Getting to TV was the best thing that happened to "Alien"

At one point in a brief conversation with part of the cast, we asked Samuel Blenkin, who plays Boy Kavalier, the CEO of Prodigy Corporation, if he worries that viewers might compare the character he plays—a wealthy young man with boundless ambition—to today's billionaires. Noncommittal, he responds ironically: "There's no correlation between my character and anyone." Before we ask him that question, he describes the character this way: "He's a CEO of a tech company who has to deal with a new alien reality. He's a trillionaire... and he thinks he's the greatest in the world. When he walks into a room, he thinks he's the greatest." The comparisons are easy, but essentially, it's a stereotype. And the important thing is that Boy Kavalier's profile is essential to understanding the intentions of Alien: Planet Earth . The first season arrives on Disney+ this Tuesday, August 12th. Two episodes premiere, with six more to follow, weekly, until the end of September.

It's worth clarifying why we began this text with the very rich and not the invading, bloodthirsty xenomorphs. The idea for the Alien series created by Noah Hawley (the man behind Fargo and Legion ) is based on events that precede the first film, Ridley Scott's 1979 original. In other words, it's a prequel. Earth is dominated by corporations, one of which is the Prodigy Corporation, led by Kavalier, a young prodigy, and the other, more familiar, is Weyland-Yutani, also known simply as The Company. It was Weyland-Yutani that sent the USCSS Nostromo into space, the ship on which Ripley, played by Sigourney Weaver, was traveling.

The world is dominated by these types of companies; the concept of countries is practically nonexistent. Cities are also a product that belongs to them. One of the plots of Alien: Planet Earth unfolds in this simplification: a spaceship belonging to Weyland-Yutani crashes in a Prodigy city. Inside the ship are a series of creatures, including a xenomorph (and many eggs). The rules—or evolutionary interests favoring technology, sorry, the economy—stipulate that if the crash occurred in Prodigy territory, then everything in the spacecraft belongs to Prodigy. Weyland-Yutani knows exactly what's inside and its future value; Prodigy knows there's something inside, but has no idea of its potential.

[the trailer for “Alien: Planet Earth”:]

This happens in parallel with another fact: Prodigy is about to launch a new product, a hybrid, a synthetic body with a human brain. Wendy (Sydney Chandler), the series' protagonist, is the first hybrid and also the one in which Boy Kavalier identifies. Kavalier considers himself the most intelligent person on Earth and wants to be challenged. He sees Wendy, in the way she has developed, as the only entity that can push his limits and take him further. Developed? That's what matters with these hybrids: the synthetic body is that of an adult, but the brain is that of a child.

In other words, they're children in adult bodies. An important detail, because they're still, deep down, children. They act, they're dazzled, they make mistakes like children. Noah Hawley's vision—which borrows heavily from the children in Akira , the manga by Katsuhiro Otomo, which is being republished in Portugal by Penguin—has a strange refinement: through the eyes of children, and through the dazzled refinement of Kavalier, it invites us to look at Alien in a completely new way.

A theory conceived after watching the first six episodes: Alien: Planet Earth is Noah Hawley writing fan fiction . But reading fan fiction doesn't necessarily lead to positive results. In fact, when we asked the actors if they felt this way, they were somewhat confused because they perceived the question as something that seemed to belittle the series. Quite the opposite. After clarifying, Babou Cessay, who plays Morrow (we'll get to that later), told us: "You have to expand the universe. And, at the same time, there's this connection with all the Alien films. Noah, when he's making the series, is communicating with Ridley [Scott], with [James] Cameron."

The difference with this fan fiction is that Noah Hawley is writing and directing it. And we say fan fiction because there's a constant homage, without creating an attachment to nostalgia. There's an episode that brings to mind the first Alien , but, for example, unlike the recent Alien: Romulus (last year's film directed by Fede Álvarez), this isn't a delirious pastiche . It inevitably revives memories, but then tries different things and approaches. Noah Hawley manages to create something new in Alien: Planet Earth . It's a case of using the same ingredients to build something entirely original.