It’s Always Been Our Meanest Sci-Fi Franchise—and Our Most Honest

Alien: Earth begins where most Alien stories end: with a crew of blue-collar workers realizing that they are, and have always been, doomed. Deemed expendable by their employers over the monsters in the cargo hold (at least the crew of the USCSS Maginot, unlike the Nostromo, knew the monsters were the mission), they are made mortally aware of their place at the bottom of several food chains at once. With the FX show’s fifth episode, cheekily titled “In Space, No One …,” creator Noah Hawley takes us back to the Maginot’s corridors to give viewers a rendition of Alien in miniature, retrofitting the sturdy bones of Ridley Scott’s seminal film to his own ends.

This may sound like a cynical enterprise, but it’s par for the course for Alien. As Slate’s own Sam Adams has noted, the series is Hollywood’s greatest non-franchise, a collection of films (and comic books and video games) constantly remixing a few primary colors into compelling new shades. Their collective strength lies in just how audacious each revisitation can be while remaining recognizably Alien, as absurd a phrase as that is. There have been diminishing returns to this of late, but Hawley’s wistful Blade-Runner-as-fairy-tale approach brings a lot to the table without sacrificing the most vital thread that runs through everything Alien: These movies are really fucking mean. And that’s what keeps them honest.

In Alien, there are no happy endings. A state of suspension is what usually qualifies as a win for the women (and sometimes men) who make it to the end of the story—not quite alive, yet not quite dead, and sometimes accompanied by androids, who are neither. It is not given that humanity is a noble enterprise; that notion must be earned. Almost every Alien story finds it lacking.

Ridley Scott made this subtext text in his 2012 return to the series, the prequel Prometheus. (Five years later, he would cantankerously highlight it again in Day-Glo yellow with Alien: Covenant.) Less a science-fiction film than a religious fable, Prometheus takes its protagonist, the archeologist Elizabeth Shaw (Noomi Rapace) on a quest to meet her maker. Shaw’s journey is bookmarked by the dispassionate cruelty of nature both known and unknown: She loses her father to Ebola as a girl, an event that both informs her Christian faith and crystallizes for her the precarity of humanity’s mastery over the natural world. And then, in the film’s climax, she meets a member of the progenitor race she was seeking, and he doesn’t care for her questions. He just wants her dead. A god that regrets his creation, yet doesn’t seem to spare it a second thought—maybe the “Engineers,” as they’re called, don’t eat us, but they don’t regard us any more highly than the Xenomorphs do. To them, we’re just meat.

Forgetting this fact is a cardinal sin in the world of Alien and its sequels. Each story is set in motion by an act of hubris: the assumption that a deadly extraterrestrial life-form can be understood or turned into a weapon; that our star-faring ancestors would care to speak with us; that wealthy men who bend worlds to their will can somehow cheat death as well. Alien: Earth takes this bleak prognosis of humanity as a given and asks its hybrid children-machines if any of it makes sense to them, if this Earth is one they feel any kinship with.

It’s tempting to regard such consistent and fundamental pessimism in the Alien movies as shallow, a sort of nihilistic Darwinism pining for some other species to come and clean house. But I find them a little more capacious than that, a little more elegiac and mournful. Really, they’re about what happens when we forget how awesome and terrifying it is to be a living, conscious being, and how our tragedy begins when we fall so in love with ourselves and our own agency that we deny it to others, whether they share a species or not. In other words, you’re only cooked if you lose respect for life.

This is illustrated by a number of recurring franchise motifs, from the equal distribution of sexual violence represented by the facehugger to the recurring android antagonists that serve as the embodiment of corporate control in the initial films, to the more complicated synthetic beings from Alien: Earth and later films that gesture at our potential transhuman future, if only to wonder whether the human part even belongs at all.

Alien: Earth refracts all these ideas through the lens of a fairy tale. (This is a good shortcut to parsing Hawley’s work: Whatever genre he appears to be working in, he’s actually making a fairy tale.) This makes the series less an installment of the franchise and more a consideration of it—another standard Hawley maneuver. Alien: Earth portrays our species on the precipice of great change, suspended between a tech baron’s vision for a deathless future built on technology he doesn’t fully understand and the reassertion of our brutal past as food for creatures we don’t understand. It’s a show built to process a real world in tremendous, violent flux, one that is continually met with hubris from governments and corporations, the grand achievements in our experiments in capitalism and democracy. The hybrid children of Alien: Earth are effectively taking in the sum total of 46 years of Alien stories, all told by people who seem to not have changed much in that time.

It’s fitting, then, that the film homage that opens the second half of Alien: Earth’s season is built around Morrow (Babou Ceesay), a cyborg in the employ of Weyland-Yutani Corporation. Cyborgs are another addition that Hawley makes to this world, but he’s not interested in the classic cyberpunk questions of whether augmentation makes a cyborg more or less human in an existential sense. Instead, the synthetic metaphor is about agency. A full-on android would, as in prior Alien stories, simply do Weyland-Yutani’s bidding because it is programmed to. Morrow, however, chooses to. He buries the memory of the life he had and was coerced into abandoning and embraces the mission, even beyond the life of the CEO who gave it to him. He’s become, as he says in the second episode, “the worst parts of a man.”

This is the most monstrous transformation that one can go through in the Alien universe. There is a natural order to the Xenomorph’s grotesque violence, a cosmic comeuppance to the arrogance of governments and corporations. Synthetic androids reflect the flaws and priorities of their makers, who are long gone in their appetites for money and power. But to work alongside others, to sweat and labor in tandem with your peers and still choose to be a company man? In this, Hawley echoes Portia’s dismissal of one of her many suitors in The Merchant of Venice. It’s a choice that makes you, at best, little worse than a man. Or little better than a beast.