[This story contains spoilers from Alien: Earth‘s fifth episode, “In Space, No One…”]
Alien: Earth gave franchise fans an unexpected treat with its fifth episode: A mini-Alien movie that feels like the FX drama took Ridley Scott‘s 1979 original film and re-imagined its core elements as a unique one-hour story.
Aptly titled “In Space, No One…” (playing off the original film’s famous marketing tagline, “In Space, No One Can Hear You Scream”), the flashback episode showed what happened aboard the ill-fated USCSS Maginot that caused its dangerous creatures to escape and the ship to crash into Earth.
With the ship’s interior sets as a near replica of those from the first film’s ship, Nostromo, the action played like an alternate universe version of the decades-old film that we’d never seen before. The sequence also contained a twist that upended many of the audience’s assumptions about the previous episodes and was inspired by the antics of a certain tech billionaire.
“This allowed me — in the middle of trying to innovate what [the Alien franchise could be as a series] — to also pick up the gauntlet for classic Alien to say, ‘We could do classic Alien and do it as well as anyone,’” Hawley said. “But what’s interesting to me at the same time is adding all these new elements, and putting the creatures in this thematic context. It’s the number of elements at play that make it fun to me. It’s like by the time the xenomorph enters the story, you’re six tragedies deep with these other creatures. Then the xenomorph arrives and it just escalates.”
Hawley continued, “When you think about the last 10 minutes of James Cameron‘s movie [Aliens], there’s no other word for it than ‘thrilling.’ And my hope was that by putting these elements together and with all these creatures — the sabotage and getting to the bridge and then the chief engineer with The Eye — and now the xenomorph is there, that it just escalates in a way that I think ends up feeling a little crazy. You leave the predictable Alien world and are like, ‘I do not know what is going to happen next.’”
One key moment is the revelation that Boy Kavalier (Samuel Blenkin) was behind the sabotage of the Maginot in an effort to get the ship to crash into his territory so he could steal the creatures. It’s a perhaps controversial twist and I suggest to Hawley that — for a famed smartest-geek-alive genius — this seems like a really dumb plan that should never have worked. But it turns out that the plan’s reckless idiocy was kind of the point.
“I don’t look at our tech billionaires and think these guys are orchestrating some master plan,” Hawley replies. “I think you have a lot of ADHD billionaires with impulse control issues. And we always look to impose a certain logic on our fiction that doesn’t apply to real life. For me, it’s a way to tie everything together and as the show plays out in the rest of the season, we find that the boy genius is not a terribly thoughtful and calculating guy. He has all these ideas. He chases all of them at the same time. And he has never failed. So he thinks failure is impossible. He’s trying to launch this immortality product, so why would he do this other stuff? He thinks, ‘Oh, I could do everything.’”
Hawley then suggested the characterization is a comment on Elon Musk (he doesn’t say the billionaire’s name, but his description seems to clearly point to the Tesla/SpaceX/The Boring Company/X mogul as an inspiration. “It’s a statement, on some level, about the hubris we’re seeing around us by people who think they can go to space, re-invent travel, drill in the earth and enter politics,” he said. “They’re doing all of these at the same time when none of them are necessarily being done well. They’re just all being done a lot.”
Throughout the episode, the viewer is also wondering the deal with one character in particular: Andy Yu’s crew member Teng, who spied on a fellow crew member in her sleep and seemed rather unpleasant, and then was taken out by the xenomorph. So was he just a creepy human then?
“It’s always open to interpretation, and that’s the fun of that franchise — who is an android and who isn’t?” Hawley said. “At a certain point, you start to question everybody. But yeah, for me, he’s a creepy dude.”
Hawley added that the show’s casting drew from his showrunning experiences on Fargo.
“When I realized that I wanted to do that flashback episode, selfishly I was like, ‘Well, I have to [direct] that one; I don’t want to hand that one off,’” Hawley said. “Part of that was the casting. [The security officer cyborg Morrow, played by Babou Ceesay] obviously carries the show, but you need that cast to be memorable instantly. A lot of it for me was being over in Thailand like, ‘Well, who can I call that will come?’ So I called Richa Moorjani. I called Karen Aldridge from season four of Fargo. I called Andy Yu from season three of Fargo. And the great Michael Smiley and so many great UK actors. They all pop and resonate. So much of what I do in these big ensemble shows is constantly building new worlds and you can’t really assign that to another director. The specificity of it, I felt like I needed to do.”
Alien: Earth releases new episodes Tuesdays at 8 p.m. ET and 5 p.m. PT on FX and Hulu.