Spoilers comply with.
The larger your sci-fi franchise will get, the tougher it’s to maintain the canon straight. It is an issue that stretches from “Star Wars” to “Star Trek.” Finally, after getting sufficient spin-offs, sequels, and prequels underneath you, as soon as sufficient a long time have handed because the starting, plot holes and continuity lapses are inevitable.
The “Alien” franchise appears to have reached that time. Now seven motion pictures, a big-budget TV collection, two “Predator” spin-offs, and quite a few video video games and comedian books later, what was as soon as a easy sci-fi horror story concerning the unknowable terrors of deep house has change into a large saga full of lore. From the origins of the Xenomorphs to the character of Earth’s megacorporations, plenty of particulars have been stuffed in over time, and “Alien: Earth,” the newest addition on FX, does a number of work in that regard by easy advantage of TV exhibits having much more display screen time than movies.The issue, although, is that not all the pieces the brand new collection has added to the “Alien” mythos suits with what got here earlier than – and that is by design.
Particularly, I am speaking concerning the timeline. You could have felt like one thing was off within the first couple of episodes, however it significantly began bugging me in episode 3, when Weylan-Yutani safety officer Morrow (Babou Ceesay) calls in to report back to company headquarters and is met with the tough actuality of getting been gone from Earth for 65 years. Nonetheless, given what we all know concerning the collection timeline, the order of occasions for his employment is senseless. Sure, nitpicking timelines is low-hanging fruit, and sure, showrunner Noah Hawley has admitted to ignoring sure elements of the canon, however in a present that is all about company tensions, the contradictions stick out.
How Alien: Earth adjustments the Weyland-Yutani timeline
“Alien: Earth” takes place in 2120. The unique “Alien,” launched in 1979, is ready simply two years later in 2122. Each tales start aboard Weyland-Yutani vessels, which ought to make sense given their proximity. Nonetheless, the mission in “Alien” is meant to take lower than two years in whole, whereas the one in “Alien: Earth” is claimed to be a 65-year mission. The additional time is presumably because of the Maginot going a lot additional into deep house than the Nostromo, however that additionally implies that the present’s ship would have left Earth all the best way again in 2057.
Instantly, this causes issues. For one, the Maginot inside in “Alien: Earth” appears to be like practically an identical to that of the Nostromo, from the cryo pods to the MU/TH/UR pc room. That is possible as a result of the present’s creators needed to evoke the enduring aesthetic of Ridley Scott’s movie, however it does not actually make sense why ships launched greater than 60 years aside can be primarily the identical make and mannequin.
The larger difficulty, nonetheless, entails Weyland-Yutani itself. See, that hyphenated title is the results of a significant company merger between two distinct corporations — Weyland, and Yutani. We all know this as a result of in “Prometheus,” which takes place in 2089 — 32 years after the Maginot would have departed on its deep-space mission — Weyland Corp continues to be simply Weyland Corp. That implies that the merger would have occurred greater than midway by the voyage, but when Morrow will get again to Earth, he calls into company HQ with a Yutani passcode that also works, and we study that he had some kind of relationship with the present Yutani CEO’s grandmother earlier than he went to house.
Noah Hawley has mentioned that he was centered extra on the story of the present and broad strokes of the collection than lining up each element from the movies, however he is stopped in need of saying that the present straight-up is not’ canon. “It is not that I did not do a timeline across the occasions,” the showrunner mentioned at SXSW this yr (per Inverse). “However I did not increase it to include all the pieces that had ever been written.” Particularly, he named “Prometheus” as part of the franchise that he did not strongly adhere to.
The story in Alien: Earth is likely to be a bit too difficult
Is it attainable that the Maginot mission began as a Yutani operation, then turned a Weyland-Yutani mission mid-journey after the merger? Sure. Morrow’s safety clearances may have been up to date whereas he was in house, and all of the tech that we affiliate with the Nostromo may have been Yutani tech from the beginning, therefore all of the similarities between the ships. There are methods to elucidate away the strangeness within the timeline should you actually wish to stretch.
Once more, I do know that this will sound nitpicky, however the “Alien” timeline established in “Prometheus” is not some extraneous element from a ’90s sourcebook or an obscure comedian. This is not a Ki-Adi-Mundi scenario, the place the one factor retconned was one thing that no regular fan would have ever heard of. It is main worldbuilding from a core movie directed by the creator of the franchise.
Even when we give the present the good thing about the doubt and say that all of it is sensible, the logistics of a 65-year mission performed over the course of an immensely tumultuous time for company authority feels … odd. How do you even monitor or keep on activity with a mission that crosses a number of generations of company management? To be clear, I am actually having fun with my time with the present for essentially the most half, and issues like this do not break it for anybody. Nevertheless it feels odd that in a present all concerning the company paperwork, and totally focused at increasing the lore of the franchise, the core collection of occasions appears to be up within the air.
