The “Alien” timeline has become quite busy in the last decade, thanks to Ridley Scott’s 2010s prequels and 2024’s “Alien: Romulus.” So, audiences might be confused about when the new TV series, “Alien: Earth,” takes place.
The eight-episode series, which starts streaming on August 12 on FX and Hulu, follows a group of soldiers and androids after a ship carrying a Xenomorph (and other cosmic creatures) crash-lands on Earth.
Presumably, chaos will ensue once the creatures escape. Like the other stories in the franchise, it will also involve Weyland-Yutani, the nefarious company that seeks to experiment on the Xenomorph for its own profit-driven ambitions.
Here’s where “Alien: Earth” sits in the franchise’s timeline.
“Alien: Earth” takes place two years before the original “Alien” movie.
“Alien: Earth” takes place in 2120, two years before the events of “Alien,” which came out in 1979.
This means the iconic character Ellen Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) is alive during the time the series is set. But it seems unlikely that she’ll be in the show as she first encounters the Xenomorph in “Alien” after her ship is directed to a planet called LV-426.
However, the show’s creator, Noah Hawley, did address the idea of a crossover with the original movie when speaking to Vanity Fair in July.
Hawley said: “I don’t yet know, in terms of the series from beginning to end, how much time is going to pass or where we’re going to end up, but I do know that at a certain point, the Weyland-Yutani Corporation is going to divert the Nostromo to that planet…We have the opportunity to maybe see what was happening on the other side of that phone call.”
The show is also set over 20 years before last year’s “Alien: Romulus,” which means Rain Carradine (Cailee Spaeny) and her faithful android Andy (David Jonsson) aren’t alive in its timeline.
Speaking of androids, we do know that companies like Weyland-Yutani are experimenting with creating android bodies for human beings in “Alien: Earth.” Sydney Chambers plays Wendy in the TV series, a terminally ill young girl whose brain is transferred into a synthetic adult body.
It will be interesting to see what the show has to say about humanity, life, and death through the lens of its android characters.
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