Where Does ‘Alien: Earth’ Fit Into the ‘Alien’ Universe Timeline?
This story contains spoilers for the first episode of Alien: Earth.
Live forever isn’t just one of the hooks you’ll hear at this summer’s biggest concert. It’s also the central idea at the core of one of summer’s biggest television shows. In Alien: Earth, which premieres tonight on FX, Fargo creator Noah Hawley reimagines another big-screen property for television. But this time, he’s tackling one of the most iconic science fiction franchises of all time, with a prequel series set in the world of Ridley Scott’s Alien.
Earth follows last year’s Alien: Romulus as the franchise unfurls its tendrils into new ventures under the Disney banner. And while Romulus managed to find a compelling way to hit the highs of the original films, Earth is poised to head in a different direction. From the opening moments of Earth, Hawley makes his intentions clear. It’s 2120, two years before the original Alien, and the five corporations that control the Earth are in a “Race for Immortality.” But how does that timeline square with what’s come before—specifically the Ridley Scott prequels Prometheus and Alien: Covenant, which established that the alien Xenomorphs were an organic superweapon created by a race known as the Engineers? The answer is a bit complicated.
From the get-go, Hawley’s been less interested in the ideas presented by the prequels. “Ridley and I have talked about this—and many, many elements of the show,” he told KCRW’s The Business. “For me, and for a lot of people, this ‘perfect life form’—as it was described in the first film — is the product of millions of years of evolution that created this creature that may have existed for a million years out there in space. The idea that, on some level, it was a bioweapon created half an hour ago, that’s just inherently less useful to me.” True to his word, the timeline, as presented by Earth, becomes a bit fuzzy in relation to squaring chronological events from Scott’s prequels.
As the show’s opening crawl details it, the crew of the USCSS Maginot is on a 65-year mission, dispatched by (you guessed it) the nefarious Weyland-Yutani corporation to secure a handful of creatures on behalf of the company. That mission puts the Maginot departing Earth in 2055, which is pre-Prometheus, since that film takes place between 2089 to 2093. Additionally, we hear crew members of the Maginot talking about “Chibuzo’s specimens.” While we’re not entirely sure through the premiere of Earth who Chibuzo is, we feel safe in assuming they’re the current CEO of Weyland-Yutani—or they were the CEO when the Maginot initially left Earth. Either way, that’s notably not Guy Pearce’s Peter Weyland, who is the CEO of the Weyland Corporation during Prometheus. Nor does it quite square with the canonical merger date for Weyland and Yutani, which is 2099.
(Quick aside: the merger wasn’t really a merger, but rather, happened as a hostile takeover of Weyland by Yutani spun to the public as a joining of forces. It also proved to be the last laugh for Yutani, who lost a lawsuit to Weyland over a copyright lawsuit related to the construction of David, the android played by Michael Fassbender in the two Scott prequels.)
