NEARLY 50 YEARS ON FROM RIDLEY SCOTT'S SEMINAL SCI-FI, THE XENOMORPHS HAVE FOUND A NEW PLACE TO TERRORISE - OUR OWN, IN TV SERIES ALIEN: EARTH. AND DOWN HERE, EVERYONE CAN HEAR YOU SCREAM...

WORDS IAN NATHAN

Acomputerised female voice is broadcasting impending doom. Sirens shriek down long, steam-congested corridors. Smears of emergency red amid oil-rig chic. One of the crew taps on an old-school keyboard surrounded by banks of winking white lights. According to MU/TH/UR, the ship’s Cassandra-like mainframe, the prognosis is bleak. Behind the crew member, attempting to smash the door’s glass panel, is that legendary Swiss-made biomechanoid hood ornament commonly known as a Xenomorph.

This is the overture to Noah Hawley’s Alien: Earth, the first television rendition of the unkillable saga. Any sense of déjà vu is entirely deliberate.

“I had pinch-me moments, standing on the bridge with the helmets and the bobbing toy,” says Babou Ceesay, who plays Morrow, currently at the keys, fixed on surviving the fate of this Nostromo cover-version. Ceesay describes himself as an Alien addict.

All of this is merely orientation, a salvo of sense memory. The story begins where a traditional Alien movie ends. “The opening few minutes is about trying to create a state of mind,” explains Hawley.

TV is different. Horror is harder to sustain, episode by episode, let alone seven days between each. The survivalist rush of mankind versus Xenomorph is only a fragment of what we can expect. Alien: Earth is aiming to be bigger, weirder, and more disturbing. This time it’s more.

“I’ve expanded the definition of what horror is,” declares Hawley. “It’s not [ just] body horror and monster horror, it’s that plus moral horror. The things that these characters are asked to do, the impossible choices they have to make.”

Gone is the existential isolation of space; impact with Earth is imminent.

NOVELIST, SCREENWRITER, director, showrunner, big-brained New Yorker, and restless geek, Hawley most recently borrowed the parochial-gothic ruse of Fargo to produce five wonderful seasons of time-traversing criminal mishap in the key of Coen. He has developed a peculiar gift for harmonising with not only another creator’s (or creators’) IP, but their actual sensibility. Call it hybrid vigour. So why not the legendary Scott-Giger-Weaver branch-line of sci-fi?

Naturally, the franchise was in his wheelhouse. With Hawley only ten years old when Alien tore through the zeitgeist and his parents wisely drawing the line, Aliens was the defining moment. “I was in high school and, to this day, I still think it’s the best action movie ever made,” he says, Zooming in from his base in Austin, Texas, shrugging off the effects of a recent chest infection (those damn bugs). “And I was excited to see Fincher’s film.” Like any fan, he has suffered the highs and lows that have attended subsequent iterations of Xenomorphology. And like any fan, has never lost the sense of potential that hovers over those first two films like laser-fringed mist.