Terrifying Xenomorphs, human-android hybrids, and a celebrity trillionaire who holds a mirror up to our world — “Alien: Earth” has it all.
The show follows two warring companies, Weyland-Yutani and Prodigy Corp, as they scramble to catch the Xenomorph and a handful of other creatures after they crash-land on Earth.
Prodigy Corp is led by Boy Kavalier (Samuel Blenkin), who has found a way to transfer the consciousness of terminally ill children into synthetic adult bodies. He uses these human-androids (dubbed the “Lost Boys”) to do his bidding and capture the Xenomorph.
Noah Hawley, who created and wrote “Alien: Earth,” spoke to Business Insider in London about how the show holds a mirror up to our world, saying, “I think it’s pretty obvious that we’re all living in the same world, and we are looking at this show with the same eyes.”
He said that because Weyland-Yutani was a “faceless corporate thing” where “the individual was powerless against the system” in the “Alien” movies, he needed to add something different in the TV show so audiences could “see the world they were living in.”
“What we have now is a system in which the individual has the most power. The one leader of the corporation is a celebrity and a trillionaire and everything, and then all of the other individuals are powerless in the face of the whim of the founder.”
Blenkin said that Kavalier makes “brutal, logical choices” because he believes he’s doing what is best for humanity.
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“There are clear resonances there with what’s happening right now in the world, and the joy of this character who is strange and has his own weird tendencies and that kind of thing. I get to inhabit that.”
Despite the commentary on our own world, Blenkin says his performance isn’t inspired by anyone in particular because “the writing is taking care of those connections.”
He continued, “The best stories, especially a TV show, you want to come around the back door. You don’t want to knock the audience over the head.”
“Alien: Earth” starts streaming on Hulu on August 12 in the United States and on August 13 on Disney+ in the United Kingdom.
