Alien: Earth Raises a Major Question About the Franchise’s Unmade Sequels

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Prometheus and Covenant are controversial in the Alien fandom, but for better or worse, they’re canonical. In an interview with Empire Magazine last month, Hawley said he would avoid the topics raised in those movies, but stopped short of saying he would contradict them. Therefore, it’s quite possible that the monsters appearing in this new series came straight from the home world of the Engineers, where David conducted genetic experiments without restrictions or oversight.

Timeline Landmarks

Alien: Earth is set in the year 2120 CE, when a spaceship called the Maginot returns from a 65-year mission with a hold full of extra-terrestrial specimens to study. A lot has happened in its 65 years away — the USS Prometheus was launched in 2091 and reached the moon LV-223 in 2093. At the end of that movie, David and Elizabeth Shaw (Noomi Rapace) left on an Engineer ship to find the Engineers’ home planet. When they arrived, David used the Engineers’ own genetic weapons against them, wiping out their population and killing Shaw before turning his attention to his experiments.

The USS Covenant then arrived on the Engineers’ home world in the year 2104, drawn by David’s transmission of music. They found that he had been experimenting with a blend of the “black liquid” genetic weapon, human DNA from Shaw, Engineer DNA, and other local lifeforms, resulting in the “neomorph.” With the arrival of fresh human hosts, his creations were finally able to evolve one step further, becoming the familiar xenomorphs of the later movies.

At the end of Covenant, we can assume that the xenomorphs will continue to live on that unnamed planet, so it’s possible the Maginot visited there and picked some up. Meanwhile, David left the planet with preserved facehugger embryos, which he could theoretically have distributed anywhere in space. The USS Covenant was resuming its course to Origae-6, which was still over seven years away, but it’s unclear if David intended to keep that course or not.

Was Weyland-Yutani Just Collecting its Property?

The neomorphs, ovamorphs, and other mutations seen in Prometheus and Covenant are particularly interesting in the context of Alien: Earth. The Maginot picked up some incredibly resilient and dangerous monsters out in space, such as the eye-burrowing critter in Episode 2. It’s certainly possible that these were native animals on some planets out there, but it’s not like Weyland-Yutani to invest in such a long mission with no guaranteed success. It seems just as likely that the company ordered Morrow (Babou Ceesay) to stop and salvage anything valuable from the failed mission of the Prometheus, where Peter Weyland (Guy Pearce) disappeared.

Missing Pieces

With all the questions that the prequels left hanging, it’s quite possible that the Maginot picked up facehuggers that were crafted by David’s hands, and perhaps even visited the Engineer home world, but there’s not enough to say for sure. Sadly, these questions would likely have been answered by the unfinished Covenant sequel, which Ridley Scott had still intended to work on as recently as 2019, though he has since said he is finished with the Alien franchise. That means we may never know what became of David and his creations, nor how they found their way back to earth.

On the other hand, a third David movie might have given us a very different explanation for xenomorphs in the later timeline. Covenant makes it seem as though David created the xenomorphs through experimentation, but Prometheus shows an image of a xenomorph in the Engineer temple on LV-223. That may suggest that David was simply recreating or resurrecting a species that had existed in the past, or that xenomorphs are the inevitable final form of mutants created by the black liquid genetic weapon.

That would seem to be Hawley’s preference, as he said, “Alien, for me, is baked in as these creatures that have existed for millions of years. They’re the perfectly evolved species.” Many other fans feel the same way, and some even prefer the origin story explained in Alien vs. Predator, which claims that the Yautja bred xenomorphs for amusement, as they liked to hunt the creatures. That is not canonical to the Alien movies, but with a new crossover coming later this year in Predator: Badlands, maybe there’s a way for everyone to get what they want.

Alien: Earth has five more episodes to answer questions like these. New episodes of the series premiere on Tuesdays at 8 p.m. ET on FX and Hulu. Previous entries in the Alien franchise are streaming now on Hulu as well, and Predator: Badlands premieres on November 7th in theaters. What do you think of the mysterious creatures on the USS Maginot? Let us know in the comments below.