{"id":128815,"date":"2025-09-03T04:04:08","date_gmt":"2025-09-03T04:04:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/128815\/"},"modified":"2025-09-03T04:04:08","modified_gmt":"2025-09-03T04:04:08","slug":"earth-creator-on-that-stand-alone-alien-movie-episode","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/128815\/","title":{"rendered":"Earth’ Creator on That Stand-Alone ‘Alien’ Movie Episode"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\t[This story contains spoilers from Alien: Earth<\/a>\u2018s fifth episode, \u201cIn Space, No One\u2026\u201d]<\/p>\n

\n\tAlien: Earth gave franchise fans an unexpected treat with its fifth episode: A mini-Alien movie that feels like the FX<\/a> drama took Ridley Scott<\/a>\u2018s 1979 original film and re-imagined its core elements as a unique one-hour story. <\/p>\n

\n\tAptly titled \u201cIn Space, No One\u2026\u201d (playing off the original film\u2019s famous marketing tagline, \u201cIn Space, No One Can Hear You Scream\u201d), the flashback episode showed what happened aboard the ill-fated USCSS\u00a0Maginot that caused its dangerous creatures to escape and the ship to crash into Earth. <\/p>\n

\n\tWith the ship\u2019s interior sets as a near replica of those from the first film\u2019s ship, Nostromo, the action played like an alternate universe version of the decades-old film that we\u2019d never seen before. The sequence also contained a twist that upended many of the audience\u2019s assumptions about the previous episodes and was inspired by the antics of a certain tech billionaire.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cThis allowed me \u2014 in the middle of trying to innovate what [the Alien franchise could be as a series] \u2014 to also pick up the gauntlet for classic Alien to say, \u2018We could do classic Alien and do it as well as anyone,’\u201d Hawley said. \u201cBut what\u2019s interesting to me at the same time is adding all these new elements, and putting the creatures in this thematic context. It\u2019s the number of elements at play that make it fun to me. It\u2019s like by the time the xenomorph enters the story, you\u2019re six tragedies deep with these other creatures. Then the xenomorph arrives and it just escalates.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tHawley continued, \u201cWhen you think about the last 10 minutes of James Cameron<\/a>\u2018s movie [Aliens], there\u2019s no other word for it than \u2018thrilling.\u2019 And my hope was that by putting these elements together and with all these creatures \u2014 the sabotage and getting to the bridge and then the chief engineer with The Eye \u2014 and now the xenomorph is there, that it just escalates in a way that I think ends up feeling a little crazy. You leave the predictable Alien world and are like, \u2018I do not know what is going to happen next.’\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tOne key moment is the revelation that Boy Kavalier (Samuel Blenkin) was behind the sabotage of the Maginot in an effort to get the ship to crash into his territory so he could steal the creatures. It\u2019s a perhaps controversial twist and I suggest to Hawley that \u2014 for a famed smartest-geek-alive genius \u2014 this seems like a really dumb plan that should never have worked. But it turns out that the plan\u2019s reckless idiocy was kind of the point.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cI don\u2019t look at our tech billionaires and think these guys are orchestrating some master plan,\u201d Hawley replies. \u201cI think you have a lot of ADHD billionaires with impulse control issues. And we always look to impose a certain logic on our fiction that doesn\u2019t apply to real life. For me, it\u2019s a way to tie everything together and as the show plays out in the rest of the season, we find that the boy genius is not a terribly thoughtful and calculating guy. He has all these ideas. He chases all of them at the same time. And he has never failed. So he thinks failure is impossible. He\u2019s trying to launch this immortality product, so why would he do this other stuff? He thinks, \u2018Oh, I could do everything.’\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tHawley then suggested the characterization is a comment on Elon Musk<\/a> (he doesn\u2019t say the billionaire\u2019s name, but his description seems to clearly point to the Tesla\/SpaceX\/The Boring Company\/X mogul as an inspiration. \u201cIt\u2019s a statement, on some level, about the hubris we\u2019re seeing around us by people who think they can go to space, re-invent travel, drill in the earth and enter politics,\u201d he said. \u201cThey\u2019re doing all of these at the same time when none of them are necessarily being done well. They\u2019re just all being done a lot.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tThroughout the episode, the viewer is also wondering the deal with one character in particular: Andy Yu\u2019s crew member Teng, who spied on a fellow crew member in her sleep and seemed rather unpleasant, and then was taken out by the xenomorph. So was he just a creepy human then?<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cIt\u2019s always open to interpretation, and that\u2019s the fun of that franchise \u2014 who is an android and who isn\u2019t?\u201d Hawley said. \u201cAt a certain point, you start to question everybody. But yeah, for me, he\u2019s a creepy dude.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tHawley added that the show\u2019s casting drew from his showrunning experiences on Fargo<\/a>. <\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cWhen I realized that I wanted to do that flashback episode, selfishly I was like, \u2018Well, I have to [direct] that one; I don\u2019t want to hand that one off,’\u201d Hawley said. \u201cPart of that was the casting. [The security officer cyborg Morrow, played by Babou Ceesay] obviously carries the show, but you need that cast to be memorable instantly. A lot of it for me was being over in Thailand like, \u2018Well, who can I call that will come?\u2019 So I called Richa Moorjani. I called Karen Aldridge from season four of Fargo. I called Andy Yu from season three of Fargo. And the great Michael Smiley and so many great UK actors. They all pop and resonate. So much of what I do in these big ensemble shows is constantly building new worlds and you can\u2019t really assign that to another director. The specificity of it, I felt like I needed to do.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tAlien: Earth releases new episodes Tuesdays at 8 p.m. ET and 5 p.m. PT on FX and Hulu.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"[This story contains spoilers from Alien: Earth\u2018s fifth episode, \u201cIn Space, No One\u2026\u201d] Alien: Earth gave franchise fans…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":128816,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[52],"tags":[23088,11,88,16299,11492,20380,206,23089,81797],"class_list":["post-128815","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-movies","tag-alien-earth","tag-elon-musk","tag-entertainment","tag-fargo","tag-fx","tag-james-cameron","tag-movies","tag-noah-hawley","tag-ridley-scott"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/128815","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=128815"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/128815\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/128816"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=128815"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=128815"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=128815"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}