Going into “Alien: Earth,” series creator Noah Hawley knew that his FX adaptation needed to be an entirely new take on the beloved sci-fi franchise. But halfway through writing the season, he realized he had an opportunity to go back to this horror staple’s roots.
“The way these big things work is that there’s a show in the abstract. You come up with the best story possible, and then you go, ‘Huh, what do you think this is going to cost?’ You go through a cost analysis, budgeting and then you go, ‘Oh, yeah, that’s too much.’ So now, now we have to adjust some story,” Hawley told TheWrap. “Somewhere in there I had the inspiration that — in the middle of this reinvention of ‘Alien — I’d love to do classic ‘Alien’ to show I could do classic ‘Alien’ as well as anybody.”
Once Hawley wrote what would become Episode 5, which uses the ship set seen in the first episode, he knew he needed to direct that installment as well. “I thought, ‘I can’t give that to a different director. I need to do it,’” he said. “Part of the joy, for me, of that fifth hour is everything goes wrong.”
“Alien: Earth” begins with the crew of the Maginot space vessel battling a Xenomorph and crash landing on Earth. But “In Space, No One…” goes back in time, showing every mistake that led to this world-changing crash. It also teases an episode-long mystery as the ship’s new captain Zaveri (Richa Moorjani) and its cyborg security officer Morrow (Babou Ceesay) try to discover who double crossed the crew and their mission to unleash an alien.
Set aboard the Maginot, the increasingly frantic hourlong episode is visually the most similar to Ridley Scott’s 1979 classic. However, it was also inspired by James Cameron’s 1986 take on the franchise, “Aliens.”
“That last few minutes, it becomes insane. When that Xenomorph finally reveals itself, and you’re like, ‘Oh, right, there’s also a 10-foot-tall Xenomorph,’” Hawley said. “That is certainly the feeling that I had when I watched James Cameron’s movie for the first time … It keeps escalating.”
Though the episode serves as the clearest homage to the original “Alien” movies, this depiction of the crash also drives the plot forward. For one, audiences learn more about, well, the aliens, specifically the lifecycle of the tick-like specimens. The first episode of “Alien: Earth” reveals that the tick-like creatures suck the blood from their prey. But in Episode 5, one of those aliens proves it’s smart enough to escape its containment and lay eggs in a crew member’s water bottle.
“The fun of it was, at every opportunity, to add a discovery, which was similar to when the facehugger falls off,” Hawley said. “It’s that tension between comedy and horror, right? It’s like, ‘What’s the worst thing that the tick could do after it lays eggs in your drinking water? Burrow into your sandwich.’ Just knowing that the audience will probably never drink out of a water bottle again without looking in it first is satisfying.”
The episode also expands on another foe — Maginot’s cyborg security officer Morrow (Ceesay). By Episode 4, Morrow emerges as the show’s biggest humanoid foe as he tries to manipulate one of the children hybrids into stealing an alien for him to bring back to his employer, the Weyland-Yutani Corporation. But “In Space, No One…” reframes his motivations a bit.
“I’m an ensemble storyteller, and I’ve created a lot of villains in in my day. They’re often the most interesting characters; they’re often people’s favorite characters, but he was never the villain to me. He was the antagonist, which is a different thing,” Hawley explained. “From his point of view, his ship has been boarded. They’re stealing from him. He is very much the hero of his story.”
“Babou is a miracle, really,” he added. “I told him, ‘Everyone in the show is competing with you, man. You were setting the bar every time I call action.’ And he really was.”
But as much as the episode may feel like a nod to Scott, Cameron and David Fincher’s “Alien” movies with some new flourishes of lore, “In Space, No One…” does feel distinct. There is a notably bleaker and more tragic tone to the episode, owing to the fact that the audience knows this story will end with everyone dying, save for Morrow. The installment also turns the strong female leader trope that Sigourney Weaver’s Ellen Ripley pioneered on its head. Though Richa Moorjani’s Zaveri is positioned to become this ship’s fearless leader, as more aliens escape and more of her crew dies, she panics. Her failure is an unexpected twist that drives home each new horror.
“The challenge of leadership is in the hard decisions. She is ultimately too invested in each individual survival in order to be the captain of all of them. I like that moment where Morrow says, ‘I’m taking control.’ But I also like the fact that it follows a moment in which we see him for the first time not know what to do,” Hawley said. “But with, obviously, Ripley, and in the strength of the ‘Alien’ franchise, there was a lot that was going to get projected on her automatically, that she was going to be this badass. But I think within that, you always want to tell a story that is unexpected.”
New episodes of “Alien: Earth” premiere on FX Tuesdays at 8 p.m. ET/PT.
