Seventeen years ago, Noah Hawley became a father during the Great Recession. If you look at everything he’s written since having children—including the TV series Fargo and Legion—Hawley says it all revolves around the same question every parent faces: “How are we supposed to raise these people in the world that we’re living in?”
Hawley’s new series, Alien: Earth, which premieres August 12 on Hulu and FX, explores this question even more directly than his previous work. Set two years before the original Alien in 2120, it imagines a future where the race for immortality has led to three competing technologies: synths (AI minds in synthetic bodies), cyborgs (humans with cybernetic enhancements), and hybrids (human minds downloaded into synthetic bodies).
When a deep space research vessel, the USCSS Maginot, crashes into Earth carrying five captured alien species, a megacorporation called Prodigy sends six hybrids to investigate. The first-ever hybrid, Wendy, played by Sydney Chandler, was a terminally ill child before she was selected for the immortality experiment, just like the rest of Prodigy’s hybrids, all six of whom wake up in super-strong, super-fast, synthetic adult bodies that will never age.
“It’s a very biological process through which we grow up,” Hawley tells WIRED, “and so the idea that you’re going to take these prepubescent children and put them in adult bodies … How are they going to become adults?”
While Alien: Earth is rife with the creature horror and body horror that made its predecessors a cultural phenomenon, Hawley also wanted to introduce “moral horror” via the hybrid characters. “We’re often asked in our lives to make these impossible choices—choices that would be impossible for an adult,” he says. “But to put a child in those positions is really awful,” especially in a future where every aspect of life on Earth—from continents and cities down to the hybrids’ bodies and memories—is owned by a handful of ruthless corporations.
In 2025, we already have runaway income inequality, a push for “startup cities” free from federal laws, a two-company race to build the first brain-computer interface, and the first warning signs of unregulated AI. In Alien: Earth, Hawley asks what kind of world our children will inherit in 2120 if we continue down the same roads.
New Company Towns Will Be “Wetter” and “Tiered”
In Hawley’s vision of the future, Earth’s nation-states have been replaced by corporate territories: North and South America are owned by Weyland-Yutani; Europe by Threshold; North Africa and the Middle East by Dynamic; Russia by Lynch; and East Asia, Australia, Greenland, and Iceland by the relatively new upstart Prodigy, which manufactures synths in addition to soft drinks.
Like the company towns for industrial workers of the 19th century, where housing, schools, stores, and other amenities were owned by an employer, much of Alien: Earth is set in the Prodigy “corporate city” of New Siam, which was based on and filmed on location in Bangkok.
“I think we can all agree that the planet’s about to get a lot hotter and a lot wetter,” Hawley says, and Bangkok is a tropical location filled with rivers and canals. Originally, he envisioned Prodigy’s soldiers moving around New Siam on trains, but once he visited Bangkok, “it became very clear: We’ll put people on boats, [and] it’ll help sell this idea that the water has reclaimed some of the city.”
Hawley’s design team built out a square mile of New Siam in Unreal Engine, the same graphics software used to develop video games like Fortnite and Final Fantasy VII Rebirth. In the eyes of Prodigy, there are “tiered layers” of the city, according to Hawley: Humanity Minus, Humanity Plus, and Humanity Prime (though this concept isn’t discussed on-screen in the final cut of the series).
“The higher you go, the richer you are, and the lower you go, the poorer you are,” Hawley says. When Prodigy soldiers descend to where the Maginot crashed, we see “Humanity Minus” living in dark subterranean hovels, but when they ascend the company’s supertall towers, they stumble upon a Louis XIV-themed party straight out of J. G. Ballard’s High-Rise. Even higher, we first meet the CEO of Weyland-Yutani thousands of feet above another corporate city (an unnamed one Chicagoans will recognize).
“Where Are the Adults” in a World Run by Trillionaires?
In our actual present, Elon Musk, a 54-year-old man who still thinks 4/20 jokes are funny, is poised to become one of the first trillionaires. In the 22nd century of Alien: Earth, the “youngest trillionaire ever” is Boy Kavalier, played by Samuel Blenkin, an egomaniacal “boy genius” who founded Prodigy when he was 6 years old and is now in his early twenties.
“The CEO of this company tells himself he’s Peter Pan,” Hawley says. “And then you read Peter Pan and you go, ‘That’s a dark book.’ He’s kidnapping these children, he’s taking them to this island, [and] it’s implied that when they start to grow up, he gets rid of them.” In a nice literary parallel, Kavalier creates the first hybrids in a research facility on a secluded island called Neverland and renames them after Peter Pan’s Lost Boys.
Alongside his costume designer Suttirat Anne Larlarb, Hawley decided that Kavalier would wear pajamas with no shoes throughout the series because he owns everything in Prodigy City and Neverland. “Everything’s his house,” Hawley says. “The thing about money that I’ve observed is at a certain point, everything is just free. You don’t feel the loss of the money, you’re not actually buying anything or aware of the transactions.”
But Kavalier’s ultrawealthy mindset also affects the way he sees and treats other people. “Triage the rescue by income bracket,” he instructs his right-hand man after the Maginot crash turns Prodigy City into a mass casualty event. Hawley says Kavalier “is a way of literalizing what I feel when I look around the world that I’m living in right now, which is: Where are the adults? Where are the people who think more about tomorrow than today?”
“Retro-Futurism” Meets Brand-New Monsters
The first episode opens on the Maginot, where Hawley’s production designers painstakingly re-created the look and feel of Ridley Scott’s Nostromo. “That’s what Alien is, as far as I’m concerned,” Hawley says. “It’s the retro-futurism. It’s those old cathode [ray] tube monitors. It’s the green ASCII text. It’s those crazy keyboards with the Egyptian hieroglyphics where, like, how do they even know what they’re writing?”
While 1979’s Alien spent 40 minutes establishing the everyday lives of space truckers, Hawley knew Alien: Earth had to accomplish the same thing in just four minutes. “Translating a film to television, your first job is authenticity,” Hawley says, so the Maginot was designed based on Ridley Scott’s Nostromo blueprints “down to the props.”
In addition to H. R. Giger’s xenomorphs, Alien: Earth introduces new extraterrestrial species to the franchise, including a flying insectoid, a botanical creature, and a highly-intelligent tentacled eyeball with multiple pupils that can hijack your body via your own eye socket. Developed conceptually in Hawley’s script and then designed by concept artists at WETA, they were “in some cases perfected only in the last weeks of visual effects,” according to Hawley.
“What I needed them to do was to give you the genetic-revulsion feeling that you had the first time you saw a facehugger,” he says. Hawley doesn’t think sharp teeth are scary; flat teeth would hurt more. “There’s a little idiosyncrasy to my approach to design, where it’s like, more claws? Not that interesting to me. But if it’s a bad flier like a junebug or something? That’s unsettling.”
A “Moral Horror” Story About Growing Up
Alien movies may have raked in more than half a billion dollars at the box office over the past 45 years, but Hawley wanted to get back to the practical effects and personal fears that infused Ridley Scott’s original film. “People feel maybe at a certain price point, now you can stop putting a camera on a rolling chair—you can stop with the guerrilla techniques—but for me it’s always whatever solves the problem,” he says.
In the first episode, when he needed the xenomorph to slide into view through a doorway, Hawley put the suit performer in a rolling chair. When watching dailies, he would sometimes hum a tune into his phone and send it to his composer, Jeff Russo. “It’s a very hands-on process, and I think you feel that,” Hawley says. “It doesn’t feel like this is some soulless exercise written by cash registers.”
Earlier this year, Hawley told the New York Times he’d “rather fail horribly than be middle of the road” and that writers “have to take the big creative swings.” When WIRED asks about the biggest swing he took with Alien: Earth, Hawley doesn’t hesitate.
“It was actors playing children in adult bodies,” he says, which initially made some collaborators nervous about the series. “When we think of children in adult bodies we think of Will Ferrell. We think of Elf. But I knew children are super noble and truthful and honorable, and if they’re written correctly, and if the actors understand the assignment, then you get the best of both worlds.”
The result of Hawley’s swing is one of the most fascinating science-fiction TV series of the decade that poses compelling questions about the future, what it means to be human, and how children become—or don’t become—adults.
“For these children who were human and have now been put into synthetic bodies, humanity is now a choice,” Hawley says. “What are these children going to choose?”