\u2019s break as many things as we can and get rich while we do it, and the world will be better when I\u2019m done with it. But, of course, a lot of eggs get broken in the process.<\/p>\n

Wendy\u2019s relationship with the xenomorphs is so fascinating. We can see part of how they\u2019re coming to understand one another, but we\u2019re not privy to most of what they\u2019re actually saying to one another. In your mind, how is Wendy\u2019s relationships with the xenomorphs evolving?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Hawley<\/strong>: I think that it\u2019s like learning a language without a guidebook. There\u2019s a certain trial and error to it. For the xenomorph, there\u2019s also a certain degree of imprinting on Wendy that has occurred because, in some ways, she was present at its birth. It\u2019s sort of how we don\u2019t know what we look like when we\u2019re first born. With human babies and their mothers, there\u2019s no distinction of self \u2014 it\u2019s just this sense of \u201cwe.\u201d<\/p>\n

With Wendy and the xenomorph, I think there\u2019s a lot of good will that\u2019s engendered from the very beginning. But once the creature becomes an adult, I wanted people wondering \u201cis it really control-able? Is it really going to listen to Wendy fully?\u201d It\u2019s a bit like being friends with a hurricane. You can\u2019t really control where it goes or what it does. Once the mayhem starts, I don\u2019t necessarily know how easy it will be to say \u201cok, stop killing now.\u201d<\/p>\n

This kept coming to me as I was watching Slightly\u2019s connection with Morrow (Babou Ceesay) developing, but, with the hybrid characters, were you at all thinking about how children have been increasingly thrust into adult spheres online here in the real world?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Hawley<\/strong>: I don\u2019t know literally whether I thought \u201cwell, Morrow is like an online predator who\u2019s pretending to be a child,\u201d but what I did know was that, in order to expand Alien from short from storytelling to longform, we needed to expand the kinds of horror that we were engaging with. One of those horrors is a kind of moral horror at the things that people do to each other. It\u2019s Paul Reiser[\u2018s character, Burke] in Aliens trying to impregnate Ripley (Weaver) and Newt (Carrie Henn) with the chestburster and then sneak them back onto Earth. It\u2019s a disgusting thing and at a certain point you\u2019re like \u201cthat may be more monstrous than the creature, which is an animal, just killing people.\u201d<\/p>\n

What Morrow asks Slightly to do \u2014 make a choice about which person is going to die \u2014<\/p>\n

would be a horrifying thing to ask of an adult. But he\u2019s asking that of a child, and there\u2019s a real moral horror to that. Watching this poor kid wrestle with this thing that no adult should have to wrestle with really deepens the horror of the show.Because then, all the cause and effect of what the monsters do, and the grossness of what unfolds is tied to a deeper moral repulsion.<\/p>\n

\"A<\/a><\/p>\n

(L-R): Babou Ceesay as Morrow, Adarsh Gourav as Slightly Image: FX<\/p>\n

The season finale is definitely open ended, but it kind of feels like you could have come to a close here. Were you steeling yourself for this being a one and done?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Hawley<\/strong>: The strange nature of television is that ultimately in a series, you\u2019re trying to tell a story with a beginning, middle, and an end. But each season also has to have those three components, and each episode does as well. There\u2019s this sort of fractal way of looking at things where an individual episode is actually just a full season that\u2019s been reduced in scale. I never looked at it as if I was hedging my bets and ending the story here.<\/p>\n

This season is kind of like the rites of passage we have for our children whether it\u2019s a quincinera or a bar mitzvah that mark the end of one phase of life and the beginning of another. And the finale is the completion of a thought. It takes the hybrids from being children in synthetic bodies to whatever they are becoming next, and it unleashes the aliens out into the wild.<\/p>\n

Looking forward, what more might you be interested in exploring about this world should the series get renewed for a second season?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Hawley<\/strong>: I definitely want to explore more of the geopolitics of this world and the larger power struggles that are going on. When season 1 ends, some dynamics have shifted. Some people are up, others are down, and that affects the fates of all of our characters.<\/p>\n

But I\u2019m also interested in exploring more of the technology, also, the real danger that comes from leaping before you look. And, obviously, when you deal with an Alien story, you\u2019re dealing with levels of containment. So, what happens if you lose that first level of containment and move to the second? How does that change things?<\/p>\n

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