SPOILER WARNING: Contains major spoilers for Season 1
Across its eight episodes, the first season of Alien: Earth proved a bold addition to the Xenomorph canon. Noah Hawley’s take on the legendary space-horror saga brought the extraterrestrial menace – and several other standout species – to, yes, Earth. But the real focus of the show was Sydney Chandler’s Wendy, the consciousness of a terminally-ill child transported into an android body, set against a backdrop of a future-Earth ruled by several warring corporations, Weyland-Yutani among them. Along the way, Wendy and her fellow ‘Lost Boys’ forged an unexpected partnership with the Xenomorphs – and the season ended on a spine-tingling note, as the synths – with their alien allies – declared: “Now we rule.”
For Hawley, that triumphant final note poses plenty of possibilities for a potential Season 2. But it won’t be plain sailing. “That moment of, ‘Now we rule,’ is such an exhilarating moment for the audience. And then the question is… well, it was an exhilarating moment when Dustin Hoffman ran out of the church and they got on the bus [in The Graduate]. But what comes after?” he tells Empire. “The [Weyland-Yutani] ships are coming and all they have is problems.”
Should the show continue (a second season has not yet been confirmed) Hawley wants to dig deeper into the future-Earth he established, where the ruling powers are capitalistic. “I’m interested in exploring the corporate politics of it,” he says. “As we’ve seen, there’s an irresistible gravitational pull toward monopoly that corporations and billionaires have. There’s a bit of Game Of Thrones to the corporate world that feels interesting to me.” Still, the core of Alien: Earth will be Wendy and friends – moving beyond the island they’ve been inhabiting. “I do think this story of these children’s autonomy continues to be the heart of the show, but Alien is always about levels of containment,” Hawley explains. “The island is a level of containment and what happens when you expand past that level? Ultimately, the show is called Alien: Earth. I know that, given the canon, I can’t blow up the Earth, but I do think that containment is going to be very hard to maintain.”
Whatever happens next, Hawley has plenty of big ideas to be explored through Wendy, the Xenomorphs, and the tech-giant future. “Because it’s a story about humanity trapped between nature that’s trying to kill us and the technology we’ve created that also seems to be trying to kill us, that feels a lot like the world that I live in,” he reasons, “and so I feel like there’s a lot there to really grapple with.” Now he rules.
Read Empire’s full Noah Hawley interview – on Alien: Earth Season 1 and what comes next – in the Stranger Things 5 issue, on sale now. Order a copy online here. Alien: Earth is streaming now in full on Disney+.