“Alien Earth” creator Noah Hawley reveals that he took some inspiration from James Cameron’s “Aliens” for a certain plot twist in the latest episode…
SPOILERS AHEAD IF YOU HAVEN’T SEEN ALIEN EARTH EPISODE 7
Noah Hawley’s “Alien Earth” series on FX has already introduced plenty of new ideas never before seen in the films and he added yet another new wrinkle with the latest plot twist in episode 7.
It was already established previously that Wendy maintained some sort of connection with the Xenomorphs after she battled one in the crashed ship, the USS Maginot, and it wasn’t soon after when she realized she could actually interpret their language and communicate with them. That took a dramatic turn in the latest episode when Wendy actually used her ability to speak to the Xenomorph and order to to hide and then attack when she, Nibs and her brother were threatened.
It turns out, Hawley drew at least part of the inspiration for this idea from James Cameron’s critically acclaimed sequel “Aliens,” which introduced the Queen Xenomorph and her ability to communicate with her soldiers when Ripley is threatening to torch her eggs with a flamethrower.
“Obviously, there’s that moment in Cameron’s film where the queen communicates with the drones,” Hawley told The Hollywood Reporter. “Is that a pheromone? Is it telekinetic? Is that a frequency we can’t hear? We don’t know, but that always seemed really interesting as something to explore.”
While that was an interesting enough wrinkle, Hawley admitted that crafting a season long show with eight episodes also gave them a lot more time to flesh out additional story involving the Xenomorphs as well as the other alien creatures captured by the Maginot in deep space.
“An ‘Alien’ movie is a two-hour survival story, and a television show has to be an ongoing series,” Hawley explained. “You have to use the monsters in a different way. You certainly want to use them in the classic way, but you also have to figure out how to sustain having monsters in your show when the reality is they would kill everyone, or that you would kill them — and then that would be it.
“Bringing in other creatures allowed me to take the pressure off the xenomorphs to fill that void.”
Hawley also introduced the moral conundrum that has faced some of the characters on the show — in particular husband and wife doctors who were not keen on mistreating the hybrids that Boy Kavalier created after placing a child’s human consciousness into a robot body. In the previous episode, the doctors were instructed to wipe Nibs’ memory after she began exhibiting strange behavior and even going as far as claiming she was pregnant — a physical impossibility for a robot.
The creation of the hybrids alongside the development of the Xenomorph presents all sorts of interesting problems and Hawley believes the show sets out to solve those over the course of a season — or maybe even two or three seasons.
“There’s also this idea of the hubris of people — that classic ‘Jurassic Park’ thing of “just because you can do something doesn’t mean you should,'” Hawley said. “And the naiveté of children, as well. There’s a romanticism that can happen in kids. She wants to believe that it’s not these creatures’ fault, that they didn’t ask to come here, and we shouldn’t experiment on them the way that she’s being experimented on. You can understand the rationale. But it doesn’t make it safe to make friends with one.
“One of the big question marks was if fans were going to go with this idea. I don’t want her to have [a xenomorph as a] pet. But if it seems like an alliance has been struck, what are the interesting possibilities that we can pull out of that? And because this is a horror story, we have to assume that, ultimately, I wouldn’t bet on this working out.”
Thus far, Xenomorphs haven’t been trained, civil or anything other than the ultimate killing machine in the other “Alien” films so it’s safe to assume that Wendy’s connection isn’t going to lead to a trained group of creatures acting at her every command.
Still, Hawley introducing the idea that a hybrid like Wendy could communicate with a Xenomorph introduces a while new ideology where these aliens are concerned.
The season finale of “Alien Earth” airs next Tuesday on FX and Hulu.
