'Alien: Earth': New prequel series turns Peter Pan-inspired character into a futurist with deadly ideas

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19 hours ago

A new 'Alien' prequel series reimagines corporate control and AI fears through a sci-fi lens — with a 'Peter Pan' twist
Heading back aboard the Weyland-Yutani spaceship, the world of Alien continues to expand with the prequel series Alien: Earth (premiering at 8:00 p.m. ET on Disney+ in Canada), starring Sydney Chandler, Alex Lawther, Timothy Olyphant, Babou Ceesay and Samuel Blenkin. It's set in the year 2120, two years before the events of Ridley Scott's 1979 film, in a world where five corporations control the globe: Prodigy, Weyland-Yutani, Lynch, Dynamic and Threshold.
Boy Kavalier (Blenkin) was a young boy genius when he founded Prodigy. The CEO manufactured a new technological advancement with the creation of hybrids, a type of robot injected with human consciousness. The first hybrid is named Wendy, created amid a race for immortality.
Created by Noah Hawley, the Peter Pan element of Alien: Earth is something that he described to reporters as being particularly linked to themes explored in previous Alien projects, but also our real world today.
"For me, it started with the fact that I'm raising kids, and I'm raising kids in this world in which the natural world is starting to turn on us and the technology we've created, the jury's out on whether that's going to turn on us," Hawley said. "And when they asked me if I had any ideas for Alien, I thought, well, that's what Alien is about. It's about ... primordial monsters of our past that are trying to kill Sigourney [Weaver]. And then the AI future we realize is also trying to kill her. So humanity is trapped between the AI future and the monsters of the past."
"Once I started with this idea of bringing children into this story—the human minds transferred into synthetic bodies—then the Peter Pan analogy came pretty quickly after that."
Chandler is tasked with portraying Wendy, with the the actor navigating playing a character that has a "child's consciousness," in an adult form.
"Wendy is very much a blank page," Chandler said. "I feel like Noah was able to create a very layered, grounded character."
"As far as balancing the two, it really depended on who I was acting with on the day and in what scene. Every actor would bring a different colour to the work, which would kind of give me more information of who I am playing. It was kind of a collaboration of finding Wendy that way. But I would have this image of two magnets kind of pressing up against each other, and you just can't get them to touch as far as the mind, which is known, and this body, which is unknown territory. It's kind of like what's in the middle."
But as Hawley highlighted, so much of what informs the Alien franchise is this evaluation of capitalism and corporate control, but the "boy genius" element makes this prequel series very relevant for its 2025 release.
"So much of what defines Alien and Aliens is this idea that there's this nameless, faceless Weyland-Yutani corporation and these individuals, the space truckers or the soldiers, ... they're really at the mercy of this nameless, faceless corporation," Hawley said. "In our day and age, our corporations have faces and the faces of these young technocrats, who are celebrity CEO billionaires."
"So, if I had done the 1970s version of capitalism, it wouldn't have felt right for the world that we live in today. And so once the Peter Pan analogy emerged in the storytelling, then it became clear that the CEO who invents this hybrid technology should be the Peter Pan character himself in Boy Kavalier. What you see is that it always felt to Yaphet Kotto and Harry Dean Stanton that they were at the whim of this larger corporation. But here, I think we really feel like it really is all about the whim of Boy Kavalier, how he feels from moment to moment. Yeah, let's send these billion-dollar prototypes to a crash site. That sounds like a good idea, right? So we're in a different sort of state where the individual is at the mercy now, not just of this nameless, faceless corporation, but these sort of boy geniuses."
Ridley Scott influence: 'I was on the runway, he was on his own runway'
Through every Alien-related project, Ridley Scott has been known to connect with the talents helming expansions of the franchise. For Alien: Earth, Hawley connected with the director of the original film, but very much felt like he was able to take his own path.
"I started talking to Sir Ridley early on in the process. I had done my due diligence in thinking through an idea that I wanted to explore within the show, but first I wanted to talk to Ridley and see, both his experiences on the first film and then what was in his mind going into Prometheus and Covenant and start to let him in on some of the ideas that that I had for the show," Hawley said.
"And every time I spoke to him, he was storyboarding what felt like a different movie. I think in the course of our conversations, it was The Last Duel. It was [House of] Gucci. It was Napoleon. So in the course of making a single season of television, that 87-year-old man made three or four huge films. ...So, we were slacking and he was working. I think my job as a filmmaker is really to make decisions, right? And Ridley's job is the same. I think once he realized that ... he did not have those responsibilities on this show, he wants to move on to the next thing. He's got a real agenda. So, we would speak from time to time, but mostly after I was on the runway, he was on his own runway."