We’ve all watched Alien movies on TV, but we’ve never had a new one made for it. That’s what happened this week, though, with the latest episode of Alien: Earth. Titled “In Space, No One…”, the episode flashed back to the events aboard the USCSS Maginot, which made it crash down to Earth. Events that, as you can imagine, involved lots of killer aliens.
We did an in-depth recap and breakdown of the episode at this link, so head there to read about it. But Alien: Earth showrunner Noah Hawley, who also wrote and directed this episode, sat down with Collider to talk about it, and he had some interesting revelations.
For example, Hawley explained exactly why this episode happened at this point in the show. “I’m used to telling stories that are 10 episodes long, and this is eight episodes, mostly for scale issues and budget and all that,” Hawley said. “It was interesting to craft it. It’s amazing how much work those two hours do, and how much you feel like, ‘Well, I’m setting things up to pay them off.’ You realize that, ‘When I have eight, I actually can’t pay off as much.’ We don’t really get back to Neverland until the middle of the third hour, and then there’s only like five hours left. But it felt to me like the last three hours, that’s not a ride you want to interrupt.”
So Hawley gave us two and a half hours to set things up and, up next, three hours at the end to wrap things up. In between, he felt leaving the cliffhanger from the fourth episode, Wendy and the xenomorph, was just the right time to fill in a few holes. “You don’t want to start the season on the spaceship, because that’s not what the show is. And you’ve got to show people what the show is,” he said. “So, where do you put it? Well, you’ve got to get back to Neverland long enough to really invest people in that story and get them to a cliffhanger moment where they think, ‘Oh, I can’t wait to see next week.’ Then, when they come back, and next week is this flashback episode, you better earn that, because that’s not originally where they want to be.”
“There’s a reason that we start with an emergency,” Hawley continued. “There’s a reason that [episode five] is already in the middle of it. Because then, very quickly, you’re like, ‘Oh, wait, this is an Alien movie. They’re giving me an Alien movie.’ That was my hope, that by putting it there… and then when you go into the next hour, there’s a lot of things that happen in [episode six], that because you know the backstory now, they mean something totally different.”
Different because of a big revelation in this episode, which, if you haven’t seen it, we’ll give you a chance to go watch with this spoiler warning.
Things are different now because we, and some of the characters, know that Prodigy CEO Boy Kavalier was behind the crashing of the Maginot. Only, Hawley teases, he may not have thought it through. “What I’ll say is, I think one of the things that we clearly reveal by the end of the season is ‘Genius? Sure. Mastermind? Maybe not so much,’” Hawley said. “There’s a level of impulse control problems and hubris, and he’s clearly a guy who’s never failed at anything, so he doesn’t think that failure is even an option.”
“This idea was that he clearly had somebody at Weyland-Yutani who told him there was this ship that was coming back, and he spent a lot of money to be able to communicate with it and found the guy. All along, he’s thinking, ‘Wile E. Coyote, super genius,’” the showrunner continued. “And then you’re like, ‘Yeah, but play it out, man. That ship’s gonna crash, and how do you know you’re gonna contain the creatures?’ But you can’t convince the genius that they’re doing something dumb.”
One thing that wasn’t dumb? Setting this flashback episode right here and giving fans a whole new Alien experience. Read more about it in our recap and over at Collider.
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