SCOTT DETROW, HOST:
If you've ever seen the movie "Alien," you know this scene.
(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "ALIEN")
JOHN HURT: (As Kane, groaning).
(SOUNDBITE OF XENOMORPH SCREECHING)
DETROW: Ridley Scott's 1979 horror film introduced the world to the Xenomorph, a terrifying extraterrestrial. In this particular scene, the creature is jumping out of somebody's chest. Each movie is set in deep space where - you might remember - no one can hear you scream. But what if these nightmarish creatures made their way to Planet Earth? "Alien: Earth," a new show on FX, out now, tries to answer that question.
(SOUNDBITE OF TV SHOW, "ALIEN: EARTH")
SYDNEY CHANDLER: (As Wendy) It's like a zoo, but the animals got out.
BABOU CEESAY: (As Morrow) This ship collected five different life forms from the darkest corners of the universe. Monsters.
DETROW: This show features two corporations fighting against each other for control of the planet. On one side, there's a major established conglomerate. On the other, a group of children whose minds have been transferred into the bodies of superhuman adults by an ambitious and perhaps psychotic boy genius future tech bro.
NOAH HAWLEY: If we're bringing these creatures to Earth, then what is the moment on Earth? And I thought it would be interesting if we set the show in a moment, you know, real sort of corporate struggle over who was going to control the future of humanity.
DETROW: Noah Hawley, the show's writer, is known for taking major franchises like "X-Men" and the movie "Fargo" and turning them into his own unique universes. When we spoke recently, he told me the show, like the movies, digs at two central questions about humanity.
HAWLEY: An alien movie is a two-hour survival story about basically, will one human survive? And our show is also a survival story, but it's - will humanity survive? - which, of course, raises the issue of, does humanity deserve to survive? And the movies really interrogate this as well. You have Paul Reiser's character in the second film, and Sigourney tells him, I don't know which species is worse. At least they don't screw each other over for a percentage. You know, there's this sense that human morality is also a monster when people are acting out of cynicism or greed. And so the show really tries to confront that as well - the idea that, you know, maybe the humans are the problem.
DETROW: A big part of the show is this storyline about a character on the cutting edge of taking human consciousness and putting it into machines and making a lot of ethical choices doing that. And I think, like, obviously, we are reading a new headline every day about the world just wildly changing when it comes to artificial intelligence. How actively were you thinking about what's happening in AI in 2025 as you crafted these stories about - I forget the exact year - but it's about 100 years down the line?
HAWLEY: Well, what's sort of fascinating to me is that when I wrote these scripts, there was no ChatGPT. The first season of the show's been a journey that's taken me about five years. And when I started it and when I did the bulk of the storytelling on paper, there was no ChatGPT. And then when we went into production, I think it was just the first iteration had come out, and we realized that this future was closer than we thought. And certainly now, by the time the show is coming out, you know, this is a vital and immediate conversation that we're all engaged in, and things are moving much faster than people can really process and plan for. So I think, like, a lot of good sci-fi, what - the futurism that we engage in is looking at this race for progress and asking, yeah, we can do it, but should we do it?
DETROW: I think everybody who worked on the segment was struck by the placement of the importance of family and children in the storyline. We were just thinking about the fact that this is not really a theme in many of the other "Alien" titles. I'm curious how you got there, why you landed on that as such a big part of what happens in this world and what happens this season.
HAWLEY: Usually these stories, these shows come to me as an image or just a concept. And I had this transhumanism (ph) story, and, you know, you put an adult mind in a synthetic body, and it tends to go a little crazy. So they start with the children because those minds are still growing. And this led me to a kind of Peter Pan analogy.
(SOUNDBITE OF TV SHOW, "ALIEN: EARTH")
CHANDLER: (As Wendy) But then the boy genius came along, and he said, don't be sad. I'm going to fix you right up. And that's exactly what he did. He gave me this big girl body, better than new. Now I'm your forever girl.
UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR: (As character) Because grown-up minds don't fit?
CHANDLER: (As Wendy) Oh, because grownup minds are too stiff, so they can't make the trip yet. But our minds - kid minds - we fit just right.
HAWLEY: The show becomes really a question of, how do children grow up? And so much of how we grow up is biological - you know, hormones, and our bodies change, etc. And if we don't have that process, how are these children going to grow up? And then it also led me to this exploration of morality and what we're teaching our children about how to be adults and then to this other idea, which is looking around the world that I'm living in right now and going, where are the adults? Where are the people who are thinking more about tomorrow than they are about today, right? And so the show becomes a kind of metaphor - these children trying to figure out - they're looking at the adults around them, and those adults are not behaving very well. And they're trying to figure out, well, what is it to be human, and what is it to be an adult?
DETROW: These are some very deep questions to be mixed in with facehugger (ph) aliens, and I have to say, a terrifying eyeball spider that pops up early on...
HAWLEY: Yes.
DETROW: ...In the show.
HAWLEY: Yeah, well, it's the other feeling that I wanted to recreate that the other "Alien" movies haven't really been able to give audiences, which is the most terrifying thing about that first movie, "Alien," is you have no idea what this creature is going to be from any moment to the next. It starts as an egg, and then it's a facehugger. And you think, well, that's the worst thing I've ever seen. And then the facehugger falls off, and you think, oh, OK, that's fine. And then this creature bursts out of your chest, and then it grows to be 10 feet tall. And so at every step, there's this sense of discovery of the life cycle of this creature.
But now, after seven movies, we know the life cycle of that creature. And so I thought, well, the only way to give the audience that critical feeling is to introduce new creatures that they don't know how they reproduce and what they eat and what their behavior is. And so you can feel that same genetic revulsion about each of these creatures. And the Xenomorph then can fill a different role in the story than it has traditionally.
DETROW: That is Noah Hawley, creator of the new FX series, "Alien: Earth." Thank you so much.
HAWLEY: Thank you.
DETROW: "Alien: Earth" is out now on the FX cable channel. It's also streaming on Hulu.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC) Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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