Noah Hawley, the showrunner for the Alien TV series, has offered an update on the upcoming sci-fi series. First announced as part of Disney’s 2020 Investor Day, the show is a spin-off of the popular Alien movies and will finally bring the deadly Xenomorph to Earth after decades of teasing.
Details on the show are scarce at the moment, but in a new interview with Esquire, Hawley reassured fans of the Alien movies it’ll be worth the wait. “It’s going great,” he said. “It’s going slowly, unfortunately, given the scale of it.” Hawley also provided some details about his interpretation of the Alien story.
“I’ve made a certain business out of reinvention,” he explained. “Alien is a fascinating story because it’s not just a monster movie; it’s about how we’re trapped between the primordial past and the artificial intelligence of our future, where both trying to kill us. It’s set on Earth of the future. At this moment, I describe that as Edison versus Westinghouse versus Tesla. Someone’s going to monopolize electricity. We just don’t know which one it is.”
He finished by saying that the series will examine transhumanist themes surrounding artificial intelligence, cybernetic enhancements, or even downloading entire brains.
“It’s ultimately a classic science fiction question: does humanity deserve to survive?” he explained. “As Sigourney Weaver said in that second movie, ‘I don’t know which species is worse. At least they don’t fuck each other over for a percentage.’ Even if the show was 60% of the best horror action on the planet, there’s still 40% where we have to ask, “What are we talking about it, beneath it all?” Thematically, it has to be interesting. It’s humbling to get to play with the iconography of this world.”
The Alien TV series is expected to start filming this year before debuting on Disney Plus in 2023.