Everybody knows that the scariest thing in the Alien is the eponymous extraterrestrial murder creatures known as xenomorphs. But, in the first full clip for the upcoming series Alien: Earth, the biggest villain in this story might not be anything with acid blood. Instead, this installment of the Alien mythos is going to double down on the hidden menace from the first film: the A.I. master computer known as “Mother.”
In the new clip, we see someone in a room exactly like the one Dallas (Tom Skerritt) and Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) used to access Mother in the original 1979 Alien. This white room illuminated with amber dots felt like being inside the mind of an old-school control computer, and seeing it recreated for Alien: Earth will certainly delight a ton of nostalgia-obsessed purists. But the new scene adds a unique twist to what we’ve always thought we knew about the Weyland-Yutani conspiracy involving the xenomorphs.
In the scene, we see a character named Morrow (Babou Ceesay) on the ship the USCSS Maginot. He’s typing in the Mother interface, conversing with the AI about the status of their mission. Behind a locked door, another crewmember (Richa Moorjani) wants to be let in badly. Morrow’s correspondence with Mother indicates that “Cargo containment has failed” and that “Specimens are loose.”
The “specimens” can only refer to the xenomorphs themselves, since we see one attacking Moorjani’s character, as Morrow calmly tells Mother that the crew are no longer alive. This seems to indicate that Morrow is likely a Synth character, like Ash (Ian Holm) or David (Michael Fassbender). In the original Alien in 1977, Ash was closely aligned with Mother, and was a secret “robot” hiding as a sleeper agent among the crew of the Nostromo. Last year’s quasi-sequel film Romulus, also reminded us that the Synth named Andy (David Jonsson) was the only person who “spoke Mother,” meaning he could interface with the Weyland-Yutani computer systems. So, it’s a good bet that the character of Morrow, in this Alien: Earth preview scene, is also not human.
All of the events of Alien, Alien: Romulus, and Aliens, are technically in the future, from the point-of-view of Alien: Earth. The new FX/Hulu show from showrunner Noah Hawley is set in the year 2120, two years before the events of Alien, meaning the crew of the Nostromo is out in hypersleep, or out to be, during the events of this show.
The clip also reveals that Morrow told Mother that the “impact point” for the cargo of the ship is “Earth.”
This is the basic set-up for Alien: Earth. Instead of a Weyland-Yutani ship going out and finding xenomorph eggs, here we’ll see that xenomorphs are crashing on Earth around the same time as the events of the original movie. Morrow’s message in this new preview clip seems to suggest that these specimens weren’t supposed to get loose. So, in classic Alien form, Weyland-Yutani tries to collect some samples, and those samples escape, become chest-bursters, then, full-grown aliens.
What remains to be seen is just how much of this was according to the Mother’s plan, and how much was truly an accident. Hopefully, when Alien: Earth debuts, we’ll have answers to face-hugging questions that have been lingering for decades.
