Alien: Earth showrunner Noah Hawley has addressed episode 7’s big Xenomorph development – and he wasn’t sure whether it was going to go down well with viewers.
In this week’s installment, titled ‘Emergence,’ synthetic Wendy (Sydney Chandler) manages to communicate with a Xenomorph and gets it to help them by taking out a group of Yutani soldiers, seemingly making a tentative ally out of the creature.
“One of the big question marks was if fans were going to go with this idea,” Hawley told The Hollywood Reporter. “I don’t want her to have [a Xenomorph as a] pet. But if it seems like an alliance has been struck, what are the interesting possibilities that we can pull out of that? And because this is a horror story, we have to assume that, ultimately, I wouldn’t bet on this working out.”
The TV show is set two years before the events of 1979’s Alien and deals with the aftermath of the USCSS Maginot , a Weyland-Yutani research vessel, crash-landing on Earth with some familiar extraterrestrials on board.
“An Alien movie is a two-hour survival story, and a television show has to be an ongoing series,” Hawley added. “You have to use the monsters in a different way. You certainly want to use them in the classic way, but you also have to figure out how to sustain having monsters in your show when the reality is they would kill everyone, or that you would kill them, and then that would be it.”
New episodes of Alien: Earth are released weekly on Hulu in the US and Disney Plus in the UK. Stay up to date with our Alien: Earth release schedule or, for more on the show, check out our Alien: Earth review.