There is Babou Ceesay’s Morrow, a cyborg who supposedly was once human but somehow seems even more reptilian than Ian Holm’s infamous Ash in the O.G. Alien. Whereas Ash seemed “off” but benign enough to those not looking closely aboard the Nostromo, Cessay’s Morrow is openly contemptuous of his fellow crewmates on the Maginot, another Weyland-Yutani vessel sent on a doomed mission to acquire dangerous specimens for mysterious motives by “the Company.” Sure enough, Morrow openly and ambivalently watches his colleagues get eaten alive by what Ash once dubbed “the perfect organism.”
Yet Morrow, nor that organism, really appear to be the focal point of Alien: Earth. Instead Hawley seems much more intrigued by the concept of using synthetic technology to create a way to extend life potentially forever. Thus enters “Wendy” (Sydney Chandler), the closest thing the ensemble has to a protagonist. In actuality Wendy was once a human little girl named Marcy, but because she had a terminal illness, a menacing tech “boy genius” at Weyland-Yutani’s rival company was able to manipulate Marcy’s parents into allowing him to upload her consciousness into a robot: a hybrid and the first of her kind.
Because of some sci-fi hand-waving techno-babble, we’re told that so far only children’s minds are malleable enough to make the jump to synthetic living, but the obvious goal is to use artificial intelligence and the blending of man and machine as a pathway to cheating death—a morbid dream chased by real-life venture capitalists and CEOs in Silicon Valley right now. And the fact that Alien: Earth’s first episode opens on title cards explaining the show’s twist on this quixotic fantasy—and the competition between Weyland-Yutani and Wendy’s literal patent owners at Prodigy—suggests where Hawley and Alien: Earth’s real interests lay.
This is not the first time the franchise has pivoted increasingly to paying more attention to the robots. It arguably was always there with the inclusion of Ash, and specifically the way that director Ridley Scott and actor Holm chose to play him. While the producers introduced the appropriately ‘70s cinema twist of there being a synthetic saboteur on the Nostromo, Scott took it one step further into the unnerving and creepy when he crafted unspoken animosity between Ash and Sigourney Weaver’s Ellen Ripley throughout the movie. This subtext culminated in how Scott chose to visualize Ash’s “malfunction.” When the robot attempts murder to Ripley, he shoves a pornographic magazine down her throat.
“I always thought that was interesting. Do androids have sexual urges? This is the closest he gets to a sexual relationship,” Scott previously said of the scene. It’s an idea that seems to have haunted the filmmaker. While the initial spate of Alien sequels from filmmakers like James Cameron and David Fincher downplayed the importance of the synthetic characters, with Cameron mostly using his android side player Bishop (Lance Henriksen) as a red herring who turned out to be a true-blue comrade and friend to Ripley, Scott went all-in on exploring the concept of synthetic sentience and what it means to be human, or at least alive, in Blade Runner (1982). Indeed, Scott purposefully used several of the same props and onscreen graphics from Alien in Blade Runner, teasing to careful-eyed fans that in the director’s mind, the films took place in the same universe.
Obviously this can never be canon given the franchises are owned by separate studios. Yet it’s seemed a goal for Scott to see them linked. Hence when he masterminded the 2010s Alien prequels, both Prometheus (2012) and Alien: Covenant (2017) became preoccupied with Michael Fassbender’s David, a Peter O’Toole-stanning android with desires to play god and create life of his own, just as humanity has done by creating artificial intelligence like David.
