FX’s Alien: Earth is not only a critical darling—it is also, if you go into the experience with the guiding light of whimsy in your heart, an absolute blast. Alien’s bleak world doesn’t seem like something suited to the eccentric and wryly humorous writing of showrunner Noah Hawley, but that hasn’t stopped him from getting in there and playing with his toys. Hawley’s entry into the franchise is a fantastically strange, rock-solid piece of retro-futurism. He twists viewers’ expectations, presenting new and upsetting implications (and Jesus Christ, the implications). Under his guide, the Earth of 2120 takes on a surreal undercurrent. Characters’ dreams and vibrant nightmares mingle with reality. The Xenomorph is a salacious weapon; Hawley wields her with precision, striking when the viewer will most enjoy the zealous gore and hiding in the background with just as much glee as the Shadow King in Legion’s first season, Hawley’s previous foray into weird horror.
But as wonderful as the Xenomorph is shaping up to be, she’s not the blade in the show that cuts the deepest. Noah Hawley’s stylistic leanings and the themes swirling at the core of the Alien franchise give him another weapon. A weapon that has proved scalpel-sharp in the first few episodes alone: the dichotomy between real and manufactured nostalgia.
Experimenting with using and subverting comforting children’s media is right in Hawley’s wheelhouse. In Legion, the first season’s core mystery was centered around this truly freaky picture book. 
The book was original to the show. But then, Legion was very self-contained, and not interested in pulling reality into its alternate-historical bubble. Alien is different, and far more entwined with longstanding culture than Legion was (I knew all about Xenomorphs before I ever saw the movie as a kid). Because of that, there’s a dialogue between Alien and other existing franchises.
And maybe Alien: Earth is just more nostalgia bait. Especially considering that it is itself a continuation of a 46-year old franchise, from an era symbolic to many of a better time in filmmaking. It’s a vision of the hypothetical future, and inextricably rooted in our actual past. One of the main critiques I’ve seen is that it’s too familiar to feel exciting, but too different to fit with established canon.
But I think the show is pretty self-aware. The careful use of camera grain, the deliberate lighting, and the tactility of the Xenomorph herself all point to a program that knows exactly what kind of nostalgia it has access to, and what it’s meant to evoke in the audience.
Which brings us to… The screencap. Yeah, that one.
“Face your furry… what?”
(Through gritted teeth: the show is good, guys, I promise it’s good) 
This moment has already been memed completely to death, and for good reason. Sid the Sloth from critically panned Ice Age 4: Continental Drift appearing like the angel on the shoulder of our main character in a franchise not exactly known for its levity seems like a bizarre pull. And this is far from the only time Ice Age 4: Continental Drift is brought up. In space, no one can hear you scream, and on Alien’s Earth, no one can stop hearing about Ice Age 4: Continental Drift.
So, was that flick just one option on a big spinner wheel of kids’ movies? Ice Age, while loved in its own right, never garnered the cult-ironic fame of contemporaries like Shrek. It also never attained true mainstream adoration like Finding Nemo or Toy Story. Why would Noah Hawley zero in on the four-times-removed sequel to a film that was…fine?
Let’s talk licensing. Alien was owned by Fox, which was snatched up by Disney in 2019, making the Xenomorph one of the least likely additions to the Mickey Mouse Clubhouse that we’ve seen in a while. So what do you do if you’re a showrunner—one who’s known for your strange, retro-futuristic existentialism—when your family-friendly corporate overlords hand you the reigns to a franchise historically predicated on themes like fear of change, fear of stagnation, loss of autonomy, physical and mental violation, and systemic abuse?
Hawley very easily could have just made up a movie for Hermit and Wendy to have bonded over. He’s made meaningful in-world media before. He could have made something from scratch that felt more relevant, more timely, more current than, again, Fox’s flop fourquel Ice Age 4: Continental Drift. But he didn’t. Every piece of media that we see in the show is pre-existing, real. Why, in 2120, are people still clinging to stories from over a century ago? Seemingly exclusively? And it’s not like Hermit and Wendy are outliers. In Episode 3, when Slightly needs comfort after a traumatizing day, he’s watching Epic, another largely forgotten Fox-owned animated movie from 2013. 
This, combined with the baseball shrine in Episode 2, implies a setting that has creatively ossified. In this world, dominated by a lonely few nation-sized megacorporations, there are no new stories. There are no new movies for children to bond over with their fathers. There’s nothing but nostalgia, nostalgia, nostalgia, bait, bait, bait. Just halcyon fragments of a time before everything was so choked by monetization that art died.
(But don’t worry; I’m sure it’s fine, no one is trying to imply anything—)
So, Disney owns Fox, which means old Fox properties are easily attainable. In fact, everything we’ve talked about up to this point has been a Fox property (or, sorry, a 20th Century Studios property). But Disney’s footing the bill for this, right? And Disney’s made some of the most easily recognizable, most nostalgic films of the 20th and 21st centuries, right? Where’s their fingerprint in all of this?
Why, in Neverland, of course.
The only time we see Disney in Alien: Earth is on a corporate black site private island owned by the show’s unapologetic villain, Boy Kavalier. ‘The World’s Youngest Trillionaire’ and owner of the newest all-consuming megacorp, called Prodigy, Kavalier brands himself as an eccentric boy genius just looking to change humanity for the better (I can’t stress enough that he is absolutely an adult and ‘Boy Genius’ is a cringe misnomer at best, if not a deliberate manipulation tactic).
Boy Kavalier has a fixation on, even an obsession with, Peter Pan. He has of course cast himself as the eponymous boy wonder, here to free children to live the life of adventure and merriment they’ve always dreamed of. And he accomplishes this by… ‘acquiring’ terminally ill kids by any means necessary, telling everyone else they’ve died, ripping their minds out of their original bodies and implanting them in immortal, synthesized, adult chassis, kitted out with strength and reflexes like super soldiers. Yaaaaaay.
Disney’s Peter Pan plays on a screen in the operating room. It’s the last thing the children see before their world implodes. No parents by their bedsides, no loved one to hold their hand as they embark on one of the scariest experiences a person could ever have, no goodbye before they literally die and awake in the hereafter with an unfamiliar face and a new name (Peter Pan inspired, of course).
No goodbye.
But hey. At least Disney’s there.
Boy Kavalier’s association with Peter Pan is especially grim the longer you watch, as you realize he’s actually doing the opposite of Neverland’s promise. He’s not letting kids stay kids forever. He is killing them, and in the process creating people who will never have a real childhood. People who are immediately seen as adults, given adult roles, have adult expectations and stressors placed upon them, despite none of them being over twelve. It’s a monstrous thing, and its contrived connection to Peter Pan is a sad irony, or a cruel lie.
So Slightly’s comfort movie is a forgotten flick from 2013. Wendy and Hermit’s emotional throughline is Ice Age (4:ContinentalDrift), and Hermit bonded with his father by watching highlight reels of a historic baseball game that originally aired on ABC in the ‘70s.
It’s all down to licensing. Disney owns Fox (20th Century Studios). It also owns ABC. Noah Hawley would have had easy access to the footage he needed to get his point across. But, crucially, every piece of media that brings the characters any shred of comfort in the narrative was made before Disney acquired the parent studio. The only piece of Disney Original Media we see is used by an out-of-touch, richer-than-god megalomaniac who weaponizes it to give the children he’s torturing a sense of false solace, while bolstering his own image as the hero of some bedtime story.
Alien’s franchise, at its core, is about violation. Physical violation, absolutely. The first installment of the films is an allegory for rape and the trauma of assault. Later prequels Prometheus and Covenant explore spiritual and existential violation, asking questions about imperfect creators, and how much we owe the people who made us. Alien: Earth takes this core premise and shines a light on something that has existed at the fringes of all these stories since day one: Corporate violation.
In the future, companies will own us body and soul. We’ll stop being individuals, reduced to additions to or detractions from their bottom line. People can’t make anything on a large scale that doesn’t benefit the Company. Synthetics are people that are manufactured and owned, programmed with limitations that make it hard to exist outside of the corporations that switched them on. Long-haul spacers are effectively ghosts in the flesh, people who disappear from their own lives and return decades later, virtually unchanged, finding that everything has moved on without them. But they still have the Company. Or the Company still has them.
Human beings are fodder for expensive experiments, from the civilians left to die by the Prodigy team to the loyal employee being stripped for parts and fed to monsters. And the children. The children who never decided that a company owned them, but who are possessed nonetheless and violated, killed, and reborn just because the Boy Wonder can, because he’s convinced that his intellect, and not his money, is the reason he’s never lost an argument. Of course a world that has so devalued humanity has also devalued art. They’re the same thing.
In a setting where people don’t even own their lives, all they have to look back on is a distant memory of a time when souls weren’t for sale. Epic, Ice Age (fourcontinentaldrift), and Mr. October’s three-run game keep the characters of the show alive, keep them sane. Nostalgia is important, especially when hope is thin and fluttering.
But the show is also aware, even as it uses its pretty lighting and careful camera-grain and guy-in-a-suit monster methodology, of what it could have been. Nostalgia is an easy thing to repackage in a sweet, appealing shell and shove down your throat. Like a candy-coated cyanide pill, keeping you too distracted to notice what’s eroding while you look away. What ideology bubbles under the surface of your remembrance of a ‘simpler time?’ What rights are becoming optional? It’s easier to keep a population preoccupied with visions of the past than it is to build a brighter future.
Alien: Earth knows where it’s coming from. It knows the viewers it’s bound to get, knows that it’ll never escape an identity as Alien by way of Mickey Mouse. It can’t help what it is, but then, neither can we. And when a call is coming from so deep inside the house, maybe that’s all the more reason to listen.
Really all Noah Hawley’s newest show is asking is that our stories “have a heart… or face my fury.”
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