"Spoilers ahead for all of the Alien films and Alien: Earth. Do androids dream of electric sheep? What about plain-Jane organic sheep who've been hijacked by a grapefruit-size eyeball with tentacles? Alien: Earth, Noah Hawley's ambitious, oft-confounding TV expansion of the slimiest franchise in cinema history, isn't afraid to ask the big questions. Specifically, the ones about what makes us human and whether we're bound to acknowledge the humanity - for want of a better word - of machines that think, feel, suffer, and dream."
"Yes, the basic scenario about a spaceman getting raped, returning to his ship, and giving unholy birth to a monster that hunts down his crewmates came from the original writing team. But the twist that Ash, the Nostromo science officer played by Ian Holm, turns out to be an android placed aboard the ship to ensure the survival of the hostile specimen the crew had been unknowingly dispatched to collect was Giler and Hill's contribution."
Alien: Earth centers on questions of AI sentience, humanity, and whether machines that think, feel, suffer, and dream deserve moral recognition. The series draws on ideas from original Alien contributors Dan O'Bannon and Ronald Shusett and foregrounds themes developed by producers David Giler and Walter Hill about android motives and secrecy. Ridley Scott's prequels similarly privileged an android protagonist in David. The original film's twist — that Ash was an android placed to preserve the alien — is attributed to Giler and Hill. Season one further reveals Atom Eins, Boy Kavalier's right-hand, to be synthetic, reinforcing synth centrality.
Read at Vulture
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